Boonville (27 page)

John didn't know how to follow that story; coming to Boonville was the most adventurous thing he had done and it had been on a three o'clock flight. Broad daylight. He had a couple heave-hos and watched a movie, ate beef bourguignon. As for school, he was a deviant but within the pack, and mostly in his head. He had friends, none he kept in touch with after his school days, but he always had a group to sit with during lunch and at assemblies.

Franny and Pensive drank their coffee, waiting for his offering. John agreed night lent itself to the feeling of mischief with the exception of sex, which seemed to him more risqué during daylight hours. His cohorts giggled, remembering improprietous moments in the sun. If you didn't have a good story yourself, John decided, sometimes it was enough to spark them in your audience.

They switched subjects and began discussing the inherent power of the image of the cross and its value as something more than a religious symbol, making the aesthetic decision that the imperfect crosses would add to the exhibit, giving it an immediate sense of age. After watching Franny use three creamers and all the packets of sweetener in his coffee, John wondered if his aesthetic could be trusted. Not that the coffee was good, even though Pensive and he roughed it black, but he had noticed over the years that the people whose opinions he trusted preferred the same things as himself. Not just in one area either, food extended to books, which extended to politics, etc. He found it was unlikely
someone who thought highly of Ronald Reagan, James Michener, and succotash, would think well of Bernie Sanders, Carl Hiaasen, and oysters. There was no empirical right or wrong when it came to aesthetics, just people with bad taste.

Franny advised them that if they wanted to sell art, they should use aged materials whenever possible, frames, newspapers, anything thirty years older than the present day option. Buyers lapped it up. New meant untested and undefined. Too much thinking. People wanted to be walked through art, hands held the whole way.

“In this country consumers long for older objects because they haven't created a tangible history or link to the past themselves,” Franny said. “Everything is disposable these days.”

John looked at the Greek's stubby legs hanging over the tailgate. His feet didn't reach the ground, even with the help of the truck's full load and Pensive's full figure.

“Especially people,” he added.

Pensive shifted her weight and the truck wobbled on its shocks. She took a sip of coffee. The grimmest of smiles bent her lips. John was surprised that she had remained quiet, not thinking she was the type who could just listen. But she was very respectful to Franny, letting the old troll ramble.

“Nobody listens, nobody remembers.” The caffeine was speeding up Franny's already charged speech. “Nothing seems as full as the past because there are so many versions. It can be overwhelming. The present has only your own observations to contend with. But people don't want to know history, they want to fabricate a new one that jibes with their idea of a noble lineage. To hear it told, nothing in this world has ever been anybody's fault. We're all just going to hell in a handbasket.”

Franny removed a pouch of tobacco from his pocket and began rolling a cigarette. Pensive looked at the makings. John thought she was going to ask him for one, but instead she inched away from Franny. The truck shook as she moved, spilling coffee down John's front. Fortunately, it was no longer hot and only dampened his shirt. He dabbed at the fabric with a napkin, spreading the wet spot and widening the stain until it was hard to believe so much liquid had come from one splash.

“Nothing makes me more upset than when Americans talk about how old everything is in Europe compared to here,” Franny said, the rear of the truck tilted to a forty-five degree angle with
John leaning into him. “Let me tell you something, this planet's the same age the world over. You don't like arrowheads and pictograms, Chinooks and Aztecs, tar pits and toxic waste dumps, that's as much a part of who you are as England and Germany, London Bridge or Auschwitz, or even Greece is to me. There is one history of propagation and genocide, heroism and tyranny, and it belongs to all of us on these seven continents. Don't be fooled by a few quaint churches.”

Pensive tried to ignore Franny's cigarette but the wind was blowing the smoke in her face. She coughed dramatically. Franny didn't notice, finishing his universalist diatribe against the Eurocentric world. Maybe he thought her objection was to his argument. Franny began waving his arms to emphasize points, increasing the amount of smoke drifting in her direction. Pensive coughed again, this time in earnest.

John didn't mind the smell of smoke. He thought hand-rolled cigarettes weren't nearly as bad as the store-bought kind. He remembered when Christina had a run with Virginia Slims, finding something she identified with in the packaging: “You've come a long way, baby.” North Florida condo pool culture. John didn't begin to understand it. He hated the way she had smelled during that period, the dead cigs clinging to her hair, her clothes, her body. She stopped when crows' feet appeared near the corners of her eyes. Vanity, not death, always her great motivater.

John thought smoking cigarettes only made sense in the wee hours of the night when there wasn't any handier way of killing yourself than to wait for cancer to come calling. When he drank, the two seemed to go hand in hand. But when he drank, a plastic factory could be on fire and he would inhale deeply. He had never bought a pack of cigarettes. He'd give his money to Blindman for heroin before he pussyfooted around with death and supported R.J. Reynolds.

Watching Pensive squirm in Franny's dragon's breath, John decided people were defined more by what they didn't tolerate than by what they did. “No bare feet, back talk, leftovers, liberals, or loud music,” that was his father in a nutshell. It was difficult to say what the man supported, except Reagan, which meant in a roundabout way the seven deadly sins. Maybe in his own manner, patricide. John had developed a lengthy list of annoyances himself, starting with people who picked their noses while they drove and
running to inedible garnishes. He would never make it as a Buddhist, unless there was a less publicized branch who were uptight.

He found it odd Pensive didn't move out of range of the smoke. Instead she began eating something she had brought with her, a hockey puck made of weeds. She said she had baked it using sunlight and all-natural ingredients, taking five days to cook it in a special oven built from mud and a flat rock she had fished out of the river. The last batch had been stolen by raccoons, which to John was hardly a four-star culinary endorsement. Didn't they eat grubs too? Maybe raccoons in this area were to muffins what pigs were to truffles in France? Since John hadn't done the research, he politely declined Pensive's offer of a taste. She tried enticing Franny by revealing there was also gingko root among the ingredients.

“And walnuts,” she said, the final hook.

Walnuts, John thought, wondering why people tried to improve every recipe by adding nuts. He hated their texture in cooked food, even kung pao chicken. Christina had a recipe for pork chops breaded in crushed macadamias that she prepared for dinner parties, knowing John hated them and looked finicky scraping the crust away with his knife. Considering the price, John thought, macadamia nuts were the biggest con job since saffron. What was the big deal? Was saffron 20 times a better spice than cumin or paprika? John would take old-fashioned salt and pepper and the money he saved passing on the saffron to buy a bag of pretzels. Nobody, not even a hippie, would throw pretzels into a main entree.

Franny passed on his chance at the ginkgo puck. He told Pensive that coffee and cigarettes had brought him safe thus far, and like grace, they would bring him home. He started rolling another butt. With no other bribe or recourse at her disposal, Pensive asked if Franny wouldn't mind not smoking near her. Holding his lighter behind the cup of his hand, Franny had caught her double negative and said no he wouldn't not mind. Pensive clarified her request, adding statistics about secondhand smoke. Franny said he would refrain from lighting up if she could name an artist worth their weight in finger paint that hadn't smoked. Pensive suggested Margaret Washington. Franny flicked his Bic, taking a pull from the rollie and exhaling two puffs through his nose that floated toward Pensive. She made a sour face, her ginkgo puck backing up
on her. Franny didn't say another word. Break was over.

John and Franny unloaded the crosses from the troll's truck, then Franny left for the Waterfall for another haul. Pensive continued to churn out crosses in her smokeless work environment, humming “If I Had a Hammer,” keeping rhythm with the pneumatic blast of the nail gun. Folds of arm fat shook with each shot. Rosie the Riveter had nothing on her. She could get a job at any shipyard in America. The only thing missing were the anchor tattoos on her biceps.

John resumed dropping off the crosses. As he drove, he noticed a rise in the road as it left town. It would add to the cumulative effect for the southbound traffic, the same as the entering and exiting of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., a sense of descent, immersion, and then release. Who knows what it would feel like going the other way, a flip-book of a crippled cartoon character? Cheating death? Although the project was becoming something more than he had expected, with greater meaning and combined purpose, Sarah was still the target audience. Her review was the one that counted. She would be heading south.

Finishing the fairground side of the street, John felt strange about leaving crosses in front of a church with a high steeple that was tucked just off the highway near a row of trees. There was a picnic area in the churchyard and an unlit neon sign that spelled “Good News.” John could picture teenage newlyweds racing from its boxy congregation hall in a rain of rice. He thought it must be Lutheran or Baptist, not knowing the difference, guessing that one ate barbecue and the other didn't. He had seen a bumper sticker once that said Southern Baptists believe in a second coming. But that implied a different kind of conviction. John killed the working headlight of the Datsun, which was shining on the house of God. He didn't want to wake anybody up, least of all a Supreme Being. The project wasn't ready for Divine Criticism.

He began working his way back the Lodge side of town, the spacing coming more naturally since completing the first side. He had developed a system of tossing crosses out the open passenger door without having to stop, traveling slow enough so there was minimal damage, a few scraped faces and scratched tails. Nothing that didn't add flavor. He would straighten them when they were all in the street, not repeating the process every hundred yards as
he had done in the beginning. Time was of the essence. They had to make stands so the squirrels could be erected on the concrete areas, and the rest still had to be put into place. John didn't know where they were going to get the wood to make the stands or what the best design would be. Franny's engineering expertise would be called upon. Maybe Pensive would have an answer. He could also ask the Kurtses if they had any logging secrets, since they had just flipped a U-turn in their truck near Pensive's workstation and were coming his way, horn honking, music blasting, bottles flying, accelerating with reckless abandon.

So much for a covert operation, John thought.

As they approached, John could hear the Kurtses screaming in strange unison, one voice climbing higher than the other, warbling loudly, then dropping low as a background for the other to solo, neither voice faltering entirely, but growing together like two farmers calling for a lost pig. A bottle exploded off what was left of the Datsun's front end. John didn't know if it was a warning shot or a greeting. He also didn't know when the Kurtses were going to start applying their brakes. Maybe they planned to swerve past to give him a scare. But they were headed dead-center, homing in at ramming speed. John braced for impact as the Kurtses truck swung in a skid toward him, turning in a quarter-arc, rubber smearing asphalt as the high-pitched squeal of the tires sang out at an octave above their own trilling voices. John's cry joined theirs in a chorus of holy terror. He felt his body jerk, slamming into the car door with his shoulder as the truck's rear caught the back of the Datsun, both cars coming to an immediate stop, facing in the same direction.

“You know them pine cones you put glue on and sprinkle with glitter around Christmas time?” Kurts asked, leaning out the window. “I practically invented them.”

Given the speed the Kurtses had been traveling, John was shocked that he hadn't been laid out on the concrete with the steering wheel embedded in his chest. The impact from their truck had been minimal. The Datsun's open passenger door had whipped shut, snapping a cross in half, but other than that, what was one more dent? No insurance papers would exchange hands.

“I ain't never made no art,” the other Kurts admitted.

Under other circumstances, John would have asked for more experience and checked references on the glue-glitter-pine-cone
precedent – next Kurts would be taking credit for the milk-carton rocket ship or Popsicle-stick puppet man – but he needed all the help he could get.

“But I'm bhell wimth a bchainsawm,” he added, making m and b sounds where none should have been enunciated.

John could see his lip hadn't healed properly since the brawl at Cal's Palace. No surprise there, given the medical attention they had applied, Krazy Glue and bourbon. John didn't want a closer look. He'd be able to tell the two apart from now on, regardless if they answered to one name.

“We need to make stands for these crosses,” John explained. “Do either of you know how or where we can find the materials?”

“I got some ideas on the subject,” Kurts said. “But I hear you got some lickin' daggers comin' from Albion.”