Nine Kinds of Naked (6 page)

With nothing else to do, Clovis dismounted and found himself plunged ankle-deep in a blanket of acorns well hidden by last autumn's leaf litter. Delighted by this ambush, he crunched a few steps this way and that, stretching his legs and browsing for a sense of where to go next. So doing, he happened across a perfectly crimson and freshly fallen oak leaf, glowing scarlet on the otherwise brown, brittle, and disintegrating forest floor. Seeing as how the seasons could not possibly have been any further along than the summer solstice, the rubied enthusiasm of this incongruous leaf shone all the more fantastic in the eyes of the beholder. Pleased and puzzled, Clovis picked it up with far greater pleasure than one ordinarily feels upon finding the first flaring leaf of late summer, smirking puckish and spreading rumors of the autumn bloom to come.

Clovis spun the scarlet leaf on its stem between his fingers. It was uncommonly beautiful, translucent, as if it were somehow illuminated from within. He looked to Attila, hoping she would show some sign of marvel to confirm his own, but she merely gazed in placid asininity. Turning away, Clovis's eyes fell immediately upon another, equally vibrant leaf a few paces ahead. He crunched over and picked it up, verifying for himself that it was not just the dazzle of a single reddened leaf that he found so enchanting, for this second leaf was no runty imitator.

And there, a few more paces ahead, he spied another cardinal leaf heralding its thank-you farewell, and beyond that
another, each going down in its own blaze of brazen glory. Retrieving Attila, Clovis resolved to follow this trail of unseasonably and unreasonably beautiful leaves. They crunched along through the acorns, making what seemed to be all the noise in the world. Clovis imagined that he could not have made more noise if he were banging on an iron kettle with a steel ladle while leading a parade of roosters at dawn. He quite cracked himself up with that image, and if the local trees were wont to broadcast rumor, oaks far and wide would have heard tell of the ass and his fool, shambling through their midst in ungoverned hilarity.

 

19
I
N
1936, during the depths of the Great Depression, forty young women arrived at the Cooper Pants Factory near Gainesville, Florida, sat down at their sewing machines, and set about stitching hems and seams, another dreary day in the land of opportunity. Shortly after they began their busywork, and as if this debasement of their imagination were not tragic enough, a tornado came along and bumped into the factory. Thirty-nine of the forty women ran panicked and screaming to the stairwell; a Mrs. Boyd Shaw remained at her station. She had inadvertently sewn her own dress into the seam she was stitching, and was unable to beat the hasty retreat. As she struggled to free herself, the tornado ripped the roof from the building, ultimately causing it to collapse, but not before it tore Mrs. Boyd Shaw clean out of her clothes and tossed her a block away, stark naked and bruised, but otherwise fine. All thirty-nine of her coworkers died in the ensuing inferno that consumed the factory.

There are hundreds of substantiated oddities such as this surrounding tornadoes. A tornado once opened a barn door, pulled a wagon out, turned it around, wheeled it back inside, and closed the door. A phonograph recording of the song “Stormy Weather” was once found wedged into a utility pole after a tornado had swept through the area. A butter churn once dropped out of the sky and landed on a cow's head, half an hour after a tornado had hit twenty miles away. Chickens are routinely stripped of their feathers, and the feathers are sometimes found speared into planks of wood. In 1974, a farmer reclaimed a mirror, a carton of eggs, and a box of Christmas ornaments—all undamaged—from the otherwise
total wreckage of his house. A tornado in 1996 even had the audacity to hit a drive-in movie theater in Canada while it was screening the movie
Twister.

Then there are those who claim that tornadoes can blow a jug inside out, or a cellar upside down, or a rooster into a bottle, or even that a tornado can change the day of the week and knock the wind out of a politician. Although these assertions are ludicrous, the essential point should not be lost. Tornadoes introduce chaos, and chaos makes anything—short of changing the day of the week—possible. To describe the situation in terms of probability theory: Tornadoes provide a high probability that several of millions of low-probability events will occur. Of course, which of these millions of low-probability events actually occurs is pure chance.

Probably.

 

20
D
IABLO WAS STILL
inside Billy Pronto's truck when he regained consciousness. The truck was about seventy feet from the road, and neither his severed middle finger nor Billy Pronto were anywhere to be seen. Frustration descended, and like a paper clip in idle hands, Diablo was bound to get bent out of shape. His finger, or the lack thereof, hurt like hell. His hand and head were bleeding, and he wanted to get himself to a hospital, preferably with a finger for some surgeon to heroically reattach.

To make matters worse, Diablo's simulacrum of satori had split, evaporating like a two-minute sprinkle in the desert. This was no longer the perpetually flaring present, the big day of everyday; this was the worst day of his life. Jeezus christ,
Diablo thought, did I
swallow
my goddamn finger? Maybe the heroic surgeon can retrieve it? Decisions. Final scan for finger and Billy Pronto. Nothing. Keys? Still in ignition. Does it start? Yes it does. Go? Go.

Diablo floored it, tore up the fallow field, crashed over a ditch, and bounced back onto the road. He had accelerated to sixty miles an hour before his zeal began to sag. Though the sky above him was as azure as he had ever witnessed, the sky above Normal—still four miles away across the Illinois flatland—was a sickeningly greenish black, clouds tumbling and boiling, thrashing and roiling like the underbelly of a rabid dragon in a pit of petroleum. Then he saw it, a wound-up towel snap from the bottom of the enormous cloud mass and slap the ground, the finger of God tickling Mother Earth. She bucked and threw a swarm of debris back at the roguish overtures of the sky, where it circled like vultures along the dancing windpipe, squirming like the trunk of an elephant about to sneeze.

Dumfounded once again, Diablo continued racing toward Normal for another few seconds. He might have continued farther if a curtain of hailstones the size of golf balls hadn't suddenly fallen all around him. He braked hard but only succeeded in marbling across the hail-covered road, spinning a dozen times, each rotation marked by a barrage of hailstones pelting him through the open driver's-side window. At some point he let out a cry, shielding his face from the punctuated bombardment of ice and his eyes from the relentless madness of the world. He managed to roll up the window once he realized he had stopped, and there he sat, shivering from shock,
realizing he could no longer cross the fingers on his left hand, as thousands of berserking devils stampeded over the outside of the truck, hooves whammering, clamoring, riding jackhammers for pogo sticks. After a few minutes, the swarm had mostly passed, with only an occasional straggler pinging like the last few kernels of corn to pop.

Relieved, Diablo picked up one of the smaller hailstones littering the inside of the truck and tossed it in his mouth. It gave way to a satisfying and refreshing crunch. He smirked, rolled his window back down, stuck his left arm out, and defiantly extended what remained of his middle finger to the sky.

 

21
N
O SOONER HAD
Diablo proffered his profanity to the heavens than a new peril presented itself. Squinting down the highway, he saw a surge of cars emerging from the dusty mist and charging his way, taking up both sides of the road and then some.

The tornado had attacked the highway through Normal, peeling slabs of pavement and tossing them here and there like so much citrus rind. This had triggered a universal reaction of internally combusted flight as hundreds of drivers shrieked their automobiles in the opposite direction and toward Diablo. Several cars were tapped out as the tornado chased the retreating pack down the highway, adding still greater imperative to the evacuation. Later, it was estimated that the tornado had been moving across the ground at speeds approaching seventy miles an hour.

Of course, Diablo was unaware of those affairs. The funnel cloud was no longer visible amid the dust and debris it was
producing, and he could only see the ripsnorting onslaught of automobiles bearing down on him. Alarmed, he turned the ignition, fully expecting it to cough and sputter, but it defied the cliché and roared to life. Diablo gunned the engine, turned the truck with a gratifying fishtail, and just as he shifted into third looked in his rearview mirror and saw the leaders of the pack less than a hundred feet behind and an enormous tornado suddenly in full view a mile or so back. Within seconds the first wave of cars tore past him, honking and squealing, and before Diablo knew what was happening he was in the middle of a high-speed traffic jam. He shifted into fourth at sixty-five, and finally made it to fifth by eighty miles an hour. He was still being passed on all sides. On the median to the right an SUV was bouncing across the grass, taking the beating it had been waiting for since its manufacture. Farther behind an ambulance was wailing its siren and flashing its lights, trying to bully its way forward, but no one was having any of that shit. The emergency, after all, was perfectly apparent to everyone.

Diablo pushed harder on the gas pedal, hoping to open the throttle another micrometer, anything to accelerate, anything to get the holy fuck away from that windy monstrosity. When he next glanced at his speedometer the needle was bouncing back and forth across the gauge, maxed out and indicating that he and everyone around him were barreling down the highway at well over a hundred miles per hour. Soon afterward the tornado veered off the road and dissipated over some trees. Traffic gradually slowed, some people pulled over and got out of their cars, and within ten minutes the road was
mostly empty again. Diablo kept on driving. It was all he had going for him, the way he figured it. The accidents of the day had conspired to trade the middle finger of his left hand for a pickup truck with three-quarters of a tank of gas and half a bag of corn chips. It was a start, and it seemed like it would lead him somewhere.

No sooner had he reasoned this out than the truck was rocked by an unseen collision. Diablo yelled “Jee-zus christ!” in the ensuing melee of braking, screeching, and the rear window shattering, and this was as it should be. After all, an eight-foot crucifix had just dropped out of the sky and into his flatbed, managing to shatter his rear window in the process. Once he had the truck pulled over, Diablo jumped out to investigate, still thinking he'd hit a deer or vice versa. He was, for the third time that day, dumfounded, finding instead a bronzed, life-sized, crucified Christ gazing placidly up at him from the flatbed as if it were a loyal pet.

Growing accustomed to the profoundly improbable, Diablo set about arranging the crucifix securely. Most pickups are designed to hold the standard cut of plywood, a four-by-eight sheet, in their bed, and so the crucifix, four feet wide and eight feet tall, was a perfectly snug fit. After regarding the curiosity, Diablo got back in the cab, pausing to inspect both of his hands. He would not have been surprised if his missing finger had mysteriously shifted to his right hand, or even, given recent events, if it had miraculously regenerated itself. The situation seemed stable, though, and the bleeding had even stopped. He sighed, and after accelerating back up to fifth gear, Diablo
tucked his left hand under his thigh to soothe its throbbing, shook his head at the bizarre events of the day, and drove away from Normal, confident that God was with him.

 

22
T
HIRTY MINUTES EARLIER
, the oblivious Dave Wildhack was impatiently ignoring Father J. J. Speed's homily. Sermons frustrated Dave since they required everyone to sit down, thereby suspending his continuing survey of the rear ends of the women in his parish. Furthermore, a squad of headaches was also kicking in the doors of his skull like overzealous gangbusters. He winced as he massaged his neck, and the gangbusters opened fire with a crack of thunder outside, blinding his closed eyelids with flares of spectacularly bright light. Dave looked up to stretch his neck, opened his eyes, and noted with a moment's curiosity that the hanging lights were all vaguely rotating.

If the oblivious Dave Wildhack ever paid any attention at all to his life, he might have noticed that he was apt to develop such headaches just prior to thunderstorms. If only he had realized this, he might have perceived the peculiarity of the atmosphere, and guessed by the severity of his headache that an uncommonly strong storm was developing outside. But Dave perceived his headaches in precisely the same way as he understood every other difficulty in his life, that is, as random misfortune and arbitrary adversity. Consequently, the barometric pressure was free to plummet to its exceptional depth that morning, unheeded by anyone at Palm Sunday Mass.

If there had been a dog in attendance, surely it would have been whining frantically, running in circles, barking, bristling,
and generally raising the alarm. But there was no dog, only people, and people reside much more comfortably in their imagination than they do in the actual physical world. Indeed, these days, the physical world itself is usually nothing more than a material manifestation of the human imagination, built to suit the human scale and to provide the illusion of control over existential chaos.

Although Bridget Snapdragon did not share this intolerance for chaos, she certainly held no prejudice against residing in the imagination. Not at all. Bridget Snapdragon merely found the socially sanctioned imagination to be a shallow, unexciting alternative to the depths of unpremeditated reverie. Today, her imagination wandered into wonder at something she had recently read about quantum mechanics. It was the notion of
nonlocality
, the preposterous principle that seems to imply that space does not exist, or that there is some hyperspatial dimension whereby two particles need not share the same region of space to be interconnected. Experiments demonstrating this—whereby measurements taken of particles that were once united show that the observation of a particle at one location can have an instantaneous effect on the state of a distant particle—seemed to disrupt every assumption of a material universe confronting human consciousness from without.
Acausal nonlocal quantum mechanical interrelatedness
is what they called it. Acausal nonlocal quantum mechanical interrelatedness. She liked that phrase; it had a certain rhythm to it.