Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (24 page)

Or is it a kamikaze’s lament?
“Die, Gordon, die! I was aiming for you, son, but I missed!”

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

Six weeks pass before the Fresno County Coroner’s Office releases Mal’s body for burial. The funeral takes place on a Friday in mid-July. It’s an unusually hot day even for that time of year and on the way to the Kingsburg United Methodist Church for the memorial service Gordon finds himself wondering how fast his father’s flesh will thaw out after spending so much time in the morgue’s freezer. Will Mal’s mortal remains be oozing pink juices inside the coffin like a defrosted slab of beef? Will he start to stink?

Gordon has been elected to be one of the pallbearers, as has his Uncle Gerald and Johnny Hoss. They’re joined by Arnie Andersen, Wayne Covington, and a few other high-ranking members of the Hoo-Hoo Club–faces that Gordon recognizes, but isn’t able to name. Even with all those hands distributing the weight, Gordon is surprised by how heavy the mahogany coffin feels as they slide it off the back end of the hearse.

“What the hell’d they do, throw half the airplane engine in here along with him?” Johnny jokes, taking the end of the casket. He’s hefting more than his share of the weight to make up for Gordon’s lack of strength.

“Mal was a big man, in more ways than one,” says Arnie. “I heard they wanted to put his prick in a jar and donate it to the Smithsonian so it could sit on the same shelf with Dillinger’s.”

“You’re just making that up,” Gerald says, straining.

“Y’think? We all saw the actual goods while Mal was making like a bullfighter at his Hoo-Hoo Club initiation,” Arnie recalls. “He could’ve made a lady rhinoceros beg for mercy with that thing, I swear….”

“He would’ve made a great Snark of the Universe,” says Wayne. “He could’ve put the Hoo-Hoos back in their rightful place.”

All talk ceases as they climb the steps to the chapel and the pipe organ inside sounds the first notes of a funeral dirge. Gordon is glad the other men think so highly of his deceased dad. He’s also relieved not to smell anything gamy. They set the coffin on a wheeled table and roll it to the front of the center aisle, where four clergymen in white tunics take over and cover the coffin’s lid with a purple satin blanket embroidered with a golden crucifix. Gordon takes a seat in the front pew between his grandmother, who’s weeping copiously, and his mother, stony-eyed in a black maternity gown. Her belly looks ready to burst.

A droning clergyman announces that Reverend Zimmermann will be reading the eulogy, but Gordon mishears the name as Reverend Simperman–an improbable moniker that he will soon find appropriate. A wiry old man with a white halo of hair and a lipless pursed mouth steps up to the microphone in the pulpit and begins:

“Malcolm Albert Swannson has passed from this San Joaquin Valley of woe….”

Oh, give me a break, thinks Gordon, already disliking Reverend Simperman and his folksy way with words.

“I can’t say I knew him well,” the Reverend continues. “Mal, as he was known to all, was not a religious man. But there are some here who remember him when he was a young go-getter, still in college, who went wooing after the minister’s daughter of this very church. Such was the fever of Mal’s ardor, I’ve been told, that he even attended an occasional Sunday service.”

Reverend Simperman gets a chuckle from his audience over that one. Gordon rolls his eyes. He can’t imagine his father ever having set foot inside a church, not even for his own wedding.

“Let’s hope Jesus got to know him well back then,” Reverend Simperman says, stifling a chuckle of his own. “Let’s pray Mal and Jesus are walking together in God’s paradise right now as we speak. For although Mal might not have been a religious man, by all accounts he was a good man, a prosperous business owner with a zeal for living–”

–
and pornography
, Gordon adds mentally, just to keep things honest.

“– a Won’t-Take-No-For-An-Answer kind of man who went on to marry that minister’s daughter–dear Cynthia, right here in the front row with us. She and Mal were going on fifteen years of a strong marriage and they produced a fine son together–young Gordon, sitting next to her. And I’m given to understand another baby will soon be on the way.”

At this, Gordon’s grandmother lets loose with a fresh bout of wailing. Her mascara streaks in grief. Reverend Simperman tries to come up with some off-the-cuff words of solace:

“We can’t know why God chooses to take a man in the prime of his life, just when it seems he’s needed here most as a husband and father. We can only assume that God required Mal for a higher purpose. As you all know, the Lord works in mysterious ways. But I can offer you this: in our day and age of overburdened hospitals and scandal-plagued nursing homes, at least Mal was allowed the comfort and dignity of dying in his own home.”

He crashed his plane into his fucking living room, you stupid priest!
Gordon wants to shout. At that moment, his Grandma Helen touches his wrist. Her bony hands flutter with tiny spasmodic tremors as she whispers through tears: “You’ll have to go up there and read this for me after the Reverend finishes.” She awkwardly stuffs a folded square of paper into Gordon’s fist. “I can’t do it,” his grandmother weeps. “Children should never die before their parents.”

“As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions   it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.”

What was he supposed to make of that? The whole thing kind of pissed Gordon off in a way he could barely articulate. It seemed to him that Paul’s version of God was like a neglectful father who abandons his children in a house filled with drugs, booze, and pornography, where their only guardian is a Satanic babysitter (“the ruler of the kingdom of the air”) who schools them in every vice imaginable. And then, when one of those errant children naïvely starts “gratifying the cravings” of their sinful nature–a nature which God is responsible for creating in the first place, being omniscient and omnipotent (not to mention having made man in his image)–what, then, does God do? Does he show up to offer his children love and moral guidance, to gently steer them away from the path he so deliberately set them upon? No. Just the opposite, actually. They become “objects of wrath.” Objects of God’s very own spiteful, all-powerful brand of vengeance, which is so clearly documented in the Old Testament.

But then comes the back-pedaling: God wants his children to love him at the same time that he’s punishing them with fires, tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, famine, poverty, pestilence, disease, and anything else he can throw at them. He wants everyone to think he’s “rich in mercy”–just as any deadbeat dad secretly believes that if his kids ever got to know him they’d think he was a really swell guy. So God creates a divine son in Jesus Christ, whom he promptly crucifies (another scary object lesson). In doing so, God makes the shaky promise that the sins of his lesser children will somehow be washed away in Christ’s blood. Now, thanks to God’s savage grace, they’ll all be able to sit down with Jesus in the heavenly realms and compare horror stories: “Christ, what was our Father thinking, putting us on that God-forsaken planet. What a fucking nightmare.”

Then again, thinks Gordon, you’re probably not allowed to say “fuck” in heaven. And you’re probably not even supposed to think it while you’re in church, as he’s done twice already. He must be on the fast track to Hades.

Okay, so maybe he’s feeling abandoned by his own father and unconsciously projecting those feelings onto God, the ultimate scapegoat. Or maybe the “incomparable riches” of God’s grace have seemed a little lacking in his life just lately. Whatever the reason, Gordon is having a hard time with God today. He just can’t understand why any father–much less the Father of Us All–would want to see his favorite son nailed to a cross moaning, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” What was the point of that, anyway? Was it God’s way of showing his love for mankind? Or his way of saying: “To know Me is to feel forsaken by Me.” That’s the lesson learned by Daniel, Job, and Christ himself, after all. Maybe it’s an inescapable lesson for every person exiled on Earth.

But then Gordon is struck by the uneasy notion that perhaps God only forsakes those who have already forsaken him. Although he can’t, for the life of him, remember forsaking God (ignoring him, perhaps, but that’s different…). Maybe he did his forsaking before he was born.

“Honey, it’s time to go up and read,” Gordon’s grandmother says, brushing her bony fingers against his cheek.

Realizing with a start that he’s completely tuned out Father Simperman, Gordon pats his grandmother’s hand and heads up to the pulpit. He can’t in good conscience read Paul’s ranting to the Ephesians now. Instead, he spontaneously decides to replace it with a passage from the Viking Compass Edition of
The Portable Nabokov
, which he was reading earlier in the week. Seeing the words in his mind’s eye just as surely as if he had them on a page in front of him, Gordon steps up to the microphone and announces:

“A reading from the Vladimir Nabokov novel,
Pnin
.”

Gordon looks out at the gathered mourners and sees his mother glaring at him. No one else seems to have noticed the switch. He plunges ahead recklessly, his voice sounding oddly girlish over the P.A. system:

“‘Pnin slowly walked under the solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended to the destinies of the quick.’”

There….
At least that’s somewhat closer, as a metaphysical statement, to something his father might have found agreeable. A few quips about mortality from Hugh Hefner might have been even better, but Gordon couldn’t recall having read any. Feeling self-conscious in the sudden silence, he steps away from the microphone and returns to his seat. Gordon’s grandmother leans over and kisses him on the forehead, saying, “Thank you, sweetie. You read beautifully.” Either she didn’t bother to look at what was on the paper when it was handed to her, or in the last few minutes her incipient senility has ramped up considerably. As his Grandma dabs at her reddened eyes with a Kleenex, Gordon’s mother crossly jerks his ear and whispers into it: “You’ll go to hell for that, you godless little book freak.”

I must be in hell already to have you as a mother,
Gordon thinks. The memorial service is putting him in a crappy mood. Fortunately, they only have a few more prayers and hymns to get through and then everyone will be dismissed.

After they haul Mal’s coffin down the church steps and back into the hearse, Johnny Hoss offers Gordon a ride out to the cemetery in his nine-year-old rust-colored Chevy El Camino. “I got a dual-carb 454 under the hood,” Johnny says. “I’ll get you there faster’n anybody.” Gordon pushes aside a grimy, sawdust-spattered chainsaw on the black leather bench seat and hops right in. He’s not about to ask his harpy of a mother for permission. He just gives her a jaunty wave as the El Camino’s engine starts up with a throaty rumble and they peel out from the church’s parking lot.

“That preacher was puttin’ me to sleep,” Johnny says as they turn onto Draper Street and blow past the faux-Swedish storefronts. The growl of the El Camino’s exhaust pipes drowns out the polka music on the sidewalks and causes a few withered old ladies to look up from their walkers and stare like dismayed herons.

“I can’t believe all this time’s passed and they still don’t know how my dad died,” Gordon says, recalling the episode six or seven years ago when his father took him up in the Cessna and buzzed Draper Street, then nearly killed them both in the airport’s lake.
Maybe he finally just screwed up and crashed
, Gordon thinks, but he still has his doubts.

“I guess some things are meant to stay mysteries,” says Johnny.

“How do you mean?” Gordon asks as they bump across the railroad tracks at the far end of town. A cinderblock overturns with a sandy clunk behind them in the pickup’s scratched steel bed.

“Just what I was sayin’. Sometimes a mystery is supposed to stay a mystery. That way it can mean diff’rent things to you at diff’rent times in your life.”

“Like God,” says Gordon.

“Exactly! Ain’t nobody ever gonna figure that sucker out. You wanna understand God, you’re just plum outta luck.”

As they pass by
Ralph’s Radiator Shoppe
and the houses start to give way to grape vineyards out on 10th Avenue, Johnny floors the accelerator and the El Camino picks up speed at a scrotum-tingling rate. Gordon leans over to look at the speedometer and sees the red needle rising from 50 to 70 to 90 in mere seconds. As it scoots past 100, Johnny yells above the thundering engine: “If today was our day to die, I might crash us into a big ol’ cow wanderin’ out here on the road, or some dumb guy on a tractor. But you don’t need to be flyin’ no plane or drivin’ no El Camino like a bat outta hell for that to happen. You can die anytime, even in your sleep. When your time’s up, that’s it. You’re a goner no matter what. And when your time’s
not
up you can get away with damn near anything. At least that’s how I see it.”

The rows of vineyards outside Gordon’s window have become a vivid green blur. He’s regretting now that he wasn’t able to find the El Camino’s seat belts.

“Most folks spend their whole lives all tied up in knots, tryin’ to be safe,” Johnny keeps yelling. “They work at jobs they hate so they can pay for things they don’t really need–and I ain’t just talkin’ life insurance and burglar alarm systems here. They’re all runnin’ around so scared that they think just buyin’ stuff in general will keep death away. Like them plastic Adirondack chairs from K-Mart will keep ‘em alive somehow, know what I mean?”