“Chuck Junior was just in a moral coma from the accident, is all it was,” declared a Glory Joy known from here to next door for the deepness of her loyalty toward Nunn. She told Simple Ranger how C. Nunn Jr. suffered six evil and morally comatose post-damage days, his sense of right and wrong and love and hate smithered to chaotic, but how the subsequent Nunn thankfully remembered none of those six dark and devilish days of screaming and vandalizing in the Minogue County Hospital, where he was at, as restrained as was possible given the personality and persuasiveness of Nunn vis à vis orderlies. How Nunn woke up familiar and normal on the seventh day and asked about location, which is always a real good medical sign. How we was all relieved.
5. NUNN’S SURFACE HEALED UP, BUT WITH SOMETHING INTERIOR ASKEW
Got dark outside, gritty afternoon dark that means serious wind through high dirt, movement of soil in sky, a swirl that fakes twister once a week and keeps the tourists minimal, and there was a peculiar but occasional black flutter at some of the tavern windows, and Simple Ranger got aroused, disquiet. Me and G.J. was telling the Ranger how Chuck Nunn Junior’s surface healed up as fast and fine as the town could expect, how he was back on his post-explosion ranch and inside Glory Joy’s affections and limbs by six weeks time; how his broke cantaloupe eyes got put back together via skill and laser by Drs., paid for through V.V. Minogue’s subsequent legalities (V.V. was in institutional caring and de-tox up in El Reno, by this time), how the eyes healed together so right and improved that Nunn could claim to spot dust-movement against the sky’s very curve. No small claim.
But how something inside Nunn got left by the impact askew, his interior self messed with, hurting, under strain, all due to the lingering insecurity of the previously busted Nunn temper and moral sense.
“We got frightened of his temper and moral sense,” Glory Joy told from a window she was at, standing, curious and distracted, looking out against dark at something against the seam of land and air that stretched tight across the Dirt. “Chuck Junior got scared of hisself.”
Ever get scared of your own self? Painful. Glory Joy had mummed up to Nunn, from concern and such, but Chuck Jr. got subsequently informed by friends and civilians about his six-day moral coma, about things he’d done, said, and implied in the privacy of a special padded Hospital wing, things he did not recollect; got told of a unnameable evil and rage directed at the universe in general, one that was diarrhetic and fearsome to see in a previous semi-demiurge, larger than life. It got known around Minogue Oklahoma that while his quality Italian seatbelt had saved his exterior, the impact with V.V. following the rain of sheep had knocked something loose in the center of Nunn. Chuck Junior got informed on this fact, and it chewed at him.
“His temper got scary,” Glory Joy said. “It got precious and valuable to us, like only something you is scared to death to lose can get.” She’d got to caressing the peeling frame of the window she was at with a mournfulness and musing that repercussed among the civilians piling up in circles at our little table. “His temper got insecure. We lived in around-the-clock fear of when Chuck Junior might possibly lose his temper.”
“Focus in on that verb lose, S.R.,” I told Simple Ranger. “The lady means it special. Whenever C. Nunn Jr. lost his post-accident temper, he lost the sucker real and true. It became gone. Absent. Elsewhere. Blew away to unfindable locations. A state of nameless and potential eternal rage and evil ever time he but stub his toe or some such shit.” I put a earnest hand on the Ranger’s deep grey sleeve, tried to get his eyes off the air outside the window. “Chuck Nunn Junior lived in fear of, plus alienation from, his own personal temper.”
Was Glory Joy duBoise told us in emotive terms how collision and concussion and coma had left Nunn’s interior bent. How the bowlegged pride of Minogue Oklahoma had to scrutinize and rein his own emotional self each minute, for fear that upset or anger could loop him back into a blank white comality of evil and meanness. How his tender gentleness toward G.J. duBoise got so extreme as to crowd pitiful, so scared was he that if he stopped loving her for a second he’d never get it back. How the rare times when a vicissitude of human relating, sheep-shearing, or pasture-status pissed him off, he’d get positively other-, under-worldly with anger, a bearded unit of pure and potent rage, ranging his sheep’s ranges like something mythopoeic, thunderous, less man or thing than sudden and dire force, will, ill. How the bright blank evil’d stay on him for a day, two, a week; and Glory Joy’d shut herself in the storm cellar Chuck Nunn Junior hisself had lined with impregnable defensive steel, and she’d stay put, drinking bottled water and watching out for Nunn-activity through a emergency periscope Chuck Jr. had punctured through the storm cellar’s roof for just such episodic periods; and how, after time, Nunn would come back out of the blind nameless hate, the objectless thirst for revenge against whole planets; how he’d find his spent and askew temper on some outer range of detonated Nunn land and return, pale and ignorant, to a towering, quivering, forgiving Glory Joy.
“Chuck Junior steered way clear of even thinking about T. Rex Minogue’s place for fear he’d kill the old man,” I told the Ranger. “Got terrified of even the concept of what T. Rex might could do to his emotions and sensibilities.”
“The tenderness and caring Chuck Nunn Junior showed me were inhuman,” Glory Joy semi-sobbed, her eyes resembling a St. Vitus of red threads. “Superhuman; not of this landed earth.”
Simple Ranger got moved, here, at something.
6. WAS BUZZARDS THAT HAD STAYED ON
Now, the peculiar darkness and peculiarer fluttering outside the Outside Minogue Bar was in fact buzzards, two civilians at the busted-inward bar door told us. Glory Joy and the Ranger nodded absent to theirselves. We took looks outside. There was buzzard-presence and -activity of thought-provoked scope. The air was dark and agitated with wings, beaks, soft bellies. The suckers soared round. The air around the Outside Minogue Bar was swirling and influenced by regiments of the buzzards that had got drawn to Big Dirt by the rain of Nunn mutton two Ascensions past, and had stayed on.
It was like something giant was coming out of the Dirt to die, the Ranger said in a gravelly whisper, staring his eyes past civilians, door, into a swirling soiled grey, looking for signals, his land, his car.
“This sucker’s damaged,” whispered a civilian, low.
But I commenced to revelate to Simple Ranger about Chuck Nunn Junior’s special and secret post-accident strain.
“You knew about the secret post-accident strain when I didn’t til it was too late and Chuck Junior was temperless and gone?” asked a disbelieving Glory Joy, pale, tight of lip, hip-shot. She come back over, toting menace.
I sympathied Glory Joy, told her how Chuck Junior had suffered a spell of his optical dislocation over to the feed store once after I once slapped him on his back over a humorous joke, and how he’d dislocated, and I’d seen, and how he’d swore me to a eternity of silence about his secret,
a sworn promise I kept til he wronged T. Rex Minogue and vameesed. I told Simple Ranger and the civilians about the hidden and subterranean strain, suffered by a already askew C. Nunn Jr., caused by his post-impact-with-V.V.-Minogue-spontaneously-detachable eyes. Told some historic facts: how the Drs. sewed up Nunn’s busted ball-bearing melon eyes with laser and technocracy and left him farther down the line from blindness and blear than ever, but with a hitch: those eyes, sewed with light, was left smaller. Ain’t hard to see that the Drs. at the Hospital had to take them some slack up from Nunn’s ball-busted eyes to laser-stitch the busts with, and how the deslacking of the eyes left them tight, small, rattling in the sockets, insecure.
“They’d fall out his head,” I told the company of men that was round our table about three deep, countless bottles of Rolling Rock already dealt with, stacked in a pyramid and headed for ceiling. “Be like the accidental impact all over again, at times: slap Chuck Junior on the back, or maybe he’d bend down after a untied lace, or
(worst)
if he�
�d sneeze at all—ever see the man sneeze, personally, a post-accident sneeze, Glory Joy?”
Glory Joy’s powdered and geometry-eyed face got singular, loose, looked like Walter Matthau a second, out of my stimulating of a old but sudden recognition (unclear but true). She got smaller in her chair, too interested by half in the label on her ninth Rolling Rock.
Was me told Simple Ranger, who kept coughing and sniffing, nervous at the special smell of interested buzzard, how Chuck Nunn Junior commenced to buckle under the emotive strain of two little post-accidental eyes that exited their sockets and dangled by cords down his bearded and near-handsome face at the slightest gravitational invitation. How the twin pressures of fear that the possible sight of his insecure and A.W.O.L. eyes could repulse the love clear out of Glory Joy duBoise, plus how the fragileness of his coma-inclined and skittish temper might at any time dust from Nunn’s concussed head any sense of ought, right, love, or concern for men, man, woman, or Glory Joy, how all this shit wore on Chuck Nunn Junior. How he got wore: thinned out, legs bandier, skin loose and paler than land, copper sweat verdigrised, rattling eyes milky and other-directed.
“Interior and progressing damage,” I summed.
7. AND, PENCLIMACTICALLY,
Glory Joy revealed how, some weeks back, the infamous pollenated dust of pre-Ascension springtime Minogue Oklahoma brought on a hay fever that had Chuck Junior woolly and writhen with secret strain, plus mysteriously excusing himself from her every few minutes to go out to the privy to sneeze,
“And to reinsert his recalcitrant and threnodic eyes,” she moaned, “I understand the total picture now, God bless his soul and mine together,”
(tears, by this point in time)
; and how, the torpid grey three-days-past morning of Nunn’s temper’s final debarkation into vengeance and fleeing, Glory Joy revealed, a fit of uncontrollable and pollenated sneezing had reared up out of the dusty land its own self and overtook a tired, tattered Chuck Nunn Junior there at breakfast, at the table, and how to Glory’s combined horror and pathos he’d sneezed his keen but tiny eyes right out into his bowl of shredded wheat, and milk and fiber covered his sight, and Glory Joy’d rushed over to his sides but he was already up, horrified and swinging the balls, the twin cords the color of innards, Nunn fumbling in a wild manner to refit his lariatic eyes, healthy ears keen to the sound of the horror, pathos of the gasps of Glory Joy, temper bidding adios altogether to the flat grey world of the limited but steady-keeled mortal mind.
“And off he flew for the second recent-historic time,” I climaxed, “this time in the impact-proof and souped-up used cement mixer he’d bought with V.V.’s legalities, off he flew east on rickety two-lane 40, blank with hate and optical mortification, to reciprocally wrong old T. Rex and V.V. Minogue.”
“Who’d malignantly through willful and explosive machinations and vehicularism caused Nunn the twin insecurities of eye and moral temper,” Simple Ranger finished up for me, in a curious plus haunting voice that was not
(more I reflected there the more I got convinced that those polysyllables were not of his gravelly Grey Lung voice, somehow) his own, somehow.
Was telling Simple Ranger how C. Nunn Jr., blood in his eye, plus cereal, roared out on that military mixer, in mood and stature similar to a demiurge, a banshee, a angry mythopoeum, roared out east on four-O to deprive T. Rex Minogue and wretched V.V. of their animate status, how he left the tall, forlorn, and quivering Glory Joy duBoise to watch the ever-tinier fog of his thunderous exhaust, his dusty final jet trail, three days past, and how Nunn never got seen no more. How the rumorous talk around town was that he’d forcibly detached the Minogue brothers’ malignant/benign, reclusive/alcoholic asses, reattached them in inappropriate and harm-conducive locations, left the two of them twisted, bent, wronged, full of gnash and rue and close to expiration, and fleen the state and nation in his unimpactable mixer, taken on down the last road to fullness, redemption, and temper.
Any old civilian at all can conceptualize Glory Joy duBoise’s crumpled Walter Matthauness by this revelational and recapitulatory time, but it’s something just other to visualize how she refilled, smooth and animated, in a negative manner, toward the sight that now half-filled the busted frame of the door of the Outside Minogue Bar, appeared against the swirling swooping light through soil outside. The sight, dressed and draped in a dusty black, was the ancient and all-around ravaged frame of T. Rex Minogue, appearing publicly for the first time since the wool-price crisis of ’67. He was seated in a dirt-frosted wicker and electricity-powered wheelchair, which hissed a low electric hiss as T. Rex made, first entry, then his way over to near the plywood bar and the combined and uncharitably disposed sight of our whole crowded three-deep pyramidded table. Was me whispered to Simple Ranger, “Minogue, T. Rex, first public display since ’67, crisis, wool,” and the Ranger nodded, his eyes more full of knowing than sky, a second.
Glory Joy duBoise, here, was getting hostiler-looking as she stared at old T. Rex, by the bar in his chair, covered by a black blanket, with crumbled old cheesy brown boots protruding from under, a white National Cancer Society cap on his skull-shaped skull, a curved and immense and hopefully domesticated buzzard on one shoulder, plus besides all this a device for electronic talking he was trying to put to his throat in just the right spot, for folks with throat dysfunctions. One of the civilians Glory Joy had proned to the floor swears later how he seen out-of-town dirt caked on the tattery soles of T. Rex’s boots, seen a tiny and scripted IMPENDING glowing fire in T. Rex’s one eye, a also tiny DOOM, CANCER burning cursive in the other; and this supine civilian was the first saw the rich orange of the jelly jars of illegal unstable sweet-potato whiskey that T. Rex commenced to pull out of a soft sheepskin satchel he had with him under that unwholesome blanket. Got the jars out and tossed them to the Ranger, who passed them around.
We passed the jars around and unscrewed Minogue’s bootleg lids.
We was silent at our table, expected T. Rex dead, or at least twisted, traumatized, Nunn-struck.
“Hi,” he said.
8. WAS THE MALIGNANT AND MALIGNIFIED T. REX MINOGUE
told us and Simple Ranger how Chuck Nunn Junior did flee to unknown and foreign locales. Manipulated his wicker-chaired plus disease-ridden self to where we all couldn’t avoid but look right at him and his bird. Held his little vibrator-esk talking tube to his gizzardy (liver-spotted to hell) throat. Lifted a jar of potato whiskey to the dusty light. Told us some facts on how C. Nunn Jr. pulled up at the lush and isolated Minogue homestead in his heavy cement mixer, freshly refit eyes, moral unconsciousness, and a fine fettle, not respective; how Nunn right off laid out the two geologic Enid ranchhands, who was on their way off the TRM spread to take their women skeetshooting, how Nunn laid them out, kicked them where they laid, and rogered their women; how subsequently (not very), Nunn manufactured a unarchitectural and spontaneous entryway in the bay window of the front of T. Rex’s spread’s Big House; and then how Nunn, on the spot, performed for T. Rex Minogue, in his wheelchair, in his front parlor, a uncontrolled and optically hazardous dance of blank white mindless rage that turned out to be one complex and complete charade for some words bore semantic kin to Wrath, Damage, Retaliation. So on.
Now the buzzards outside the Outside Minogue Oklahoma Bar was down, sitting row on straight and orderly row on the edge-of-Minogue land stretching off toward dirt. Appeared to us through the windows like fat bad clerics, soft and plump, teetery, red-eyed, wrapped up tight in soft black coats of ecumenism and observation. Had orange beaks and claws. Was a good thousand orange beaks out there. Double on the claws. Lined up.
T. Rex Minogue was asking us to drink to his death;
“To death, gents, lady, civilians, Ranger,”
he said in a rich electricity of mechanical voicebox. He hefted a jar of yam liquor up, and Glory Joy grinned unpleasant and right off lifted hers up with a enthusiasm I got to call sardonic. Upright civilians commenced to lift too, and finally mys
elf, and under the pyramid of bottles on our table there was a quiet community toast to the publicity and temporariness of T. Rex Minogue, who explained while he poured rounds—his IMPENDING-DOOM-ravaged face dry brown and wrinkled as a circus peanut, hair hanging out his cap thin and white as linen off the deeply unwell—explained that when Chuck Nunn Jr. come three days past to damage and maim T. Rex and V.V., he got informed in the parlor by T. Rex that the benign and pliable V.V. had already previously ceased and succumbed, in a institutional-caring facility in El Reno, months back, to hostility of the liver and smoothness of the brain. That Nunn, in mid-rage-charade, declined to show either sympathy for the late V.V. or any sort of compassion or Christianity to the soon-to-be-late T. Rex; expressed, instead, through interpretive amoral dance, his own personal attitude toward T. Rex Minogue, plus some strong personal desires that had to do with the nullifying cancellation of T. Rex’s happiness, gender, life.
Jelly jars or no, we was objectively and deeply unclear on how Chuck Junior and T. Rex got spared iniquitous criminality and grievous harm, respective; and was me asked T. Rex Minogue, who was attending a itch between his buzzard’s wings with the corner of a tie clip, how and where Nunn had spared T. Rex and gone, plus whether the moral coma and eye-and-T.-Rex-centered rage and vengeancelüst still now had hold of the fleen and missing Chuck Nunn Junior.
“A titantic plus miraculous scene to see,” grated T. Rex’s vibrator. He detailed the titantic plus miraculous struggle of minds and wills that proceeded to take place in Minogue’s front parlor that vengeful dancing day: Nunn cataloguing such T.-Rex-offenses as jealousy, neighbor’s-wife-coveting, avarice, manipulation, illegality, explosions of turf and lamb, loosenings of eyes and consciousness, desecurings of abilities to love and requite; T. Rex, in his wicker chair and blanket, countering with a list of Nunn’s putative virtuous qualities headlined by charity-via-might, -main, altruism, Christian regard and duty, forgiveness, other-cheek-turning, eudaimonia, sollen, devoir, . Told how he, T. Rex, due for consumption by his own malignancy in just time, anyhow, refused to yield up fear or resignation to Nunn’s blood-eyed blankness. How T. Rex’s ravagedness, will, and wind-blown statuses saved his life from a thoroughly amoral and fatal-minded Nunn.
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