Finus Melonius (the Ratio of Love)
THE WHITENING SUN up at the midmorning mark and black-rimmed. Finus felt its heat already prickling at his sensitive skin. He left the office, headed to Ivyloy’s just down the block. A faded, pea-green Chevy stepside trundled past the courthouse, the figure inside but a shade in a town Stetson raising a hand. Finus waved, hardly noticing. Laughter made him look up and across the street at the courthouse lawn where a bob-haired teacher in a peach sundress gathered her small charges in the lean shadow of the monument, the little ones hopping like grounded fledglings. The young teacher’s slim shoulders, white against the straps of her dress, gave shaded suggestions of her lovely bones. In the hard yellow morning light against the bright green centipede, they were all, teacher and little children, in motion and indistinct as a dream. He had turned to walk on when from the slanting scant shadow of a lamppost materialized Euple Scarbrough, the Man Who Knew Everything Because He Knew Nothing, wouldn’t it be a skit writing him up one day, and couldn’t be too far off. Euple now had that turkey look, head notched forward on the neck, mouth open, expression like a man just saw something mortally shocking, must’ve been his own shadow. Here he came, the mechanics of his walk resembling more and more that of an old steam locomotive, arms crooked like tie-rods and pumping, and moved as if on a track, no sharp turns. Here he was. Worked his jaw a silent moment to jar speech back into commission.
— Hello, Finus. His larynx a hollow dried corncob.
— Euple.
Didn’t want to say anything more, get him started. Euple chewed his gums, blocking the walk and staring at Finus, looking all over his face like he didn’t recognize him after all, in spite of speaking, his mind putting his memory of Finus back together in pieces. Worked his jaw a moment more.
— Well I’m never eating another can of pork ’n’ beans if I live to be a hundred’n two.
Finus paused, to see if this one would die on the vine. But no.
— Was looking at the sauce. You know they use that gum from a special tree in South America, xanthan gum, drain it in little pipes look like your water faucet on the side of the house, naw, like they did the turpentine down here. Can turn it off anytime they want to, stuck in the bark of the — pause a long moment for a synaptic misfire — xanthan gum tree. Get buckets of it and that’s what they use to make the sauce of things like pork ’n’ beans. Called xanthan gum, I believe, I think I read that on the label. Seen it in salad dressing, even. And in stuff you can’t even eat, like bug spray. It’s an adhesive, something. They boil the bark, I believe. Euple paused again, his eyes wandered off into the park though his head didn’t move, and Finus for a moment thought he’d fade out and allow an escape. The teacher in the peach sundress was now standing in front of the historical marker, the children clustered around her and moving something like Mexican jumping beans in a jar.
— Or could be the guar gum, they got that, too. Changes the texture of the skin of the bean, changes the chemistry of the skin of the bean, makes it like plastic, won’t digest in your stomach, changes the bean meat into something like goat cheese, some kinda dairy by-product, something like bean curd. Harder to digest. And the gum in the sauce, with a little ketchup and sugar in there for color and flavor, it’s a binder makes it hard for the stomach to absorb water at the same time, and working against digestion, and can lead to the spastic colon, you never know what’ll come of that.
The two men stood there a moment.
Finus said, — Say you been thinking on beans.
— Yes I have.
— I tell you, Euple, I hadn’t thought about it much, but you’ve truly been studying the bean.
— Guar gum, Euple said, looking over at the park as if distracted now. -No, it’s xanthan. You look at a label, see it in just about anything. That’s the key to life. Simple observation. It’s what the scientist does. He might be watching in a microscope or he might be just setting beside the crick, but he’s watching. He’s looking at his little wife bending over to pick up the young’un, he’s thinking fulcrum, lever, distribution of weight, density of bone, muscle mass. He’s thinking all them things. If he’s a philosophical scientist he’s thinking about the ratio of love.
— The ratio of love.
— You’d know what I mean, eh, Euple said, his gaze wandering.
— Say I would, now.
— I believe you would.
The ratio of love: amazing and beautiful, whatever it meant. Maybe the ratio of love over longing, or longing over love. By God. That’s why he’d given him the op-ed column, Finus remembered. The occasional weird jewel like this. He regarded Euple, who then nodded at him as if to confirm his thought. Finus said he had to go on. Euple nodded again and shuffle-turned to watch him go. For all Euple’s turkey buzzard exterior there was still a glinting light in the old gent’s eyes, they were still a hard blue and clear, as if his hard wiring were still clean and new, which maybe it was, maybe his particular imaginative visioning though of no practical value at all was genius of a weird sort. Even so, shoot me if I ever, Finus thought. So many things Euple had enlightened him and others on, from the invention of the shoelace eyelet to the reason birds can’t swallow but just must raise their beaks to drain it down. A dog turns three times about his bed before lying down because it puts him in sync with the rotation of the earth, to which he has been on angle during his wanderings of the day, and it’s why dogs are so easygoing as a rule and forgiving of others, because they are in sync and harmony with the world and the heavens. Clocks go clockwise because there is a natural gravitational pull to the right, though in England it is slightly to the left, just a hair, which explains things. A crack in the asphalt is the manifestation of one of the zillions of tiny natural fault lines in the rock formation miles deep in the earth, communicated by minute wave action to the surface, cracking the asphalt like chocolate frosting on a jostled cake. Finus let him write a column in the seventies, but after a while people just couldn’t stand it anymore. Finus had titled the column Euple’s Views. Privately he’d called it Euple’s Screwy Views though he had never said it out loud to anyone but Lovie. Of course he would be the first to acknowledge that screwy views fit right into his paper, given his own whimsical approach to journalism.
He regarded Euple, who was standing there looking across the street at some pocket of air and working his jaw in a minor fashion, old desiccated lips parted and a crust of something pale in the corners, running through the grainy film of his days. He moved on.
Euple’s discourse on beans had dislodged a pocket of breakfast gas stuck around Finus’s ribs and it rumbled like a bubble in the bathtub making for the surface, but downward through Finus. He stopped, leaned a little against a building wall and let it brattle out, went on his way. He hardly bothered to conceal a fart anymore, and hardly dealt more than one or two a day anyway. They rarely seemed to have much odor beyond something akin to the sweetfeed you give a horse — corn, with dank rich molasses. He could track their progress through the tract. Sometimes on one side of his abdomen a creaking would begin, and sound really like the joyous squawks and burblings and intermittent drumming of a woodpecker on a grubby old tree in the woods. Then directly on the other side of his abdomen would answer the bird’s mate, a little higher on the scale, of a different warble and rhythm, as if they were just letting each other know where they dined. And then brrraaapppt! like they’d both found the hot spot and hammered away. Back before his surgery and the moderation of his diet he’d had a big problem with gas, seemed sometimes his body existed for nothing more than to produce it, as if he were fossilizing and mineralizing like some ancient buried dinosaur in the brief span of his earthly years. In that time he figured he’d produced just about every variety of methane odor a human is capable of producing, until Orin Heath had assisted Mack Modica in the removal of several malignant polyps from Finus’s colon, including a large section of the colon itself. Before they’d done this they’d irrigated him, cleaned him out with a pressure hose, it felt like, and what had at first been simple discomfort, and then grave discomfort, had then progressed into a kind of relief, a sense of a cleansing, which had then become a sort of euphoria, a moment of absolute clarity, which had then intensified to the point that he felt like his brain was on fire, tiny geysers of flame were firing from the pores in his head, couldn’t they see it? And also he had a pain down lower, but not in his ass, instead in his groin, and he peeked down to a teen boner, one of those threatened to split the skin. He tried to reach down to hide it but his arms were gently pressed back to the sheet by the firm soft hand of a fleshy nurse whose breasts he could see straight through her clothing, like X-ray vision, saw her nipples grow hard and erect before his gaze, and he looked into her eyes and saw it was Adelphia Morrisette, the daughter of Blaise Morrisette, the druggist, a girl he’d often watched bend over to stock the shelving when she was just a teenage girl helping out after school, and in that moment during the visionary irrigation he could imagine with astonishing reality his rejuvenated prick poking its way through her wiry blond pubic hair and into slick glandular softness, young tight softness, and he felt her fingers press into the flesh of his head in a grip that could have been her manifest ecstasy.