Saint Calvin the Cannibal is a novel about a man who, deceived into eating his father's remains to survive when stranded in the Arctic, suffers a subsequent mental breakdown and goes on a string of adventures throughout the state of Texas. Available from lulu.com June 26, 2023.
CHAPTER 5
The funeral of Okie Puckett, and two startling revelations.
†
Calvin was relieved to have hold of such clarity when he attended his father’s proper funeral in Oklahoma City. He was glad to feel both deeply saddened and oddly satisfied that Okie Puckett would have a decent burial and not one improvised by a hapless park ranger amid rocks and wild scavengers.
Despite being his father’s birthplace and the site of his formative years, Oklahoma City was completely foreign to Calvin. Okie had never taken him there, not even during his childhood when Okie was still part of the family unit. Upon driving through what was, to Calvin, a bustling city, he wondered if the town had any local orchestras, or at least chamber music ensembles, for which he could audition. His contrabassoon was never allowed to gather dust, but he knew both he and the instrument would require vigorous refreshment should Oklahoma City offer some kind of musical opportunity; nights spent playing the music of Beethoven and the contemporary likes of the Foo Fighters and the Airborne Toxic Event brought him comfort and mental exercise, but were a far cry from the lengthy hours he’d rehearsed with great focus in his teenage years.
Though Calvin was joyed to have regained a semblance of aspirations again, his mood quickly became sullen and jumbled as he endured his father’s funeral. He knew next to no one who attended, but was sure that among them must have been some notable figures, or once-notable, in Texas politics. It was also not lost on him that many attendees were likely loose acquaintances from Okie’s pre-Texas days, lured to the event mainly by the surprising fame his death had spawned. News of his bitter cold end and his son’s subsequent rescue had been the stuff of feature stories in western Canada; Calvin had done his best to pretend not to notice the camera crew filming his limp to the plane at the airport.
The funeral service itself was a traditionally Baptist one, which itself brought the grown orphan to tears, knowing his father had accepted no Christian doctrine before his death. Thus the hymns sung could give Calvin no peace this morning, only bitter and humorless irony, and the knowledge that Okie assessed himself too vile for even the all-powerful and omnipotent Almighty to redeem him. Of all the vices with which Calvin could identify most, and therefore the one he most despised, was the sin of self-loathing.
The sight of his father’s discolored, made-up face in his casket summoned the far-away chills of the Yukon to again grip his spine. He’d been told the damage done to his father’s body by animals was concentrated mostly in the taking of his liver, thus completely hidden by the charcoal suit in which Okie was stiffly placed. Still, the artificiality and wax-like appearance of his face only compounded the absolute absence of life behind the eyes sealed shut by a mortician’s glue.
Calvin had little input in the planning of the funeral, being too focused on his own physical and mental recovery. Most of it was taken care of by Sam Puckett, his father’s older brother and business partner. It was fitting, as Sam had been much more of a presence in Calvin’s growing years than his brother had. Calvin sometimes suspected that his father had dispatched his brother to bring various Christmas gifts and appear for spontaneous visits as a way to live vicariously through him, so he might feel less guilt over his absence. But there were other times when Calvin felt his uncle’s concern for his nephew and sister-in-law to be genuine, more than that of an ambassador for a deadbeat, given Sam’s amiable personality.
Sam Puckett, despite being a native Oklahoman himself, and despite never having appropriated “being Texan” the way his brother had, possessed a much more boisterous manner and Texas-esque swagger than Okie could ever hope to emulate. He ate steak or pork with every meal, wore a brown, starched Homburg hat that, when removed in the company of ladies and clergy, revealed a shock of slicked-back white hair drenched in Vitalis; he always smelled of cologne and pipe tobacco, possessed a handshake of Herculean grip, was incapable of using words ending in “-ing” without dropping the g, routinely swore, owned a horse stable, and even rode and bred them; he owned not one but two cabinets full of rifles, underwent some variation of a medical procedure for his heart every few years, and married a Sunday school teacher from Galveston. They had no children, as, owing to the Texan forces that had taken hold of the tall, broad man from Oklahoma, Sam had been injured when a rogue fishing hook pierced his loins, permanently compromising his reproductive ability.
Calvin would sometimes think of the injury and, being fair to his lively and loud uncle, surmised that his inability to have children of his own was the reason for his attempts to establish a rapport with his only nephew. But it was a hopelessly awkward situation of course, his own brother having deserted the family for a life of politics, prison, and chicken-fried steak.
Notwithstanding, Calvin felt a warmth in his heart, something more to distract from the lingering frost of the Yukon, when his uncle Sam insisted on taking him to a large steak-and-etc. restaurant after the funeral. The one thing Calvin had imposed on the service was that there be no post-burial pot luck; despite eating at every gathering being a staple of Baptist culture, Calvin felt that to do so immediately after committing a box of mortal remains to the earth was less than tactful.
The restaurant was quite what one would expect from a Mid-Southern steak emporium, catering to tourists and sightseers with the overdone novelty of Old West imagery. The hostesses wore faux Stetsons and long skirts of cow-hide print; a trio of middle-aged minstrels roamed from table to table playing the violin (that is, the fiddle) and a pair of acoustic guitars; the wood plank floor was intentionally creaky, reminiscent of what a saloon of antiquity might sound like in movies (indeed the doors of the dining area were fashioned like the swinging double doors of Old West watering holes). The restaurant was so spacious that in its center was a full-sized carousel of porcelain horses for children. Near the carousel was a special table, raised above the others, the place of honored guests who took on the challenge to finish the 72-ounce steak meal in less than an hour; if they could achieve this feat, the steak and all its sides would be free of charge (though, to prevent the impoverished and starved from wolfing down a free meal every day, challengers were required to pay for the meal before attempting it; they would be refunded if they succeeded).
The tacky charm of the restaurant reminded Calvin of a similar placed he’d visited with his mother and father in happier times, the Big Texan in Amarillo. Even as an eight-year-old, Calvin couldn’t help comparing the Big Texan restaurant and tourist trap to his father – it aggressively exuded Texas, yet it rang hollow, pandering to out-of-towners, an imitation of what non-Texans would expect the region to be. And though this particular steak place was in Oklahoma, it made the same risible effort as the late elder Puckett. Calvin felt weak as he and Uncle Sam were seated; he held back the sting of tears, not wanting to ruin a steak dinner for his uncle with a maudlin display.
Upon examining the menu, Calvin was struck by the sight of the delicious bird that saved his life in the frigid Yukon – the coveted pheasant. Though his mouth immediately began to water at the photo of an immaculately prepared platter of pheasant meat, Calvin was unprepared to encounter the bird again so soon after his father’s memorial.
He was shaken from his funereal trance by Uncle Sam’s booming observations about the menu. Sam Puckett, calling Calvin “Joe” as his father had always done, remarked with amusement and disdain what everyone else in the restaurant already knew, that the presentation echoed a cheesy Western from what was called the Golden Age of Hollywood, and as Sam mused, a Roy Rogers Western at that, lacking the muscle and rugged swagger of a John Wayne or Clint Eastwood film.
Somehow, Uncle Sam’s boisterous presence, his obliviously uncouth and loud demeanor instilled a bit of courage in Calvin, steeling his resolve. This moved him to shun his hesitation at ordering a plate of juicy pheasant. He suddenly felt the discovery of a succulent dish could be seen as a small, unlikely blessing that came from the tragedy he’d just suffered. He’d lost a father, but gained a new favorite fowl.
Though, when Calvin told the waiter (clad in a cowboy hat and leather chaps) that he would have the pheasant plate, Uncle Sam combined a unique string of curse words and insisted he order at least a 32-ounce steak in addition to the bird, to offset the inherent Yankee daintiness of such a meal. His appetite growing by the minute, Calvin readily and happily obeyed his uncle.
When their abundance of meat, potatoes, corn, and okra arrived some time later, Sam drawled a blessing over the meal, blessing even the bird he held in derision for, he prayed, soaring majestically, in an attempt to escape the bullet of the hunters, admiring the fight it may have put up when it was grabbed by the fowlers to be caged, thanking the Almighty for giving the pheasant the nerve to make a valiant effort to flee its captors; Sam also asked the Lord to have mercy on the bloody hands of those who’d been given the unenviable task of slaying the cattle they were about to eat, to give the slaughterhouse workers the peace to sleep that night, despite knowing they’d slain such beautiful animals.
Calvin, being used to such lengthy prayers, though not quite as bombastic as this one, was patient during his uncle’s exclamation of grace. But when he finished, Calvin relished putting his fork into the tender pheasant that lay on the plate before him. Before he could bring it to his mouth, however, Uncle Sam interrupted, thundering an earth-shattering question with strange Mid-Southern informality – he asked Calvin if his father ever told him he had a sister.
His nephew frozen in bewilderment, Sam told the story, still intently chewing his food, of how Okie had fallen in lust with a pen pal he’d encountered while incarcerated. After his release, Okie had immediately traveled to Waco, where the woman lived, where they fornicated to consummate their desires. Several months later, a baby girl was born to the woman (who Sam vaguely recollected to be named Tammy), three months premature, and almost died, but overcame the adversity of being a “preemie” and lived to be named Kathy.
The room began to tilt and sway; given the enormity of both the restaurant and the sudden revelation of a hitherto unheard-of sister, he felt as if he and the entire building were tumbling into a bottomless void. The spinning carousel in the corner of his eye seemed like a blur.
Uncle Sam continued, not missing a beat in the voracious rhythm of his chewing, that the girl Kathy was about twenty years old now and still lived in Waco. Sam relayed all this so casually in his speech, his eyes never leaving his rapidly-emptying plate, except one brief moment when the clatter of a dropped dish caused him to look up and give a charming wink to the embarrassed server who’d dropped it.
Calvin was in too deep a stupor to notice the sound of the dish, or how nonchalantly his uncle was revealing such an explosive story. He absently began putting piece after piece of fried okra in his mouth, giving each piece a perfunctory chewing before forcing it down his throat with a strained swallow. It was as if he’d developed a sudden nervous tic that required constant chewing to avoid an attack of hyperventilation.
His mouth occupied by okra, Calvin forced the question from his mouth if this half-sister knew of his existence. Sam replied, as offhandedly as he’d told the rest of the tale, that she too had only learned her half-brother a few days ago, when Sam contacted her to inform her of her biological father’s death.
Calvin was drawn out of his daze and brought back to the humming, crowded restaurant with a string of questions: why had he never been told of this Kathy? Did Calvin’s mother know? Had Kathy ever met Okie Puckett? If so, how often? Was Kathy a believer in Christ? If so, was she of any particular denomination?
Uncle Sam, having just polished off his entire steak, finally seemed aware of the shock his story had caused his nephew. He reached across the table and gripped Calvin’s forearm, imploring him to take a deep breath and calm himself, speaking in a gentle but firm tone as if commanding an unruly horse. He explained there was no need to be jealous, that Okie was as scarce a presence in his bastard daughter’s upbringing as he’d been in his son’s.
Calvin was snapped completely out of his shock now, thanks to Sam’s assumption that Calvin would have been jealous if his father had taken more of an interest in his daughter. While he indignantly protested such a notion (despite knowing it to be a fair assumption), his uncle interrupted and continued the story: philandering Okie distanced himself from the girl and her mother not long after she’d given birth, and moved away from Waco as soon as his parole conditions allowed for it, overcome with guilt at what he’d done. A monthly sum of child support was arranged, and (usually) paid on time. To Sam’s understanding, he did visit the girl Kathy on occasion, and once even took her to the Six Flags amusement park (this didn’t fail to sting Calvin, as he’d never been to an amusement park of any kind). But Sam added that any relationship between father and love-child had been only obligatory.
Sam was aware enough of his nephew’s dismay to add an aside at how disappointed he’d been in his brother.
As for Deborah Puckett, Sam revealed that she’d indeed been aware of Okie’s “other family,” if one could reach far enough to call it that, given his sparse interaction with them. Sam himself had told Deborah Puckett of the affair, oddly enough at the cowardly request, Sam said, of his brother, not being able to confess his infidelity on his own accord. Deborah, Sam was sure to add, had taken the bombshell with a great degree of dignity; she didn’t burst into tears or smash any household objects in rage. But she did, Sam explained, refrain from telling Calvin about the ordeal – and swore Sam to do the same, reasoning it must be Okie to confess all to his son. Unfortunately, he never did.
When Calvin asked why he was being told of his half-sibling’s existence now, Sam explained that Calvin’s inheritance, and his own conscience, were the reasons: Okie had left a part of his estate to Kathy, of course meaning Calvin’s share of the life insurance payoff would not be as abundant as it would have been had he been an only child (which he had been until twenty minutes ago, Calvin thought dizzily). Sam didn’t want his nephew to think he’d short-changed him in the distribution of his father’s money.
Uncle Sam added that he felt it simply wasn’t right to leave Calvin in the dark concerning his flesh and blood, given that both his mother and father were no longer able to let him in on such a scandalous secret.
As for Kathy’s religious beliefs, Uncle Sam had nary a clue; he did mention that, when he called her, her ringback music was the pop classic “Jesus Take the Wheel,” but other than that he had no information to give concerning her faith. He produced a scrap of paper from his wallet, on which were written Kathy Campbell’s street address and phone number in jagged cursive. The sight of the name, seeing it visually and handling it with his fingers, was the final exhibit solidifying as fact the outrageous story that had just burst upon him in a tacky steak restaurant in Oklahoma City.
Calvin put the piece of paper containing proof of his half-sister’s existence in his coat pocket. He’d been brought back to solid ground, so to speak, and was suddenly more hungry than anything else, perhaps subconsciously desiring to devour the emotion of the past half-hour. He cut a generous portion of pheasant, his mind just recovered enough to anticipate, with joy and a bit of anxiety, the succulent taste. Calvin chewed one piece thoroughly. Then another piece, and another. Each successive bite was chewed slower and slower, and accompanied by more and more disappointment, followed by a creeping revulsion.
The pheasant on his fork tasted nothing like what he’d eaten in the Yukon.
CHAPTER 6
Calvin appears on television, and other noteworthy
events in his post-rescue life, including becoming a meme.
†
Calvin reasoned within himself for the next week, conjuring many explanations for why the pheasant he’d eaten on American soil was not been at all similar, in neither taste or texture, from the pheasant he’d been fed by the woefully inept tour guide in Canada: the change in altitude and temperature, the shock of having just learned about a half-sister, the particular breed of pheasant, all could explain the vast gulf of difference.
He went so far as to order a variety of other pheasant meats via the internet. To his dismay, none of them tasted slightly like the meat he’d eaten and savored in the cold, flimsy tent in the Yukon.
When he made the grand step of ordering a batch of pheasant from that specific area, Calvin flirted with the notion that Bryson, not being an exceptionally adept or expert outdoorsman, had simply misidentified the bird. Calvin researched the other species that dwelt in that part of Canada: geese, ducks, pigeons, doves, and more. He would have been very displeased at having eaten a dove, that bird being a symbol of the Holy Spirit and thus having a special significance for Calvin, but he knew God would understand that he’d been on the verge of death (and moreover, that it was no sin to eat a dove in the first place). Even so, consuming a dove was a far better scenario than the one that increasingly haunted every hour of his day.
Calvin set out to taste as many edible birds as possible, spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars, and it seemed just as many hours, obsessing over finding a bird – any bird, any edible creature with wings and capable of flight – whose meat held the unique taste as what he’d eaten before. But the taste evaded him, save for in his memory. He could never forget such a distinct taste no matter how he tried. He felt nauseous and chilled to the core when he faced the only answer as to why what he’d devoured so hungrily in the Arctic had tasted nothing like pheasant, nor any other bird under the sun.
Calvin was so consumed with the search for the perfect fowl that he wasn’t in the least intrigued, excited, or gobsmacked when a television station in Dallas reached out to him and invited him to share his harrowing experience via media.
He moved almost robotically as he had his suit dry-cleaned, prepared a paper manuscript of The Elusive Tangerine to give to any interested media personnel, and drove seventy miles south to Dallas on an unextraordinary Tuesday morning, doing all this as someone whose life was completely unruffled.
Calvin arrived to the studio with the 416-page manuscript, double spaced, concealed under his coat, and kept it held against his body by keeping his left arm pressed against his side. It was an awkward stance, but he could disguise it as being the effects of a stiff arm recovering from some dreadful effect of the Yukon. His limp from losing three toes to frostbite was certainly not exaggerated, and he reasoned it would take away attention from the bulky bundle of paper he concealed. Before long, Calvin began to perspire with the strain of holding the heavy manuscript so awkwardly against his side with one arm, but he would have been greatly embarrassed carrying a big, fat piece of his own work; it would have revealed how desperate he was for anyone in the TV station with possible connections to publishers to take it and become engrossed in the Russian Civil War drama.
In the makeup chair, Calvin felt even more self-conscious, as any first-timer on television would. He timidly asked the makeup artist to conceal the now-maroon frostbite scars on his cheeks, though he requested she use as little powder and goop as possible in doing so. The makeup artist, however, responded that her instructions from the producers were the opposite – to highlight the facial wounds. When Calvin gathered the courage to ask the cosmetic technician if she might put some temporary dye in his beard, to conceal some of the premature gray that speckled it, she again declined, explaining that doing so what be against her instructions to enhance and emphasize the apparent effects of the icy ordeal Calvin had endured. Calvin’s vanity rose and his pride sank as the makeup artist observed that the white in his otherwise auburn beard, no doubt a bodily chemical response to trauma and grief, lent him a snowy look, as she phrased it, that fit the desired aesthetic. Calvin grumbled in response, under his breath, that his words could have just as well painted a picture of his experience.
For someone on live television for the first time in his life, he was rather listless and lethargic as he sat next to a stunningly attractive news anchor named Maria Garter. Calvin, who endued the aura of a deflated balloon, was a study in contrast next to the olive-complected woman with bright blue eyes and clad in a crisp red blazer. Calvin didn’t fail to notice this on the monitor, the sight of which made him exhale with despondency. No one would want to buy the rights to a novel written by such a disheveled author, he thought sadly: a depressed author is difficult for publishers to market, he reasoned, and such a one’s picture would look quite unappealing on the dust jacket. But after all he’d been through, the only version of himself he could present was a version that looked as though it had been plucked from a landfill.
Calvin snapped out of his trance of self-pity when Maria Garter introduced him in a voice that matched her vibrant appearance. Her countenance slowly fell, however, as her guest began to tell his story, before her prompting, and without proper segue; he gruffly described his late father as a philanderer with delusions of adventure to compensate for a life of lies and failure; Calvin assigned the rest of the blame for the tragic expedition to Bryson the haphazard guide, whom he described as a having all the outdoor savvy of Timothy Treadwell.
Maria Garter’s bright expression darkened to a dull trance of her own, almost mesmerized by the grim rehashing that flooded from the mouth of her guest. She watched the slow train wreck, so to speak, as Calvin let forth a guttural sigh clogged with phlegm and concluded his dire tale with the epilogue that his father would find himself in the flames of hell upon the day of his judgment.
Maria Garter recovered her poise, on the surface at least, her experience in front of a camera having taught her how to conduct herself in such unexpected conditions. She put her hand on Calvin’s corduroy-clad shoulder to punctuate the humanity of the moment. But before she could improvise any sympathetic speech to bring the depressing segment to a more sentimental mood, Calvin spontaneously announced, in cold, blunt speech that he had unwittingly eaten his father’s liver.
A chilling hush fell over the studio, save for a bit of stuttering on the part of Maria Garter, which could not be edited on a live noonday broadcast. When she found her voice, she managed to offer that this incident of eating a human organ, though most unfortunate, was not uncommon in such desperate situations. She went so far as to cite what became known as the Alive incident (so called because of the shocking book and movie that detailed the events), in which an airplane carrying a rugby team from Uruguay crashed in the Andes Mountains, leaving the survivors no choice but to consume the meat of the dead for sustenance. Calvin, nonplussed, responded (or more aptly, wondered aloud) if the harrowed rugby team slept better at night than he could, knowing the meat they’d eaten had belonged to presumably better men than the cowardly adulterer Okie Puckett.
At this, Maria Garter, as steady as she’d been throughout most of the interview, was finally lost for words flowery enough to shift the tone of the discussion and change the atmosphere of the studio, which was no doubt the same as the rooms of those watching all over the Dallas-Fort Worth area. She decided to wrap up the interview as gracefully as she could by asking Calvin if he had anything else to say, perhaps words of advice for other amateur explorers who dare to travel to such remote and harsh locations as the Arctic.
Calvin, feeling the weight of his bulky manuscript, and the crinkling of a single piece of paper in his pocket, made a decision and asked to read the note he’d written to his dear, beloved Fidanka when he’d been convinced he was at eternity’s door.
The anchorwoman’s face softened with relief and sentimentality at such a touching gesture, and she urged her downtrodden guest to bear his heart and recite the words he’d written to his love. As Calvin unfolded the letter, he let out another sigh, less accented with throaty gurgling than his last, and remarked that the beauty of Fidanka Kovachevski made even Maria Garter look like Vernon Dursley. She glanced at the producers and crew, a subtly hurt expression on her face.
Calvin’s letter began by noting that he’d never called Her Excellency by her first name in his previous letters; the anchor and others watching took this to mean he’d always referred to her by some pet name in their correspondence, as they had no idea who this Fidanka was. But, Calvin continued, the circumstances under which he wrote this letter allowed him to be so forward.
Maria Garter was so moved that she forgot all about Calvin’s earlier slight.
He went on reading, the note expressing that the ostensibly dying author had no wish to write about politics, but only to implore his apple’s eye to hold her beauty sacred; not only her carnal beauty (which Calvin extolled in a passage of honey-soaked prose, comparing her to sunrise, sunset, moonlight, and any other celestial host one can think of), but also the beauty she gave to the world by her words, accompanied by dutiful deeds of honor and sincerity; he went on to catalog a number of terrible sights common in the world that are overshadowed by, he said, the radiance of her tireless work to shine light in the darkest corners of civilization – a rusted oil derrick, a crumbling Soviet monument, a mural marred by bullet holes, and a slew of other grim images.
Maria Garter and the surrounding television crew struggled to stifle their tears. All except a gaffer, whose cheeks were soaking wet by the time Calvin’s now-quivering voice lamented the bullet-riddled street art. The letter concluded with the bittersweet epitaph that, should Calvin never be so blessed to again look upon Fidanka’s face and all the Slavic mysteries it held, he would close his eyes for the final time in peace, knowing she would continue to, as the trite expression goes, make the world a better place.
A hush fell over the studio, a softer kind of quiet than the one that befell them earlier, and everyone inside reeled from the rending of Calvin’s heart. When Maria Garter was able to speak, she asked if Fidanka was Calvin’s wife, to which he explained he had never met her; that she was the recently outvoted president of a Balkan nation whose position had been taken by, he scowled, the nefarious, classless, ungracious means of a common cattle butcher.
When the interview was awkwardly and hurriedly brought to a close, Calvin shuffled aimlessly out of the studio. Maria Garter almost hurried after him, but his posture convinced her anything she said to try to encourage this man would only fall flat. As he slowly ambled down the hallway, his limp reflecting his soul, he noticed a large trashcan. His arm felt a wave of relief as he relinquished his grip on the heavy manuscript he’d concealed for two hours, and carelessly dumped it into the large waste bin.
Though the letter Calvin read on the air had taken away the breath of all who heard it, the romantic effect did not last. The story of Calvin’s unwitting cannibalism became the focal point of his TV appearance. Clips of Calvin rehashing the eating of his father, spliced with his scathing description of Okie, soon went viral and eventually made the rounds on hybrid comedy-news shows and podcasts, turning the very real tragedy into a slice of schadenfreude.
Memes inevitably followed and the internet was soon buzzing with graphics of an unflattering still of Calvin in mid-speech during the interview, with various sardonic and morbid captions:
“Can’t wait to have Dad for Thanksgiving,” “How do you make a Dead Dad Float? Two scoops of ice cream, two scoops of dead Dad,” and one that featured a red glow superimposed over Calvin’s eyes, over which the words, “I have daddy issues” were pasted, followed by “Calvin Puckett has entered the chat.”
In the cacophony of intrusive thoughts and existential musings, he could abide being the face of the “Calvin the Cannibal” meme. He did, however, find himself fighting the thought that he should have shared his manuscript on TV, instead of his love letter to President Kovachevski. The notoriety might have at least led to some interest in his sprawling war epic.
Calvin caught himself regretting his decision more than once; each time, he deeply despised the thought.
