Girl With Curious Hair

JOHN BILLY

1. WAS ME SUPPOSED TO TELL SIMPLE RANGER

Was me supposed to tell Simple Ranger how Chuck Nunn Junior done wronged the man that wronged him and fleen to parts unguessed. Brought up the Ranger to date on Chuck and Mona May Nunn's boy Chuck Junior, closest thing to handsome and semi-divine we got here in Minogue Oklahoma, good luck bad luck man, who everything that hit him stuck and got valuable, but on whom of this late time the vicissitudes of human relatings had wrought grief and retinal aggravation to such a extreme that C. Nunn Jr. lost his temper to a nameless despair and got him some vengeance.

Told Nunn's tale to Simple Ranger, the damaged dust-scout, who is a old man, watched his farm blow away in the hard and depressed highwindy days of the Bowl, got farmless, but however angled some job out of F. Delano R.'s WPA and set himself up in a plywood shack on the Big Dirt between here and El Reno, drawing government pay as a watcher for major or calamitous dust. Stayed out there near on forty years til looking at the dust made him damaged. Now he's too old not to be back, roving the streets in a kind of crazy d.j. vu, Minogue Oklahoma's own toothless R. Winkle, wants to re-know the lives of his people and their children after forty alone years of trying to make out the shape of his farm in the air. Buys me my personal beers with the checks some Washington D.C. computer sends him too much of, and I tell Simple Ranger things about Minogue only he don't know.

Told him some facts about Chuck Nunn Junior, with whom even the high winds decline to mess. How the prodigiousness of his 1948 birth tore up his Momma Mona May's innards so bad that even today the woman can only fall asleep after hot pads and loud opera, and requires institutional caring. How Chuck Junior was swarthy and pubic by ten, bearded and bowlegged and randy by twelve; how his late Daddy tried to whip him just once, like to broke his belt to smithers on Chuck Junior's concrete behind. How C. Jr. flipped his cherry on our seventh-grade music teacher, a pale, jagged woman, but highly scented, who even today passes through Minogue Oklahoma in a Trailways bus ever leap year, needlepoint-ing and humming vacant tunes of love's non-requiting. How Chuck Nunn Junior's color was that of the land and how his sweat smelled like copper and how the good ladies of Minogue got infallibly behooved to sit down whenever he passed, walking as walks a man who is in communion with Forces, legs bandy and boots singing with the Amarillo spurs he won himself at the '65 State Fair in O. City for kicking the public ass of a bull without but one horn, but a sharp one.

Told Simple Ranger, whose rate of beer is scary on account of no teeth to hinder a maximal swallow, told Ranger how, while he was out on Big Dirt watching skies and eating peas out of cans, Minogue Oklahoma H.S. won the state H.S. football title two years back to back with Chuck Nunn Junior at quarterback and defense and myself at Equipment Manager. How in '66, in the state final versusing Minogue Oklahoma and Enid Oklahoma, our sworn and fatal foes for all time, how in the final game's final few competitive seconds Enid, down by five, granted the ball to their giant ringer nameless nigra wingback, who took off from the Enid eleven with the ball in his hands and wrongness in his eyes, meaning harm to Minogue Oklahoma's very heart and self-perception, this nigra blowing through Minogue boys like grit on big wind, plus getting interferences run by two cow-punchers' boys of human form but geologic size, plus a Canadian martial arts expert in a padded bathrobe and metal cleats, who played dirty and low. How (I'm seeing this now, mind) how after a climactic and eternal chase-down-the-field and catch-from-behind, a swift cruel red-bearded and glitter-eyed C. Nunn Jr. brought down the whole stadium house, solved the runner-plus-interference problem at our ten's Enid sideline by tackling the huge cow-boys, the low Canadian kicker, the inhumanly fast nigra, three Enid cheerleaders, a referee, and one ten-gallon cooler of Enid Gatorade, all at one cataclysmic time. Busted a igneous leg on a interferer's spine and healed up in just weeks, bandier than before. Got a hall of Minogue Oklahoma H.S. named Chuck Nunn Junior Hall.

2. CHUCK NUNN JUNIOR MORE GOD THAN NOT

Told Simple Ranger some data on how Chuck Nunn Junior, more God than not to those of us peers that lived for a whiff of his jet trail, ate up his school and town, left us bent and in mid-yearn his eighteenth year and moved on to Oklahoma University, Norman, at whence he was observable throwing high-altitude televised spirals and informing his agriculture and range-management teachers of facts they did not know. Then how Nunn chucked it all to give time as a volunteer in The United States' Involvement in Vietnam, whence trickled down rumors of the glory and well-armed mightiness of Nunn: how he toted his unit's fifty-calibers up sheer and cliff-like impediments to conflict; how he declined to duck, never once crawled or ate mud, however never even once smelled lead in his cranial vicinity; how he got alone and surrounded by VCR's (Viet Cong Regulars) in 71, and through sheer force of personality and persuasion persuaded the whole battalion of sly slanted Charlies to turn their own guns on their selves. How etc. etc. How he sent me a postcard with a red bloom of napalmed jungle on the front, wrote how he wished my personal vision was better so I could leave the feed store and get over there to watch and whiff the trail of his jet.

Simple Ranger's eyes is the color of the sky. There's speculation hereabouts concerning if you look at something long enough does your eyes take its color.

I profess to telling the grey-eyed Ranger, plus a Nunn-happy group of Minogue civilians, how Chuck Nunn Junior returned home from OU Norman and South East Conflict more theory than man. How there was a welcome parade, fussy and proud, with a tuba. How the immoderate and killer twister that hit in 74 (this twister old Simple Ranger, by then more than a tinch damaged, chased for twelve helter and skelter miles in his DeSoto, said he smelled his aloft land in every revolution, finally wound up upside down in phone lines and no sign of his car evermore. Didn't never come down) that hit in spring, '74, the day after Nunn's returning and parade, how that sucker ripped the roof off Nunn's late Daddy's machine shed, sucked two N. Rockwell prints and Nunn's late Daddy out a busted ranchhouse window to follow Simple Ranger's DeSoto in a straight-up, and how it took up the Nunns' TV's aerial antenna off the house roof and flew the electric javelin out a fair quarter mile, flung the pole down into Nunn land like a mumblepeg, and how up from this TV-speared ground, just inherited ex officio by Chuck Nunn Junior, come a bubbling crude. Black gold. Texas tea. How Nunn paid off his late missing Daddy's sheep ranch's mortgage with revenues, put his scrambled and operatic Momma Mona May into institutional caring, and took over the Nunn sheep business with such a slanderous cunning and energy, plus oil money, that soon amounts of CNJ-brand sheep was bulging straining and bleating against the barbed wire limit of Nunn's spread, mating in frenzies, plus putting out wool hand over hoof, plus fighting over which one got to commit suicide whenever Nunn looked like he even might[keep] ("Might," I told Simple Ranger) be hungry.

Was telling the dust-watcher how C. Nunn Jr. passed up multitudes of come-hitherish cheerleaders and oriental princesses to return to Minogue and enter into serious commitment with his childhood sweetheart, the illegally buxom and tall Glory Joy duBoise, closest thing to femininity and pulchritude that to date exists in Minogue Oklahoma, eyes like geometry and a all-around bodily form of high allure and near-religious implication, and just as I was commencing a analogy relating the shape of Glory Joy's hips to the tight curve of the distant Big Dirt horizon, the door to the Outside Minogue Tavern busted inward and there against the dusty sunlight was framed the tall, angstifìed, and tortured frame of Glory Joy duBoise, hand to her limpid and Euclidean eyes, hips (that was similar to horizons) brushing the trauma-struck frame of the busted-inward door. She stood like that for time, looking at me, then come over at the table we was all at. Whereupon she stood, staggered, dropped and flopped in a floor-direction, her wracked and convulsively semi-conscious frame moving in directions like the Minogue Oklahoma H.S. half-time band, spelling out Kicked In The Butt By Love, or, Forlorn And Subject To Devastation Following The Loss Of Chuck Nunn Junior Due To The Hurtful Precariousness Of His Post-Accident Temper.

3. NUNN'S PERSONAL UNDOING WAS THE DAY IT RAINED SHEEP

Nunn's personal undoing was the day it rained sheep, I outlined to Simple Ranger as me and several civilians carried the forlornly swooned and flopping frame of Glory Joy duBoise to our table, smeared cold Rolling Rock on her pulse-points, and propped her up in a splinterless chair to come round to the outlining of our mutual Minogue sadnesses and troubles.

Told Simple Ranger how the success of the Nunn sheep ranch, plus the devotion of the near-beautiful Glory Joy, had aroused the ire and jealousy of T. Rex Minogue, the antique and hermitically reclusive, also malignant and malevolent, Minogue Oklahoma sheep mogul, plus the manufacturer of the illegal and chemically unstable sweet-potato whiskey that kept our neighboring reservation's Native Americans glazed and politically inactive; and how following the spectacular rise of the Nunn sheep operation under the energy and Agriculture Degree of Chuck Junior, who was, remember, a-shtuppin' the little lady T. Rex himself had wanted to a-shtup since she was twelve,[keep] how in light of all this it's comprehensible how T. Rex Minogue repeatedly and with above-average vigor attempted to financially acquire, legally finagle, then violently appropriate the Nunn sheep operation from Chuck Nunn Junior; how Nunn was too petro-leumly rich, well and savvily educated, and martially formidable, respective, for any of the attempts to fructify; how Nunn took all Minogue's shit with good humor, even the complimentary and ribboned jelly jars of yam liquor that T. Rex kept sending Glory Joy, each attached to a note headed NOTICE OF FORMAL WOOING, all with great and superior humor, until finally T. Rex, a man wholly allergic to any distance between himself and his way (least here in this town his own Daddy built before getting fatally harmed by some politically active Native Americans), until T. Rex arranged for his younger antique brother V.V. Minogue — a benign however treatably alcoholic rangehand and poet (his stuff rhymed, I'm told) who was under the thumb of dependency on T. Rex's secret sweet-potato recipe, I informed the ranger — for V.V. and two humungous out-of-town cow-punchers' boys from Enid (yes the old interferers from the climax of the state football title game in '66), for them to explosively dynamite a large and bulk-like portion of Chuck Nunn Junior's ranch's flock-infested grazing land; how whereupon the land was in fact dynamited by V.V. and the geologic Enid boys; and how it rained various percentages of sheep in Minogue Oklahoma for one whole nauseous afternoon two years ago next Ascension.

As Simple Ranger sat up straight at this and informed myself and the civilians that he himself had heard a far-off thunder booming off the dome of Big Dirt space, plus seen a singular pink-white rain from clear out in his shack on Dirt two Ascensions back, and had attributed the experiences to theology, plus the effects of damage, Glory Joy duBoise fluttered her way into consciousness and arousal, smoothed her brass-colored and towering hair with a hand-motion of such special sensuousness that two civilians tipped back over in their chairs and was largely lost for the rest of the duration, and entered into the therapy of it all, getting on the outside of several beers and detailing for the Ranger how it had been, that dark, fluffy, and rusty day, running with C. Nunn Jr. through the blasted heaths of exploded former pasture, ruining her best silk umbrella for all time, watching her man move through turf, mutton, and gore like the high wind of madness itself, floundering bow-legged through gruesome fields of gruesomer detonated wool, catching plummeting major percentages of particular favorite sheep in a shearing-basket, Glory Joy watching his mood and attitude getting more and more definable in terms of words such as grief, sorrow, loss, disorien-tation, suspicion, anger, and finally unambiguous and unequivocal rage. How as coyotes and buzzards began to sweep in off Big Dirt and commence a scavengerial orgy unsurpassed in modern Oklahoma in terms of pure and bilious nasty, how C. Nunn Jr. unhitched his '68 souped-entirely-up Italian Sports Car from his OU Norman quarterback career and fairly flew off the ranch east on rickety two-lane 40 toward the gigantic and private T. Rex Minogue spread, without so much as a kiss my foot to Glory Joy, who watched her man inject his vehicle of light into the chewed-up straight-shot road to TRM, his mind on the noun T. Rex Minogue, the near-gerunds confrontation, reparation, possibly even reciprocation (i.e. detonation).

4. SO IT WENT BACK AND FORTH

So it went back and forth, myself and Glory Joy, Simple Ranger gumming his bottle, his expression moving between vacant and preoccupied, the odd and frequent passing civilian patron getting pulled into the table, beer in hand, whenever Glory Joy rose her six-foot self up to tell what it had been similar to, those lonesome days of trying to run off carrionizers and mop up sheep percentages and run a ranch — admittedly now a smaller spread by a good measure — all herself; she'd rise up in her purple satin midi- and pay public tribute to the resemblance the days after Nunn's undoing and accident bore to hell right up on the grey and psoriatic skin of this world's land.

So it went back and forth, me handling the historical and observational, Glory Joy the personal and emotive. Was me revealed to Simple Ranger how, after the rain of sheep, Nunn was fairly flying in his little Italian Sports Car east on 40 to present to T. Rex Minogue the gift of T. Rex's own personal ass, and how meanwhile, back at Nunn's ranch, a good part of Minogue Oklahoma commenced to arrive and gawk and Kodak and catch mutton-cuts in receptacles ("Honey," this one old Mrs. Peat in yellow rain boots and slicker and a pince nez told me as she adjusted her hairnet she told me "Honey, when it rains bread and fishes, you get yourself a bucket, is what you do.") And how but mean-meanwhile, T. Rex Minogue's benign but sub-digital brother V.V., steeped in post-explosion guilt and self-loathing, plus not a little eau d'sweet potato, was speeding away from T. Rex's enormous spread for the Deep Dirt of Oklahoma's interior to commune with himself, guilt, pain, and a whole big truck full of jelly jars of distilled yam, and was accordingly fairly flying west on rickety 40 in this huge old truck, and at a ominous and coincidental point in time V. V. subconsciously decided, in some dark and pickled back part of his oceanic head, to see just what it was like driving his gargantular three-ton IH home-modified yam liquor transport truck on the left side of the hills, valleys, and sinewing curves of two-lane 40, V.V.'s left side being Chuck Nunn Junior's by right, course; and how here come Chuck Nunn Junior ripping up the highwayed hill right dab equidistant center between the two ranches, and here's V.V., driving in a pickled manner and a inappropriate lane up the hill's other side, and how there was impact at high speed, of a head-on kind, between the two.

"Impact," I said to Simple Ranger. "Plus damage, in no small measure."

And Glory Joy duBoise testified to the feelings she felt upon arriving in my pickup upon the accident scene, some pathetically few miles down 40, and seeing her Chuck Nunn Junior literally wearing his little impacted car; how there was white steam whistling out of his tires, out of the accordion that had been his engine, and out of Nunn's head, which looked on first look to be minus a jaw, consciousness, and two healthy eyes, in that order. How red lights and sirens come emergencying out across Dirt; how the Emergency Folks had to cut Chuck Junior out of his car with torches; how they was scared to move him on account of spinal considerations; how Minogue Sheriff Onan L. Axford announced to some press and media that wearing a safety belt, which Nunn was, had been all that come between Chuck Nunn Junior and eternal flight out a punctured windshield.

She told how Nunn come more or less to, in his little wraparound car, his torch-lit busted eyes in blood like bearings in deep oil;[keep]

"Remember the eyes of Nunn," I interjaculated, and Simple Ranger give me a watching look[keep]

; and as Glory Joy finished up communicating the anger and jus-ticelessness she felt, upon seeing T. Rex's brother V.V. Minogue, listing far to port up against the largely unharmed cab of his IH liquor truck, weepy, shitfaced, scratchless; how V.V.'s accidental ass had been immunized and preserved by how some old International Harvester trucks turned out had one of them air bags in them, that nobody knew about, from a IH experiment in the 1960's that didn't make the economic wash. But so the whole accident that was V.V.'s pickled fault and that impacted Nunn's hairy jaw and busted both his eyes, plus a pelvis, plus concussed the sucker into moral comatosity and undoing — the whole damaging calamity had consisted for V.V. Minogue of just a jillionth-of-a-second sensuous experience of soft and giant marshmallow (the white foaming lumpy bag was still filling up the big truck's cab, at this time, I remember, starting to jut and ooze out the busted windows, looking dire and surreal), of a marshmallow instant, plus a upcoming year of subsequent legalities. As Glory Joy climaxed telling how it felt, and took a deserved grief-intermission, a certain palate-clefted but upstanding civilian turn to me and he say,

"Sucker busted his eyes?" being real interested in physical damage, birth defects, accidental maimings, and the like.

"Sucker busted his eyes?" the Simple Ranger repeated in a rich gritty voice that croaked of advanced Grey Lung, the disease most specially feared by us who spend our lives on Big Dirt.

Out of a consideration for Glory Joy duBoise, who was wearing her pain like a jacket, now, I lowered my voice as I invited civilian and Ranger to picture what two cantaloupe melons dropped from a high height would resemble, if they wanted the picture of how Nunn's eyes got busted out his head via general impact and collision, hanging right out his head, ontojolly insecure.

And was me told the table how except for the eyes, the jaw, and the pelvis, which to our community relief all healed up, prime face, in j ust weeks, leaving good luck bad luck Chuck Junior a sharper shot, wickeder dancer, and nearer to handsome than before, how except for that, the major impact and damage from the accident had turned out to be to Nunn's head, mind, and sensibility. How right there in the post-accidental car he suddenly got conscious but evil,[keep]

"evil," I emphasized, and there was shudders from civilians and Glory Joy,[keep]

and how a evil Chuck Nunn Junior fought and cussed and struggled against his spinal restraints, invected against everything from the Prime Mobile to OU Norman's head football coach Mr. Barry B. Switzer hisself; how even slickered in blood, and eyes hanging ominous half out their holes, Nunn'd laid out two paramedics and a deputy and shined up my personal chin when we tried to ease him into a ambulance; how right there on rickety two-lane 40 Nunn publicly withdrew his love from his Momma Mona May, me, the whole community of Minogue Oklahoma, and especially from Glory Joy, who he loudly accused of low general spirits and what he called a lack of horizontal imagination.

"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 nutter 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-de-tachable 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)[keep]

; 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[keep]

(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 pyra-midded 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 re-fit 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;[keep] "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 myself, 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 blank-ness. How T. Rex's ravagedness, will, and wind-blown statuses saved his life from a thoroughly amoral and fatal-minded Nunn.

Now "To life," intoned the Ranger, nose full of dust and buzzard, eyes to quartz glitter by vegetable hooch, face shining with a odd and ignorant presence. Voice was still different, smoother. Young. Also familiar.

T. Rex Minogue and his personal fowl looked at Simple Ranger. Asked him some soft and intimately acquainted questions about the variable various shapes of the dusted Big Dirt air patterns. Asserted he could hear the special whistle of the Ranger's aloft land in certain storms of darkness, grey. Ranger done nodded. His face come and went.

"But not a bad career, Ranger," T. Rex continued, referring here to the governmental dust-watcher job Simple Ranger had had for a solid forty. But except T. Rex said wasn't actually the Ranger who had got hisself the cushy WPA angle; fellow with the real cushiony arrangement was a certain old and hold-out government clerk in Washington, D.C., who'd got his antique job under the original F. Delano R. Clerk was the one had himself the cush: his entire and salaried career was just sending Simple Ranger, plus this certain blind octogenerial Japanese sub-sentry in Peuget, Wash., their checks ever month. Clerk lived in big-city Washington and owned TV, T. Rex revelated. Simple Ranger commenced to feeling along his own jaw, thrown by new fits down into a jelly jar of introversion and temporary funk. And just internal theorizing on how T. Rex Minogue possessed these far-off historical facts sent some civilians into a state of shivering that had T. Rex's vulture agitated and hissing, plus opening and closing its clerical wings, thus hiding and revealing by turns the spectral and disquieting (calm, though) face of T. Rex Minogue, making his IMPENDING eye show red fire. The rows of audobonial Dirt-scavengers was still outside, now a tinch closer to the bar windows, watching, lined up.

Things was threatening to get surreal until Glory Joy duBoise rose up, tall and shaky, looking the worse for a mixture of Rolling Rock and yam whiskey, which your thinking person don't want to mix, and proclamated in a falsetto of disbelief and anger that: one) she disbelieved T. Rex's sitting here, leguminous cool and unscathed, if her own Chuck Nunn was as desirous to scathe him right there in his parlor as T. Rex implied; and that: two) she was angry as a animal, plus forlorn and subject to devastation following the loss of Chuck Nunn Junior due to the hurtful precarious-ness of his post-accident temper, plus eyes, angry as a animal at the galaxy in general and T. Rex in especial for his causal part in the above precariousness, forlornness, and devastation; and that the malignant T. Rex Minogue just better come out clean about the whereabouts of Nunn if he didn't want his wrinkled and senescent butt to make the acquaintance of Glory Joy's high-heeled shoe, but good. And T. Rex, whose historical thirst for the self and corporeality of Glory Joy duBoise is the stuff of Minogue Oklahoma myth — a whole nother story, I informed the funked and othered Ranger[keep]

— T. Rex, whose passion for our town's lone arm-wave at beauty is legend, glanced, gazed, and stared at Glory Joy, til we all of us got skittery. T. Rex and G. Joy faced each other cross ten feet of plywood room like fields of energy, all energetic with lust mixed up with regret, on one hand, rage and repulsion mixed up with a dire need for knowledge of Nunn, on the other. Simple Ranger's face had checked entirely out: the old and historical and adental man was dreaming out through the window into the geometry of bird and soil that stretched to the sky's tight burlap seam.

"I took the boy upstairs," T. Rex croaked into his box. "Took him upstairs to my own boodwar and to the window and I showed the boy what was outside, is how I come out of the titantic plus miraculous struggle." Addressed himself to Glory Joy, plus to Simple Ranger, who besides looking checked-out now was looking also strangely odd, bigger, eyes both here and not, his head's outline too focused, some deep wrinkles in his face, stained by dust for all time, like slashes of No. 1 pencil. T. Rex touched his fowl's claw with speculation, rue: [keep]

"Took the boy to my own window and opened her up. It was mornin. Three months exact since we buried my brother, who got consumed by my liquor, by poetic burnings and yearnings, by grief and legalities on account of under-influence driving and the eyes and mind of Chuck and Mona May Nunn's boy."

"What I see," whispered the big sharp clear new Ranger in a smooth new clear young voice, his paperskinned hands steady around his jar of liquor. There was non-spectral colors in his eyes.

"Ranger?"

"What was outside?" said Glory Joy.

"Was and is," vibrated T. Rex Minogue. "Showed the boy where it all blew to. Showed him what his seatbelt done left him to look at and be." Looked around. "Made the sucker sniff and see." Drank up.

"Made him smell death on your own wind? Death he'd missed by a impacted whisker, zif that was a prize? Made him read IMPENDING and DOOM, CANCER? Introduced him to buzzards and such fowl?"

The birds was at the windows, now. All over them. Ranks broke. Bar all dark. Each window covered and pocked with a mabusity of cold red observational buzzard eyes. Dry rasp of orange claws going for purchase on the dusty frames and panes. We was on exhibit to animals.

"Miss Glory Joy," T. Rex said, "I knocked that boy upside the back. Out come the eyes, hangin. The eyes Drs. me and V.V. paid for put back together after they was busted."

"Made him think he owed you his eyes?" I incredulized.

"Ranger, tell John Billy here he's missin a point," said T. Rex.

"Don't owe my eyes to nought but the clean high wind," whispered Simple Ranger.

Glory Joy stared. "Your eyes?"

"Knocked that boy's eyes loose, out they come, hangin," recollected Minogue. "I lean his puppy ass out the window so he's dangling his eyes out over the land. Wind blows them eyes around. Sucker can see straight down into everything there is."

We was all looking at the new Ranger, tall and straight and other. Each window a smeared tray of cold red watching marbles. Glory Joy took back her seat, dizzy with mix. T. Rex Minogue lifted his jar of deep orange up to the fly-speckled overhead light, swirled it round.

"You brought Chuck Nunn Junior's eyes out his head and made him look at dirt and brush and soil and fowls?" I said. I was pissed off. "You show him the waist-deep shit we all grew up in, like it's a gift from you to him? Grey sights and greyer smells we can't get out our own heads, and for that he declines to scathe you?"

"Something like that."

"Don't believe it for nothing," Glory Joy wailed. (Woman could wail.) "T. Rex done something sinister to Chuck Junior, is what happened."

I agreed loudly. Plus two civilians, as well, with the sinister part.

The ceiling commenced to creak and precipitate dust, on account of the immense and shifting clerical weight on top. We was in the belly of something black and orange and numerous.

Now: "Where it all blew to," whispered the smooth steely Ranger. I remarked how his jelly jar's colors was overhung with lush and various floras. Was me asked Simple Ranger how floras got in his liquor.

"Gents, lady," smiled T. Rex, "in regard for your community selves I'm here today public to say that me and Chuck and Mona May's boy's struggle ended where all things titantic end. In meadow-physics. We done some together, that day. Some macrocosmic speculation."

This one previous civilian, cleft palate, red iron hair, up and levitates. We look up at his Keds. He asks the air in front of him: "Where did Minogue Oklahoma blow to?"

Commenced to just rain ceiling-dust.

"Boys, wrap yourselves around something affirmative," said T. Rex, his domestic bird now holding his box to his throat with one savvy claw. "Remember what's the next world and what ain't. Minogue blew to Minogue, neighbors. See you selves. You, me, the corporeally phenomenal Glory Joy, the Ranger especial, we been swirlin and blowin in and out Minogue land since twinkles commenced in our Daddies' eyes."

"Minogue is you, Minogue?" slurred Glory Joy duBoise. I couldn't say skank. We was all sleepy with vegetable fuss.

"Minogue blew to Minogue," Minogue said. "Under Dirt's curve she's whirled and fertilized her own self into a priceless poor. Lush, dead, elsewhere."

"So where is it at, Minogue," asks the palatal man, aloft in a cumulus of webs and dust and creak. "Where's the meat of the bones we crawl on, plus eke out of, plus die and sink back in without no sound."

"Ain't no difference," sighed the Ranger. He'd growed him half a beard in just time. He sniffed at his liquor.

"Where you at, there, Ranger?" smiled a uncertain and far-off T. Rex.

"At the window," whispered the Ranger, at the window. He stared into a wormy and boiling black peppered with eyes, red. "Me and Mr. Minogue is at the window looking down at what the life and death of every soul from Comanche to Nunn done gone to fertilize and plenish."

"Showed him what we own," said T. Rex. He smelled at his old hands. "Showed what we all done gave via the planetarial actions of movement, wind, top-soil artistics, to the landed spread my own personal Daddy first plowed. That I first fertilized to humud black with the juices of his arrow-punctured self and my grief-withered Momma."

"Ain't no Chuck Nunn from Minogue Oklahoma that ain't eternal and aloft," sighed the Ranger at the window. The cleft rigger got levitationally joined by some more civilians.

Things was dark and singular.

"Aloft," intoned the damaged man. "My eyes are free of my head and flat grey temper and I am able to see directly below my dangling self the plumed and billowing clusters of the tops of trees of meat, dressed and heavy with the sweet white tissued blossoms indigenous to Minogue, fertilized by the wind-blown fruit of the toneless Curve on which me, my woman, my people move."

"Indigenous?" I slurred.

"That voice there, John Billy, that voice there is Chuck Junior's voice," said Glory Joy, flat, toneless, curved, Klan-white.

"When the high winds blew off Country," the Ranger said, "I was able to hear the infinitely many soft sounds of the millions of delicate petals striking and rubbing together. They joined and clove together in wind. My eyes was blowing everywhere. And the rush of perfume sent up to me by the agitation of the clouds of petals nearly blew me out that window. Delighted. Aloft. Semi-moral. New."

Glory Joy duBoise up and levitated. Also myself. Soon we was all uncommitted except to air and vision. T. Rex stayed where he was at, under us, by our pyramid of bottles studded with jars.

"Shit," he said.

Buzzards was gone. Flown home with a violence that set the edge-of-Minogue soil to lifting and tearing, twisted and grey, only to get beat down by a sudden plus unheard-of rush of clean rain from a innocent and milk-white sky. It fell like linen-wear, strings of technical light. Other such things. Windows ran smeared, then clear, then the rain shut down as abruptly as it had etc. etc.

The land commenced to look wounded. Dimpled puddles stretched off into nothing, outside — coins of water bright and clean and looking like open cancres in the red light of the low hurt red sun.

"Fore I die," whispered the malignified T. Rex, "I need to know where y'all think you live." He looked up. Around. "It's why I'm public today. Think what this is costing me. I need to know where y'all think you live at," he wailed. (Sucker could wail, too, gravelly vibrator or no.) His fowl got ornery.

"Maybe we'll just have us some fine new liquor first," whispers a aloft Ranger beside me, old, unbearded, sky-eyed. I saw for the first time how cataracted he was.

T. Rex commenced to hand up jars. "Tell me, Ranger," he said.

"Lord but don't it look clean," I was saying over and over.

"Show me the Chuck Nunn Junior I love, plus need," Glory Joy petitioned to a T. Rex maneuvering into a position for looking up her dress.

I grappled with some unsayably fearsome temptations to tell Chuck Nunn Junior's loyal and near-lovely woman who in all this landed world I loved.

"What's all that again?" said the Ranger in a flat grey gurgle.

"Have some liquor."

"Tell me where y'all think you live at."

Should of seen me grapple.

9. MY NAME IS JOHN BILLY.

Was me supposed to tell you how, on that one fine dark day a pentecost's throw from Ascension, we all of us got levitationally aloft, moving around the seated form of Minogue Oklahoma's expired T. Rex Minogue. How we passed, hand over hand, jar after jar of his unstable sweet-potato medicine, each jar deeper in color, duskier, til it got like the washed and bleeding land in the colored outside. How we all, even and especially Glory Joy, got glazed and apolitical, also torpid, docile, our minds in a deep loose neutral gear; how I started the story how Chuck Nunn Junior done wronged the man that wronged him all over again; and how at a point in time,[keep]

which is where we lived at, if the sucker'd asked me,[keep]

we all, me and civilians and Woman and old lone listening sky-eyed Ranger, we all crossed the thin line and slept. Aloft. How we dreamed a community dream of Chuck and Mona May Nunn's good luck boy Chuck Junior, riding his own mixer and might and absent purpose high, chasing a temper, a Daddy, Simple Ranger's DeSoto and farm, an everything of flora, sheep, soil, light, elements, through the windy fire of Oklahoma's roaring, watching stars. Now go on and ask me if we wasn't sorry we ever woke up. Go on.

[scanners's note: Unconventional paragraphs were in original text.]