He’s trying to think of a way of eating the mayor’s breakfast and without guilt (should be easy, so rarely is he struck down by that grim disease) turning his offer down afterwards, when the scumbag dimestore owner comes in with a couple of other sad sacks off Main Street. The guy who owns the last downtown clothing store says people are trying to return things they bought six months ago, and the old fart who runs the hardware store says the only things he sold all last week were six screws and a nail. And that was on credit. Tee-heeing, Mick dribbles a bit of oil onto the grill and cracks the eggs into a bowl, whips them with a fork and spills them onto the grill and the lights go out. The coffee stops perking and the eggs fail to sizzle. “You should pay your fucking bills, Mick,” Robbins grumbles. “I can’t be more than a month behind,” Mick says in his squeaky voice. “They always send you a notice.” Everyone laughs at that. “Well, you don’t have to cook the wodka,” the drunk says, already having difficulty keeping his seat on the bar stool. He pulls an imaginary Stetson down over his nose. “Hit me again, podnuh! I’ll suck it up raw!” Georgie waits a few minutes to see if the power comes back on. It doesn’t. In this town, a power outage can last weeks. And Whimple may be on his way over by now. Carrying a fireman’s axe, if he has an inkling Georgie is here. Georgie wolfs down a gelatinous slab of week-old green apple pie, pockets the change for later, and steps out the back door on his way to the Fort.
Over on Treasure Mountain, repository of the Kingdom’s stash of black diamonds, the King and a handful of Knights stand alone against the vast formation of Cretin Wizards and their enchanted puppets at the foot. The Cretins raise their tinny battle cry: Oh, come and march with us to glory! Though they are not marching. Not yet. Just getting up the nerve. For the end of time has come! It’s a kind of rope-skipping song. Why is the King denying the Cretins? Because it’s a Holy Mountain and cannot be desecrated by lunatic fake magicians? No, because he is a King and it’s his mountain and this is what you do. It’s fun.
Sally can still think in the metaphorical way, though her heart’s not in it and her pen’s in her pocket. The end of once-upon-a-time has come. Goose Girl, looking for an ending to an old story of love un-consummated, kissed the Sleeping Prince’s dick (dicks) and woke him up, and now she’s sorry. Go back to sleep. I didn’t mean it. It was an accident. The important thing about stories is not to begin them. I’m never going to be happy, she thinks. Not really happy. Satisfied maybe. Sometimes. Not often.
At least Billy D is not among the belligerents. Nor are Mrs. Collins and her daughter, as Billy Don foretold her. Franny Baxter’s father is making noise over there with Billy Don’s wonky ex-roomie Darren standing beside him, posing as a saint with golden locks and a mad beatific smile on his face, his granny glasses glittering in the emerging sunlight like golden coins, Auntie Debra’s failed orphan rehab project pasted against his side. Billy Don didn’t turn up at the Tucker City drugstore either. Probably, once he got away, he decided to just keep going and not look back. She’ll miss him. He has been good company this long strange summer. He has her phone number; maybe he’ll call.
While waiting for him at the drugstore, she picked up some more film for Tommy’s cameras, and she has been whiling away the time here at the mine, in and around her desultory sketching (a lot of thick black lines), photographing the mine tipple, hoist wheel, and abandoned equipment, rusting freight cars, signs and graffiti, the limp tattered windsock over the grimy brick office building, the bloated water tower. She has also taken a shot or two of the confrontation over on the hill and of the tent at the edge of the camp where the dynamite blast happened, but mostly she has stayed discreetly out of sight, not wanting to draw attention to herself. A.k.a. the Antichrist. They are crazy, and they have guns. Anyway, now that she is no longer Professor Cavanaugh’s research assistant, her interest in all that weirdness is fading. Christianity is quite simply a shamanistic cult of monumental stupidity, chicanery, and willful self-delusion. A legacy of the infantile origin of the species. She should stop worrying her head about it. Let it swallow its own tail.
The old coal tipple, rising high into the brightening sky above her, is more appealing, a giant contraption of scaffolding and pulleys and ramps and what looks like a seedy, quirkily designed hotel squatting like an old dame with lifted skirts over three parallel railroad tracks. How did this thing work? The mined coal went onto a conveyor belt and was lifted up into those shed-like buildings, where the rocks and rubbish were separated out and the coal screened for at least three different sizes, finding its way down chutes into the train cars below, the obvious corresponding anatomical appurtenance functioning, as it were, in triplicate. From loose to constipated. Thus, the anthropomorphizing of the world, both in the way we read it and the things we make for it, the stories we tell about it. Mother Earth and Father Sky. She has learned that the Mount of Redemption, long before it was called that by the Brunists, was known by the miners as Cunt Hill because of its cleft ravine under the rounded belly of its summit. If this is an obscenity, so were the primitive Mother Earth folktales she read in college. And, well, they were, of course. Dirty jokes that have evolved into our world religions.
Over on that exposed lady’s tum, now catching a sunbeam or two, things are becoming more agitated. The aroused cultists, inheritors of those elaborated dirty jokes, have crept forward and stand face to face now with the policemen and Tommy’s father. They still sing their Christian soldier songs, marching in with the saints now (oh, when the moon turns red with blood, they’re singing cheerfully, I want to be in that number…), though from here it’s just a thin cacophony, more like children yipping on a playground. A phalanx of armed men in farm boots and suspenders encircles them, either for protection or to arrest them. All of this is apparently on live TV, with helicopters hovering overhead. Some of the cultists watch the helicopters apprehensively. What are they thinking? That they might be agents of the Rapture? Or of the Antichrist? Their famous Great Speckled Birds? Is this funny? Only if madness is. She takes another picture of the people on the hill, framing it between tipple support posts to shrink it to its rightful dimensions. Two yellow backhoes sit off to one side like grazing dinosaurs. Tommy’s father is having a fierce argument with the sheriff, pointing his finger at him. He is an unhappy man, Sally supposes, and in a mood to take no shit. Stacy called Sally on Sunday to say goodbye and to apologize for what happened. She sounded like she’d been crying. Maybe she hadn’t stopped since the night before. Both she and Tommy’s father had tearful faces when they stepped out of the motel room, looking stricken and washed out under those awful corridor lights. She said she never finished that French novel Sally loaned her but she knows it must have ended badly. She’s leaving it for her at her rooming house. Stacy had talked about going away during their drive over to the river town a couple of weeks ago. It’s the sadness, she said then. Staying or leaving, the sadness is the same. Sally didn’t understand it then. Now it’s her own metaphysic.
So what now? Well, she could go back to college and get her degree. Or at least, now that the door’s open, get laid. God expels Adam, takes a rib out of Eve: new playmate, better design. Adam left to play with himself. She has a writing prof at college who has a lot of faith in her, he says. Is he on the make? Probably. Writers are like that. She can get an education, learn a few tricks. He’s married, but so much the better. He’ll be careful, and there’ll be no residue. She has rather hoped that the sort of love the Lutheran preacher called a “dying to oneself” might happen to her, at least once, in her earthly transit — not mere orgasm, but the legendary madness of love — but too late, she knows now. Back at the ice plant in Tommy’s car, in that moment of frightened adoration (of what? doesn’t matter), it might have been possible, but now irony has gotten in the way. Call it irony. It’s what she has really lost. If her prof starts talking about the future, she’ll find somebody else.