Haunted

  Up the black-carpet aisle of the auditorium, through the red Chinese promenade, down the blue French stairs, we carry Mr. Whittier. Through the bright orange of the Mayan foyer, there Mother Nature pushes some white wig hair off her forehead, her brass bells jingling. She's wearing a pile of gray curls left over from some opera. The curls hang, wet from the sweat on her face, and Mother Nature says, “Is anybody else hot?”

  The Duke of Vandals is panting with his shoulder under the weight of Mr. Whittier, panting and pulling at the collar of his tuxedo jacket.

  Even the red silk bundle feels damp with sweat. The airplane-glue smell of ketones. Starvation.

  And Reverend Godless says, “It's no wonder you're hot. Your wig's on backward.”

  And the Matchmaker says, “Listen.”

  Below us, the subbasement is dark. The wood stairs, narrow. Beyond that dark, something rumbles and growls.

  Something mysterious needs to happen.

  Something dangerous needs to happen.

  “It's the ghost,” says the Baroness Frostbite, the greasy pucker of her mouth sagging open.

  It's the furnace, running full-blast. The blower pumping hot air into the ducts. The gas burner chugging. The furnace that Mr. Whittier destroyed.

  Somebody's fixed it.

  From somewhere in the dark, a cat screams, just one time.

  Something needs to happen. So we start down the wood stairs with Mr. Whittier's body.

  All of us sweating. Wasting even more energy in this impossible new heat.

  Following the body down, into the dark, Mother Nature says, “What do you know about wearing wigs?” With the stumps of both hands, her diamond ring flashing, she twists the gray wig around on her head, saying to Reverend Godless, “A big lug like you, what do you know about a vintage Christian Lacroix anything?”

  And the Reverend Godless says, “A Lacroix tulip-skirt bustle?” He says, “You'd be surprised.”

  Babble

  A Poem About Reverend Godless

  “Until Genesis, chapter eleven,” says the Reverend Godless, “we had no war.”

  Until God set us to fight each other, for the rest of human history.

  Reverend Godless onstage, his eyebrows are plucked and shaped

  into twin-penciled arches, with, underneath each,

  a rainbow of sparkle eye shadow in shades from red to green.

  And on one bare bicep muscle, bulging,

  below the spaghetti strap of a red-sequined evening gown,

  tattooed there is a skull face with, under the chin, these words:

  Death Before Dishonor.

  Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment:

  A travelogue that shows churches, mosques, and temples.

  Religious leaders in jeweled robes

  waving to crowds from bulletproofed town cars.

  Reverend Godless, he says, “On a plain in the land of Shinar, all people toiled together.”

  All humanity with a shared vision,

  a great noble dream they worked side by side to fulfill

  in this time before armies and weapons and battles.

  Then God looked down to see their tower, the people's shared dream,

  inching up, just a little too close for comfort.

  And God said, “Behold, they are one people . . . and this is only the beginning

  of what they will do . . . Nothing that they propose to do

  will now be impossible for them . . .”

  His words, in His Bible. The Book of Genesis, chapter eleven.

  “So our God,” says Reverend Godless, his bare arms and calf muscles stippled

  with the black marks of a shaved hair growing back in each pore,

  he says, “Our all-powerful God got so scared He scattered the human race

  across the face of the earth,

  and shattered their language to keep His children apart.”

  Part female impersonator, part retired U.S. Marine, the Reverend Godless,

  sparkling in his red sequins, says,

  “An almighty God this insecure?”

  Who pits his children against each other, to keep them weak.

  He says, “This is the God we're supposed to worship?”

  Punch Drunk

  A Story by the Reverend Godless

  Webber looks around, his face pushed out of shape, one cheekbone lower than the other. One of his eyes is just a milk-white ball pinched in the red-black swelling under his brow. His lips, Webber's lips are split so deep in the middle he's got four lips instead of two. Inside all those lips, you can't see a single tooth left.

  Webber looks around the jet's cabin, the white leather on the walls, the bird's-eye maple varnished to a mirror shine.

  Webber looks at the drink in his hand, the ice hardly melted in the blast of the air conditioning. He says, too loud on account of his hearing loss, he almost shouts, “Where we at?”

  They're in a Gulfstream G550, the nicest private jet you can charter, Flint says. Then Flint digs two fingers into a pants pocket and hands something across the aisle to Webber. A little white pill. “Swallow this,” Flint says. “And drink your drink, we're almost there.”

  “Almost where?” Webber says, and he drinks the pill down.

  He's still twisted around to see the white leather club chairs that recline and swivel. The white carpet. The bird's-eye maple tables, polished until they look wet. The white suede couches that line the cabin. The matching little throw cushions. The magazines, each one big as a movie poster, called Elite Traveler, with a cover price of fifty dollars. The 24-carat gold-plated cup holders and the faucets in the bathroom. The galley with its espresso machine and halogen light bouncing bright off the lead-crystal glassware. The microwave and fridge and ice machine. All this flying along at fifty-one thousand feet, Mach zero-point-eight-eight, somewhere above the Mediterranean Sea. All of them drinking Scotch whiskey. All of this nicer than anything you'll ever be inside. Anything short of a casket.

  Webber's nose, he tilts his drink back, sticks his big red-potato nose into the cold air, and you can see up inside each nostril. See how they don't really go anywhere, not anymore. But Webber says, “What's that smell?”

  And Flint sniffs and says, “Does ammonium nitrate ring a bell?”

  It's the ammonium nitrate their buddy Jenson had ready for them in Florida. Their buddy from the Gulf War. Our Reverend Godless.

  “You mean, like, fertilizer?” Webber says.

  And Flint says, “Half a ton.”

  Webber's hand, it's shaking so hard you can hear the ice rattle in his empty glass.

  That shaking, it's just traumatic Parkinson's is all. Traumatic encephalopathy will do that to you, where partial necrosis of brain tissue takes place. Neurons replaced by brain-dead scar tissue. You put on a curly red wig and false eyelashes, lip-synch to Bette Midler at the Collaris County Fair and Rodeo, and offer people the chance to punch your face at ten bucks a shot, and you can make some real money.

  Other places, you'll need to wear a curly blond wig, squeeze your ass into a tight sequined dress, your feet in the biggest pair of high heels you can find. Lip-synch to Barbra Streisand singing that “Evergreen” song, and you'd better have a friend waiting to drive you to the emergency room. Take a couple Vicodins beforehand. Before you glue on those long pink Barbra Streisand fingernails; after them you can't pick up anything smaller than a beer bottle. Take your painkillers first, and you can sing both the A and B sides of Color Me Barbra before a really good shot puts you down.

  As a fund-raiser, our first idea was “Five Bucks to Punch a Mime.” And it worked, mostly in college towns. The aggie schools. Some towns, nobody went home without some of that Clown White smeared across their knuckles. Clown White and blood.

  Problem is, the novelty wears off. Renting a Gulfstream costs bucks. Just buying the gas and oil to fly from here to Europe costs about thirty grand. One way, it's not so bad, but you never want to go into a charter place saying you only p
lan to fly the plane one way—talk about your red flags.

  No, Webber would put on that black leotard, and folks would already be salivating to hit him. He'd paint his face white, step into his invisible box, start miming away, and the cash would just flow in. Colleges mostly, but we did good business at county and state fairs, too. Even if folks took it as some kind of minstrel show, they'd still pay to knock him down. To make him bleed.

  For roadhouse bars, after the mime routine petered out, we tried “Fifty Bucks to Punch a Chick.” Flint had this girl who was up for it. But after, like, one shot to the face, she was saying, “No way . . .”

  On the floor, sitting in the peanut shells on the floor and holding her nose, this girl says, “Let me go to flight school. Let me play the pilot, instead. I still want to help.”

  We still had, must've been half the bar standing in line with their money. Divorced dads, dumped boyfriends, guys with old potty-training issues, all of them wanting to take their best shot.

  Flint says, “I can fix this up.” And he helps his girl to her feet. Taking her by the elbow, he leads her into the ladies' room. Going in with her, Flint holds up his hand, fingers spread, and he says, “Give me five minutes.”

  Just out of the army like that, we didn't figure how else to make that kind of money. Not legal-wise. The way Flint saw it, there's no law yet says folks can't pay to sock you.

  It's then Flint comes out of the ladies' room, wearing the girl's Saturday-night wig, all her makeup used up on his big clean-shaved face. He's unbuttoned his shirt and tied the shirttails together over his gut with paper towels stuffed in to make boobs. With whole tubes of lipstick smeared around his mouth, Flint, he says, “Let's do this thing . . .”

  Folks standing in line, they're saying fifty bucks to punch some guy is a cheat.

  So Flint, he says, “Make it ten bucks . . .”

  Folks still hang back, look around for some better way to waste their cash.

  It's then Webber's gone over by the jukebox. Dropped in a quarter. Pressed a couple buttons, and—magic. The music starts, and for the length of one exhale, all you can hear is every man in the bar letting out a long groan.

  The song, it's the wailing song from the end of that Titanic movie. That Canadian chick.

  And Flint, with his blond wig and big clown mouth, he steps up on a chair, then up on a table, and starts singing along. With the whole bar watching, Flint gives it everything he's got, sliding his hands up and down the sides of his blue jeans. His eyes closed, all you can see there is his shimmering blue eye shadow. That red smear, singing.

  Right on time, Webber reaches up to offer Flint a hand down. Flint takes it, ladylike, still lip-synching. You can see now, his fingernails painted candy-red. And Webber whispers to him, “I plugged in five bucks' worth of quarters.” Webber helps Flint down to face the first man in line, and Webber says, “This song's the only thing they're going to hear all night.”

  From Webber's five bucks, they made almost six hundred that night. Not a fist left that bar not beat deep, tattooed blue and red and eyeliner-green with the makeup from Flint's face. Some guys, they'd hit him until that hand got tired, then get back in line to use their other.

  That wailing Titanic song, it almost fucking killed Flint. That and the guys wearing big honking finger rings.

  After that, we had a rule about no rings. That, and we'd check to see you weren't palming a roll of dimes or a lead fishing weight to make your fist do more damage.

  Of all the folks, the women are the worst. Some of them ain't happy 'less they see teeth fly out the other side of your mouth.

  Women, the drunker they get, the more they love, love, love to slug a drag queen. Knowing it's a man. Especially if he's dressed and looking better than they are. Slapping was fine, too, but no scratching.

  Right quick, that market opened up. Webber and Flint, they started skipping dinner. Drinking lite beer. Any new town, you'd catch one of them standing sideways to a mirror, looking at his stomach, his shoulders pulled back and his butt stuck out.

  Every town, you'd swear they each had another damn suitcase. This suitcase for dressy dresses, evening dresses. Then garment bags so's they wouldn't wrinkle as much. Bags for shoes and wig boxes. A big new makeup case for each of them.

  It got so their getups were cutting into the bottom line. But say a word about it and Flint would tell you, “You got to spend it to make it.”

  That's not even adding up what they spent for music. Hit or miss, they found most people want to slug you if you play the following record albums:

  Color Me Barbra

  Stoney End

  The Way We Were

  Thighs and Whispers

  Broken Blossoms

  Or Beaches. Really, especially Beaches.

  You could put Mahatma Gandhi into a convent, cut off his nuts, shoot him full of Demerol, and he'd still take a shot at your face if you played him that “Wind Beneath Your Wings” song. Least-wise, that was Webber's experience.

  None of this is what the military trained them for. But, coming home, you don't find any want ads for munitions experts, targeting specialists, missions point-men. Coming home, they didn't find much of any kind of job. Nothing that paid near what Flint was getting, his legs peeking through the slit down the side of a green satin evening gown, his toes webbed with nylon stockings and poking out the front of gold sandals. Flint stopped just long enough between songs and slugs to put more foundation over his bruises, his cigarette ringed with red from his lips. His lipstick and blood.

  County fairs were good business, but motorcycle runs came a close second. Rodeos were good, too. So were boat shows. Or the parking lots outside those big gun-and-knife conventions. No, they never had to look too far for a good-paying crowd.

  Driving back to the motel one night, after Webber and Flint had left most of their makeup smeared on the blacktop outside the Western States Guns and Ammo Expo, Webber pulls the rearview mirror around to where he's riding shotgun in the front seat. Webber rolls his face around to see it from the mirror at every angle, and he says, “I can't be up to this much longer.”

  Webber, he looks fine. Besides, how he looks don't matter. The song matters more. The wig and lipstick.

  “I was never what you'd call pretty,” Webber says, “but least-ways I always kept myself looking . . . nice.”

  Flint's driving, looking at the chipped red paint on his fingernails holding the steering wheel. Nibbling down a torn nail with his chipped teeth, Flint says, “I was thinking about using a stage name.” Still looking at his fingernails, he says, “What do you all think of the name Pepper Bacon?”

  About by now, Flint's girl, she was off in flight school.

  That's just as well. Things was sliding down hill.

  For instance, just before they got set up and ready, in the parking lot outside the Mountain States Gem and Mineral Show, Webber looks at Flint and says, “Your goddamn boobs are too big . . .”

  Flint's wearing a halter kind of long dress, with straps that tie behind his neck to keep the front up. And, yeah, his boobs look big, but Flint says it's the new dress.

  And Webber says, “No, it ain't. Your boobs been growing for the past four states.”

  “All your carping,” Flint says, “it's just cuz they're bigger than yours.”

  And Webber says, real quiet out the corner of his lipstick mouth, he says, “Former Staff Sergeant Flint Stedman, you're turning into a sloppy goddamn cow . . .”

  Then it's sequins and wig hair flying every which way. That night, they raked in a total of zero cash. Nobody wants to slug a mess like that, already all scratched up and bleeding. Eyes all bloodshot and mascara all smeared from crying.

  Looking back, that little cat fight damn near scuttled their mission.

  The reason this country can't win a war is because we're all the time fighting each other instead of the enemy. Same as in the Congress not letting the military do their job. Nothing ever getting settled that way. Webber and Flin
t, they ain't bad people, just typical of what we're trying to rise above. Their whole mission is to settle this terrorism situation. Settle it for good. And doing that takes money. To keep Flint's girl in school. To get their hands on a jet. Get the drugs they'll need to knock out the regular lease-company pilot. That all takes solid cash money.

  The truth be told, Flint's tits were getting a little on the scary side.

  Flying here, reclining on white leather at fifty-one thousand feet, they're headed south along the Red Sea, all the way to Jedda, where they'll hang a left.

  The other guys in the air right now, all of them headed for their own assigned targets, you have to wonder how they made their money. What pain and torture they went through.

  You can still see where Webber got his ears pierced, and how pulled down and stretched out they still look from those dangle earrings.

  Looking back, most of the wars in history were over somebody's religion.

  This is just the attack to end all wars. Or at least most of them.

  After Flint got control of his tits, they toured from college to college. Anywhere people drank beer with nothing to do. By now, Flint had a detached retina floating around, making him blind in that eye. Webber had a 60-percent hearing loss from his brain getting bounced around. Traumatic brain lesions, the emergency room called it. They were both of them a little shaky, needing both hands to hold a mascara wand steady. Both of them too stiff to work the zipper up the back of his own dress. Wobbly on even their medium heels. Still, they went on.

  When it came time, when the jet fighters from the United Arab Emirates would come to shadow them, Flint might be too blind to fly, but he'd be in the cockpit with everything he'd learned in the air force.

  Here, in the white leather cabin of their Gulfstream G550, Flint has kicked off both his boots, and his bare feet show toenails still painted titty-pink. You can still smell a hint of Chanel No. 5 perfume mixed with his BO.

  One of their last shows, in Missoula, Montana, a girls steps out of the crowd to tell them they're hateful bigots. That they're encouraging violent hate crimes being acted out against the gender-conflicted members of our otherwise peaceful pluralistic society . . .