Saturday, June 17, 2023

"Saint Calvin the Cannibal" - A Novel - Chapters 5 & 6

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.”

For the time being, Calvin took the fifteen minutes of infamy in stride, as he was such a jumble of emotions he didn’t possess the will required to stay angry long enough to curse the faceless meme-lords who relentlessly made his ordeal the butt of their jokes. He did settle long enough to wonder, though, why Bryson the guide wasn’t found and interviewed; his mountain man appearance fit the “psycho cannibal” stereotype much better than Calvin’s, and it was Bryson, after all, who’d instinctively known to go straight for the corpse’s liver.

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.

Sunday, June 11, 2023

"Saint Calvin the Cannibal" - A Novel - Chapter 1

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 1

Touching on the lives of Calvin Puckett and his father,

and the Balkan nation of Zabluda.

When Calvin Joseph Puckett left his home in Mongo, Texas to assassinate the newly-elected president of the Republic of Zabluda, he did not claim or believe for an instant that his decision was good, right, or justified. Despite his deep religious faith, Calvin did not invoke the doctrine of predestination, or claim God had appointed him to commit such a murder. On the contrary, he knew very well it was a blatant sin, and objectively wrong even in irreligious eyes. He simply carried the knowledge he was on a journey to commit a terrible act, and negotiated it as best as he could – though he didn’t attempt to negotiate with it.

Calvin, a man of conscience, didn’t even attribute his newfound moral recklessness to the horror and trauma of having unwittingly eaten his father’s remains during a disastrous trip to the Yukon.

The elder Puckett, Lloyd “Okie” Puckett was sixty-seven years old when he’d saved enough money for a guided expedition in the Arctic. He hadn’t spent more than three hours at a time with his son since Calvin’s mother’s funeral twelve years ago, and he was determined that sharing this pilgrimage with him would be proper penance, and reparation, for their stagnant relationship.

Okie Puckett was called Okie for no better reason than he was a native of Oklahoma. When he migrated south to Texas as an adult, he was needled by native Texan friends and coworkers for being Oklahoman, as Texans are wont to take note of such a thing. The more Lloyd Puckett became enamored by Texas and its larger-than-life folklore, he grew less impressed with his Oklahoma ancestry. He even went so far as to lie to those who asked him about the nickname he couldn’t shake, saying it was not because he was an Oklahoman (claiming to have been born in Amarillo, close enough to his former state’s panhandle that he felt less guilty about the bold-faced lie), but simply because he’d married an Oklahoman, and was often teased for his choice of wife by his “fellow” Texans.

At least the part about marrying an Oklahoman was true, and Lloyd Puckett took a bit of comfort in knowing his only son was born a Texan in the strictest sense of the term.

Okie’s estrangement from his wife and son began when he was appointed to the Sabine River Authority Board of Directors under the administration of then-Governor Rick Perry. His office being in Orange, Texas (at the Texas-Louisiana border) he was home less and less, and finally decided his modest family in the small town of Mongo, nearly four hundred miles northwest of his office, was beneath a man of his stature. It was for the good of Texas that he distance himself, he told his wife. His state (Texas, not Oklahoma) needed him more than Deborah (née Smethers) Puckett, whom he genuinely saw as a strong woman who could handle just about anything. Those were the kind of people forged by Texas, native or not, he told himself and others, and he couldn’t be prouder of his wife and her jobs as mother and assistant tax assessor of Mongo County. These admirable Texan attributes, however, weren’t enough to keep Okie at home.

It soon came to pass, while young Calvin was impressing the eighth grade with a perfect attendance record and rapidly proving himself a prodigy of the contrabassoon in the Mongo Junior High marching band, that his father was indicted for accepting bribes from a pair of affluent petroleum businessmen suspected of illegal dumping in the Sabine River, that same modest but majestic body of water he’d been appointed to protect from such environmental crimes. Though the media never found it important enough to invade the Puckett home for interviews with his family, as it was a relatively small scandal in the grand Wild West of Texas politics, Okie Puckett was nonetheless too humiliated to return to his wife and son when he was released from jail. He didn’t deserve their mercy, should they deign to offer it, he said. He was sentenced to two-to-three years in prison, ultimately serving sixteen months. After his release, he and his far more sturdy and successful brother Sam Puckett tried their hand at operating a pair of Baskin-Robbins locations in the city of Longview. When the franchises failed, the brothers were ordered to pay the company $28,000 in a breach of contract proceeding. Their next endeavor, the Coyote Cafe in the tiny town of Big Sandy, was a much bigger local success. Okie made a comfortable living until his retirement, when he decided it was now or never if he wanted to see the Yukon, and make some semblance of amends with his son.

Their estrangement was punctuated by the fact that he’d always called Calvin “Joe,” short for Joseph, as he had reservations about the name chosen by his mother: if his Oklahoma birth was a point of shame for the counterfeit Texan, Okie certainly kept it under his hat that his wife Deborah’s ancestor, Captain Calvin Eugene Smethers, had not only been a loyal Unionist who’d fought against the South during the Civil War, but had also earned the grisly nickname “the beast of Chickasaw Bayou.” During the 1862 battle in that place, his regiment, the 82nd Ohio, took several Confederates captive and cut every one of their throats, one after the other, at Captain C.E. Smethers’ criminal orders. It was a chilling mark left on the area, despite the Union’s loss of the battle itself.

Despite his self-granted privilege of calling his son by a nickname, one would never have assumed on sight that Okie was the father of Calvin. Okie was tall and slender, his hair quite black for a man his age, a salt-and-pepper goatee adding an air of sophistication for a man who’d been surrounded by grease and Pepsi the last fifteen years. Calvin, meanwhile, was of average height, barely tall enough to carry his stocky, thick form. His own beard contained more gray than his father’s, despite his relatively young age of thirty-three. He’d been greatly embarrassed by his extremely curly copper hair when he was in elementary school; but as he matured he became quite proud of it, and in high school he often grew it out into an august bush (but kept it cut modestly as an adult). His gap teeth were a source of teasing in any era of his schooling, though Calvin would never dream of having them fixed when he became old enough to do so – his mother had had the same gap in her teeth, and though he never said so to anyone, seeing that quaint trait in the mirror when he brushed in the morning was a way to make sure he thought of her each day.

Whereas Okie was a reckless and irresponsible fellow, Calvin, beginning in his mid-twenties, had been led to pursue a life of some form of Christian ministry. He’d also auditioned for several jazz ensembles and orchestras in Dallas and other Texas cities, while working as the clerk for Handy’s Hardware and Automotive, a position he would keep for over a decade, reaching from his early twenties to his early thirties (indeed until he left his home to commit the aforementioned assassination). But being a high school contrabassoon prodigy in Mongo, Texas and being a contrabassoonist fitting for a place in a professional orchestra were two worlds apart. Even so, the instrument remained his most trusted and consistent companion, and the only one he owned from his teen years to his thirties, thanks to Calvin’s meticulous care. The instrument was such an intimate musical mate that it was only out of self-consciousness (and a concern of idolatry) that he refrained from giving the titanic woodwind its own feminine name.

When he turned twenty, he attended Collin College in Plano, Texas and studied music, though the ministry (usually) remained foremost on his mind. He dropped out of college after two years, obtaining no degree. As far as pursuing the Christian life as a profession, Calvin considered the prospect of becoming a chaplain for some undecided branch of first responders. But his diffidence and distrust of his own spiritual sturdiness led him to waffle and postpone such ministerial decisions until his late twenties, when he settled for a far less taxing position putting his amateur graphic design skills to work, designing and printing literature for the Balkan Bible Mission. The organization was dedicated to providing the Good Book specifically to the people of the Balkan nations in southeastern Europe. His interest in the region was centered on the small nation of Zabluda, which is bordered by Bulgaria to the west and south, Romania to the north, and the Black Sea to the east. Calvin came to his position with the Balkan Bible Mission by sheer accident, having one day found himself in a Wikipedia “rabbit hole,” during which he discovered the then-current president of Zabluda, Fidanka Kovachevski, just happened to be the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

Her Excellency was twelve years Calvin’s senior, with exceedingly blonde hair (so blonde in fact that a European fashion magazine noted how her yellow locks helped dispel the stereotype of the swarthy Balkan), with impeccably shaped ivory white teeth, intelligent green eyes, and a delightfully curved aquiline nose. Despite these physical gifts, Calvin found her charmingly modest and a product of everyday people. She was five years widowed, the mother of a teenage daughter, and a devotee of yoga. It wasn’t adultery to be so enamored with President Kovachevski, Calvin told himself, as she was not married, made single by her husband’s death from mesothelioma (though it’s likely the actual clerics of his faith would probably have disagreed with his view on the matter; this is perhaps why he never voiced his admiration for her beauty to any of his peers).

Some of his fellows in the general field of Christian lay ministry were privately envious that their brother who’d never seen a day of seminary or finished college had managed to learn the Bulgarian language, which is spoken in the Republic of Zabluda, in a matter of months – even if the arduous task came more from a desire to write letters to President Kovachevski than a devotion to the literature he manufactured for the Balkan Bible Mission. He did eventually develop more solid aspirations to be a “proper” pastor, one who heads a church and all the responsibilities and anguishes that go with it, but for now, Calvin was content to write and print tracts and gospel excerpts in the Cyrillic script and provide them, free of charge, to the BBM. It was just the same that he charged no fee, as his Bulgarian, though adequate, was less than ideal, especially for addressing such a delicate matter as religion.

Though Calvin admired Fidanka Kovachevski’s dedication to the environment, winnowing the chaff of government corruption, and righting the past wrongs that had sprung from the region’s alliances with the Central Powers during the First World War, and the Axis during the Second, it was at first only her physical beauty that stole his heart, a fact of which he was aware and consciously regretted. He wished her progressive stances were what formed the larger part of his infatuation, but the quickness of his eye overcame his heart. He was, however, eventually able to deceive himself, as people have a talent for doing when in love, into believing his affection stemmed just as much from her convictions as her physical allure.

After a five-year term in office as the Republic of Zabluda’s first female president, Her Excellency lost her reelection bid by a narrow margin to the corpulent, bald, bearded First Captain Borka Bonev, a Bulgarian and Zabludan navy veteran and beef industry mogul. He appealed to the “right” on the political spectrum, insisting the reforms of Fidanka Kovachevski’s administration were the product of dangerous liberal radicalism. He even attacked the formal apologies issued by the government under Kovachevski to the Roma peoples, formerly known to the wider world as “gypsies,” who had been persecuted in the Balkans in eras past; Bonev maintained Her Excellency had unfairly held modern-day Zabludans responsible for the crimes of their ancestors.

Just as much as his rhetoric and his unapologetic, churlish approach to the campaign, Captain Bonev’s military service and his work in the country’s beef industry gave him a place in the hearts of the “common” working people, its blood-and-guts nature appealing to those whose parents had labored in unpleasant and underpaying jobs thrust upon them by the Communist regimes of old.

Calvin Puckett’s admiration for President Kovachevski left him so downhearted when she lost the election that he almost hadn’t had the strength or will to finish writing his novel, The Elusive Tangerine, the story of a young soldier in the White Army during the Russian Civil War. But he gathered his resolve and, with tears splashing the paper as he wrote the last paragraph, completed the 130,000 word epic. The book had been a precious child in the womb, in a manner of speaking, for two years, and like a father relishing the future accolades his son or daughter might achieve in track and field, Calvin looked forward with conviction to the critical and commercial success the sprawling war novel was sure to receive. It was far too compelling, far too unique to fall by the wayside like the innumerable other authors and countless manuscripts that never see the light of the day.

But, true to the laws of literature and nature, The Elusive Tangerine was rejected by agency after agency, twelve in total. Calvin had prayed before he began the submission progress that if he could not receive recognition without turning it into an idol, that the Almighty would refuse him the slightest success. Calvin’s prayer was answered with a resounding let it be so, but each day, at least once, he would forget the joy he should have felt that God had heard his request and, what’s more, had granted it to him.

Thus when the opportunity came to take a trip to a far-away wilderness like the Yukon, Calvin was very much welcoming to the idea; he was already under a spell of persistent numbness, and therefore reasoned he wouldn’t mind the cold. He was in a rut of sorts, and any break from it might lift his spirits. His father, having been separated (though never legally divorced) from Calvin’s mother for an oddly impressive twenty years, was quite insistent that his son (whom he still had the nerve to call “Joe,” as if they were old pals) accompany him on his trip north. It had long been a dream of Okie’s to just once be as close to or inside the Arctic as possible, having spent most of his life in the dustier, hotter climates of Oklahoma and Texas. Before his short career in politics and food service, his work in the petroleum industry had sent him all over the country, and after he felt the cold of Alaska, he’d always longed to feel the bracing sting of frost just once more before the twilight of his life. Though Okie never found the words to describe it in such a way, the feeling of being in a remote location in such merciless conditions had an effect on the mind that couldn’t be replicated by simply being alone in the woods on a hunting trip or on a hike through a Texas canyon in December. Somehow, being at the mercy of the untamed, far from the luxuries of a vast population of helping hands, aroused every lovely feeling inside him.

Okie was quite surprised, though glad, that his son agreed to accompany him on his pilgrimage. Needless to say, his relationship with “Joe” was strained; in the twenty or so years since he’d left his family for the plum position on the river authority, he’d seen Calvin a total of just five occasions. The first was at his high school graduation, then, a full three years later, when he visited Deborah Puckett in the hospital as she slowly succumb to lupus nephritis (that is, lupus-related renal failure). Atypical to their relationship, Okie spent an entire week with his distraught son following Deborah’s death. If there had ever been a time Okie seriously contemplated giving up his lucrative small town diner and returning to Mongo to reconcile with Calvin, this had been it. But he ultimately chose the diner and the middle-aged single life, and returned to Big Sandy as if Deborah’s passing had been a brief hiccup in his routine. In the years since his estranged wife’s death, Okie made just three more brief visits to Calvin, informal lunches that lasted no more than two hours each. The most recent of these lunches had been one year ago; this time, Okie took the added effort to accompany his son to church. This, in Okie’s eyes, acquired him more credit in his attempt to make up for his absence. The odd phone call here and there increased to once a week, and Okie would take the time to e-mail various videos of bassoon performances he found on the internet (not aware it was the contrabassoon that his son played).

He was still unaware of his son’s languor, much less of the rut Calvin’s life had become, having given such little fatherly interest to the goings-on of his son’s life. Though Okie was newly convicted to become better acquainted with him, he had, after all, seen Calvin only three times in the past twelve years, for a combined total of about seven hours. He had no idea Calvin’s acceptance of his invitation came from desperation rather than any eagerness to spend time with his father and patch things up between them, as Okie vainly hoped. Calvin could take or leave a healthier relationship with his father. It wasn’t one of his immediate concerns; in fact, the routine rejection of his epic novel, as well as Fidanka Kovachevski’s uncertain future in Balkan politics, firmly overshadowed Calvin’s feelings about his lack of a strong paternal presence.

Notwithstanding, the invitation to see the Great White North was, to Calvin, a Divinely appointed interruption of the repetition of work, both at Handy’s and in printing literature for the Balkan Bible Mission. He’d also become sick of feeling sorry for himself to the sound of his contrabassoon, played alone in his apartment far into the night (he loved the works of Beethoven, whom he believed was far less appreciated by music theorists of the past century than he’d once been). Calvin still had the clarity to remember his God, and to his credit, he was aware he’d entered the fruitlessness of self-pity. He longed for a change, albeit a temporary one, even if it came in the form of arctic temperatures and stiff, halfhearted conversation with his father, all for the sake of his walk with the Almighty, as it were.


Sunday, June 4, 2023

Jesus & Social Justice

I once read the claim that "If the point of Christianity is not social justice, it is ultimately useless."

The statement in itself is an unfair and quite arbitrary one. It could just as easily be claimed, "If the point of Hinduism isn't the protection of endangered species, it is ultimately useless." In making such a statement, one is burdening a stranger with a moral mission the stranger hasn't agreed to carry.  

But, giving the statement its due response, compelled to carry the Roman soldier's gear for the extra mile, as Jesus' metaphor goes - concerning the question of Christianity and its role in social issues, if I were directly asked, "is the point of being a Christian, a follower of Christ, to further social justice?", I would have to answer, unequivocally, no.

The first reason is, social justice can be easily molded to mean different things for different people. One person or one group's definition of social justice might include or exclude causes and concerns others' societal visions don't. A construct whose definition should be quite clear has, like many things, become subjective: one vision of it could include specific goals like racial equality and closing the income gap, while another's could consist solely of something as vague as "American values." And it would be rather unfair to any religion if one were to claim it must be judged by its dedication, or lack thereof, to American values (whatever those are) - this is in essence what the statement "If the point of Christianity is not social justice, it is ultimately useless" is doing, only measuring it using a different belief system.

A follower of orthodox Christianity does not view Jesus as subjective or open to interpretation. 

The second, and main, reason why following Christ is not simply a means to exact "social justice" is that the role of Christianity in the world is to spread the good news of the eternal salvation given to us by Jesus Christ. This is a clear and simple Biblical tenet. The role of a Christian is not to simply be kind and charitable. Kindness and charity are certainly characteristics of a life lived in Jesus, but they are not the point, the end, or the entire story. Societies are quite sufficient with those who instrumentalize Jesus as a poster boy of sorts for their causes, those who attempt to claim Him as their exclusive means to validate their views - in America especially, we're rife with conservative versions of Jesus, liberal versions, militia versions, apolitical versions, versions with added or subtracted spiritual aspects, and myriad others.

Jesus is not a spokesman we can rent to parrot our messages the way an actor can be paid to promote Pepsi or Dyson vacuums.

But, as for the relationship between Christianity as a religion and concept, and social justice, it has to be said that the desire for social justice is, if one abides in Christ's teachings and commands, an inevitable product of true Christian obedience. One who seeks to obey the inspired Scripture will abhor racism and delight in racial equity and the fight against systemic oppression; one who believes the Bible to be the Divine Word of God will give energy, time and resources to help the impoverished, and to bring attention to the institutions that put the poor under the thumb of a callous society; one who believes Jesus' claim "I am the way, the truth, and the life" will desire a crackdown on police brutality and abuse of legal authority, advocate for fair employment opportunities for recently paroled convicts, and for the rights, dignity, legal counsel, and living conditions of those incarcerated; one who loves Jesus will support better, more affordable healthcare and medical treatment for low-income parents, substance addicts, and mental health patients, no matter their orientation or ideologies. 

Jesus is not the property of nationalist conservatives or militant liberals. He tells us, "My kingdom is not of this world." No God who claims to be as all-powerful and all-knowing as the God of the Bible will be easily put into a box with our visions and versions of social justice, and He certainly can't be made to toe our party lines. The truth of a God as big as our God will contain things in which we find joy and comfort, but also things we hear with dismay and difficulty. 

If I could cram Jesus into my version of social justice, or yours, or anyone else's, I would doubt His divinity and sovereignty. 

"Open your mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy." -Proverbs 31:9