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.
