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.
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