"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.