Zod Wallop (2 page)

The three approaching figures halted in front of the minister, who was aware that other occupants of the van moved on the periphery of his vision. The minister leaned forward, compelled to touch this extraordinary girl’s arm, and said, “My dear—”

Before he could continue, she giggled and said, “Not me, silly. This is Emily’s show.” The girl patted the bundled figure in the wheelchair, whose head was bobbing rhythmically.

“My beloved,” Raymond said, reaching past the minister and pushing the raincoat’s hood back. “Emily Engel.”

The bride regarded the heavens with her left eye while her right eye studied the minister’s forehead. Her face was pale, round, immobile, and oddly flattened, the face of a fat child pressed up against a windowpane. Her hair was a snarl of brown curls and the daisies in it seemed like a cheerful act of vandalism. The bride’s head bobbed constantly, her mouth was open, and she was drooling slightly.

The rain seemed to abate, as though pausing with the minister’s held breath, and then the storm lost all sense of decorum and roared. An angry sea fell from the sky.

Perhaps it was this urgency of the elements that allowed the Reverend Gates to perform the ceremony. The drumming deluge did not allow for cool reflection.

They raced through the ritual. “Do you, Emily Engel,” the minister intoned, “take this man, Raymond Story, to be…”

“Gaaaaaaa,” the bride said. Miraculously, the monkey had not swallowed the ring and produced it with a courtly, old world flourish.

“You may kiss the bride!” the minister shouted through a hole in the thunder, and Raymond reached down, wrested his bride from her wheeled chair, lifted her in his arms, and shouted, “Allan! Behind you! They come!”

The Reverend Gates peered through the writhing sheets of rain. A low, black limousine had pulled sideways to the van and several dark figures in raincoats were emerging. The rain seemed suddenly colder.

“Raymond,” the reverend said, “I think—”

“Good friar,” Raymond shouted, cradling his bride in his arms, “you’ve done well. What God has joined no man will sunder.”

Two of the men from the limousine had reached the giant and were struggling with him. He hurled one of them into the crowd.

“Goodness!” Ada Story said to her husband. “I guess Raymond and his friends didn’t really have permission.”

Her husband patted her hand. “Oh, probably not,” he said.

The Reverend Gates watched as several more dark figures fell upon the giant, dragging him to the ground. Then the bridesmaid—and the reverend could not help noticing that the rain had invested her bathing suit with translucent properties—shouted a rallying shout that brought her companions pouring from the sidelines. 

A brawl
, the reverend thought.
I have married a half-wit and a madman and it has ended in a brawl
.

He prayed he had done the right thing.

His prayer was interrupted by the appearance of a large bald man whose raincoat flapped open to reveal a white uniform.

“You ain’t been taking your medication,” the man said.

The Reverend Gates, momentarily confused—for he did not take medication—was on the point of responding, when he realized that the man was speaking to Raymond.

“You gone right off your head, Ray-boy,” the man said. “You tore it this time, and you are going down in the Deep One.”

The man brandished a large hypodermic needle.

“Here now!” the reverend shouted.

Raymond Story, clutching his bundled bride, stepped back. “Blackguard,” Raymond bellowed, “your master will taste the bitter fruit of our joy this day!”

“Right around the bend,” the man shouted, lurching forward. “Right over the hill and into the trees!”

The monkey screamed, leaped through the air, and embraced the bald man’s head. The reverend watched as the monkey bit down on the big man’s nose. Those large, yellow teeth haunted the minister’s dreams for weeks, and it was a great wonder to him how an event occupying no more than a second could etch itself so perfectly on his memory. The reverend’s conclusion was that the bald man’s scream—a high-pitched, animal howl—worked as a kind of psychic cement, gluing the moment to the faculties of recall.

The big man’s arms flailed the air, and the monkey added its own hysterical shrieks to the fray. The man stumbled backward, slipped on the wet grass, and fell, knocking the wheelchair over. The monkey jumped away and raced off toward the trees.

Raymond, clasping his bride in his arms, turned and raced after the monkey. He disappeared into the rain, a great flapping, flamboyant boy who, on his eleventh birthday, had drowned in a swimming pool and whose return to this world was tragically incomplete.

“God bless you!” the Reverend shouted after him. “God bless you Raymond and Emily. God bless the both of you.”

The rain held its breath again. Two little girls in matching blue dresses ran after the couple. The girls stopped when it became clear that they would never close the distance. They stood on a green hill, leaping in the air with excitement, giggling and shrieking, and they threw their handfuls of birdseed in the wake of the newlyweds.

H
ARRY
G
AINESBOROUGH
W
OKE
around noon when the phone began to cry. The phone bawled like a hungry baby at midnight. This was only startling to strangers. Three years ago a fan of Harry’s children’s book,
Bocky and the Moon Weasels
, had sent Harry a telephone with a note that read: “Here is a telephone from the planet Spem.” On Spem, a phone is always startled when it is called up, and so bursts into tears. The fan, an engineer, had rigged this phone to do just that, its ring an infant’s bellow. Harry had originally been enchanted, had later found it irritating and would, no doubt, have junked it had tragedy not struck and rendered him indifferent to everything.

Harry lifted the receiver. “Yeah?” he said.

“Lord Gainesborough!” the voice shouted. “This is Raymond Story. Don’t give up! We are on our way. I’ve got to free Lord Allan from the dungeon, and that will delay us some, but we are definitely on our way. And have I got a surprise for you. Boy! Uh oh.”

The phone clicked, the buzz of a dial tone returned, and Harry replaced the receiver.

It began crying again, and Harry snatched it up and shouted, “Keep away from me! I’ve got a gun!”

A woman’s voice said, “Harry?”

“Who’s this?”

“This is your agent, Harry. Remember me? Helen Kurtis.”

“Oh. Helen. Hey.”

“Yeah, me. Well, how you doing, Harry?”

“Oh I’m okay.”

“I bet you are. I bet you are jogging five miles a day and taking vitamins and boffing the college girls down at Elgin’s and writing—just writing your ass off up there in the woods.”

Harry didn’t say anything.

“Hey, you still on the line?” Helen hollered. “Look Harry, I’m coming to visit you. I’m taking my life in my hands and driving down to that hell-and-gone briar patch you’re holed up in. I should be there tomorrow evening, so look decent. You don’t have to dress up, but I don’t want you answering the door in your underwear. Let my own example inspire you. I’m an old, fat woman who’s going bald and God, for his own good reasons, has given me bad teeth and a spine that’s nothing but a rope of pain, but I put on the business suit, the makeup, the perfume—I get up and go out into the shit storm.”

“Maybe you could save all this for when you get here,” Harry said.

A small, hurt silence, and then: “Sure. Okay. Oh, and Harry?”

“Yeah.”

“They want to make a movie of
Zod Wallop
.”

“No.”

“We’ll talk about it,” Helen said. “It doesn’t hurt to talk about it. I’ll see you.” She hung up.

Harry walked outside. He was still in his underwear, but he had a little over a day to get dressed.

The sun-glared surface of the pond made Harry’s head ache. He had started drinking again about two months ago, and he hadn’t gotten around to stopping yet. If Thoreau had been a drinker, Walden would have been a different book. (“Damn birds shrieking like hyenas this morning; I have nailed boards to the windows to keep the sunlight out.”)

The phone began crying again, but Harry moved away from it, walked to the edge of the porch and pressed his face up against the screen.
You old fraud
, he thought. It was a sentence that sailed in and out of his mind and had no precise meaning. It was the sentence of his discontent, his self-disgust.

He had come to this small North Carolina town to teach children’s literature at Elgin College, and he had come with some vague notion that it would be a way to re-establish contact with his fellow humans. Lord knows he didn’t need the money. Two years after its publication,
Zod Wallop
was still on
The New York Times
’ best-seller list, and the other books were doing almost as well.

“Life goes on,” Jeanne had said, and Harry agreed with that. Harry hated self-pity. In his book,
The Sneeze That Destroyed New Jersey
, a little boy becomes bloated with self-pity, growing so large that he attracts the attention of aliens who use self-pity to power their spaceships.

Although Harry and Jeanne were no longer married, they still talked, and he had called her on the first day of classes and said, “I was wrong. They want me to talk about my books, and I can’t do that.”

“Maybe it will get better,” Jeanne said, her voice coming through the wire from upstate New York without much hope that it would, neither of them owning enough of hope to feed a winter sparrow.

Harry said, “I don’t even write children’s books, Jeanne. You know that.”

She said nothing.

“I write Amy books,” Harry said. “That’s all I write…wrote. Amy books.”

Harry had stayed at the cabin. He’d already rented it, signed a year’s lease. It was as good a place as any.

Harry watched a lizard run quickly across a weathered railing, pause, do a few staccato push-ups like a jogger at a red light, and race on.

Busy, busy
, Harry thought. He went back inside and dressed, donning a camouflage T-shirt, baggy gray slacks, and tennis shoes. He sat on his rumpled bed and regarded the room from a visitor’s viewpoint. Various slivers of pizza, melting into the wooden floor like irradiated slugs, would have to go. The hordes of empty beer cans would have to be disposed of. The pot of soup that had caught fire and apparently exploded—there should be some sort of warning on really volatile soups—would have to be tossed. There would have to be a general marshaling of renegade laundry. A shorted-out floor lamp that lay on the kitchen table in preparation for surgery would have to be repaired or dumped in a closet.

All that stuff was easy. But what if the room had acquired an inherent lunatic character that mere “straightening up” would fail to address? Would Helen find the bulletin board covered with photos of Amy a bad sign? Perhaps he should take the photos down, or at least the one of Amy in a bathing suit. Would Helen attach some special significance to the bloodstain on the throw rug (which was nothing more dramatic than a fall, a broken glass, a few stitches at the local emergency room)? Would she stare unblinking at the empty shelf and ask, “Where are your books, Harry? Didn’t you bring them?”

And would he, Harry Gainesborough, crack like the last witness in an old “Perry Mason” and blurt it out: “All those damned books are at the bottom of the pond! I was drunk, okay? There was a full moon. I rowed out to the middle of the pond and heaved the whole goddamn lot of them over the side, and I was sobbing my eyes out while I did it, like a TV evangelist up on a morals charge. It was just one of those melodramatic gestures drunks make, and I’m going to have my publisher send me copies of all my books again. I’m going to stop drinking. I was just off balance when I got here. I’m all right now.”

Harry wanted Helen to approve of his mental health. She was a good friend, but four years ago she had overreacted and single-handedly wrestled him into Harwood Psychiatric. No doubt the experience had been a bracing one and good for him, but he did not wish to repeat it.

Harry slapped his thighs. “Gotta get moving,” he said, standing up. He began walking around the room, stooping to pick up vagrant socks and T-shirts.

Harry was unaware that he had just spoken the second line of his children’s book, Zod Wallop, a book that the reviewer at
The New York Times
had called an instant classic.

This is how
Zod Wallop
begins:

Rock yawned. “Gotta get moving,” Rock said. A couple of hundred million years went by. A rock is always slow to take action. A rock watches an oak grow from a sapling to a towering tree, and it’s a flash and a dazzle in the mind of a rock.

What was that?
Rock thinks. Or maybe,
Huh
?

T
HE
G
IANT'S
N
AME
was Paul Allan but nobody called him Paul, because he did not like the name and would react violently.