The Heavenly Table

30

FROM TIME TO time during that period, Jasper saw a couple of the men who sat on the city council stop by the Whore Barn, men who were always casting complaints about him shutting down this or that well or shithouse like he was some sort of despot lording it over the citizenry, when all he was trying to do was the job he’d been assigned. He had met up with the worst one of them just yesterday, Sandy Saunders. Dressed in a tailored blue serge suit and swinging a new cane, the insurance salesman started to pass by silently, with a look of disdain bordering on revulsion, as if the sanitation inspector were nothing but a maggot or a bit of offal stuck to the bottom of one of his custom-made shoes. However, when Jasper stopped in the middle of the sidewalk three or four feet in front of him and grinned, Saunders couldn’t resist a smart remark. “What say, shit scooper?” He tapped his cane on the sidewalk, then struck a rakish pose as he saw a couple of young ladies approaching.

“I wouldn’t call me that no more if I was you,” Jasper replied, the smile plastered on his face growing even wider.

“Oh,” Saunders said with a laugh, “and why not, you little turd?”

Moving closer, Jasper waited until the women walked on by, then said, “Because I saw you over at the Whore Barn the other night. Sucking on the toes of the fat one got the grease dabbed all over her face. And you a-courtin’ that nice daughter of Mr. Chapman’s and blowin’ off to everyone about how you’re gonna run for mayor next fall. That’s why, Sandy. From now on, you either start calling me Mr. Cone, or I’ll tell the whole goddamn town about ye.”

For at least a minute, Saunders stood speechless, staring openmouthed at the inspector. His face turned a ghostly white, then a bright red, and finally a deep angry purple. “You’re…you’re crazy,” he finally managed to sputter.

Jasper winked and started to move on. “I might be,” he said over his shoulder, “but at least I’m not payin’ money to lick a whore’s dirty feet.”

Even though he had finally turned the tables on Saunders, his most vocal critic and one of the snootiest pricks to ever come out of Ross County, Jasper was still rattled by the encounter. Because it was the only thing that soothed him when he became upset, he hurried home right after work and took his buffalo gun out of the closet in his bedroom, where he kept it wrapped in an old quilt. Sitting down on the bed in front of a tall mirror, he wiped the long, heavy rifle down with a rag dampened with Hoppe’s Solvent. He began talking to himself as he did so, glancing in the mirror from time to time, pretending that someone was seated across from him listening. “So this Jasper feller,” he said to his reflection, “he decided his town had been dirty long enough and it was time to clean it up, and the first thing he did was go over to Sandy Saunders’s office on Paint Street and, BOOM, he shot the dirty snake’s head off with a buffalo gun his daddy bought at an auction one time up in Frankfort, and, by God, you should have seen the look on the sonofabitch’s face right before ol’ Jasper pulled the trigger, and his brains splattered like red mud against the wall. And then he walked over to the jail and killed both those Wallingford boys and their old man just because they’d let everything go to hell, and then he blasted a hole the size of a…” He talked on and on like this for quite a while, assassinating various city leaders and other higher-ups, ridding the town of filth and corruption once and for all. He was being hailed a hero when he realized he was at it again, losing himself in a fantasy that he kept wishing he had the courage to carry out. Though he did so with regret, he stopped abruptly in the middle of a speech being given by some big-breasted matron in which she was extolling his high morals and princely virtues. She was standing on a stage in the newly renamed Cone Park. Draped behind her was a banner that had the image of a buffalo gun sewn on it, and in the front row sat his father, alive and well and hardly aged at all.

After sitting for a few minutes staring at his now silent image in the mirror, he wrapped the gun in the blanket and stuck it back in the closet. Then he dropped his pants, undid his truss. A thin shaft of yellow sunlight swirling with dust motes shone through a crack in the curtains. Taking out his cock, the bane of his existence and his cross to carry for as long as he walked the earth, he wrapped both hands around it and whipped it against the side of the oak dresser until he wept. He finally quit beating it and took a bloody leak in a bucket sitting in the corner and bunched it back up in his pants. Exhausted by his efforts, he went downstairs and drank a glass of water, then curled up on his mother’s couch and went to sleep with all her old plaster saints watching over him with sadness and understanding and compassion, as saints are wont to do.