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?"