David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

2. CHUCK NUNN JUNIOR MORE GOD THAN NOT

Told Simple Ranger some data on how Chuck Nunn Junior, more God than not to those of us peers that lived for a whiff of his jet trail, ate up his school and town, left us bent and in mid-yearn his eighteenth year and moved on to Oklahoma University, Norman, at whence he was observable throwing high-altitude televised spirals and informing his agriculture and range-management teachers of facts they did not know. Then how Nunn chucked it all to give time as a volunteer in The United States' Involvement in Vietnam, whence trickled down rumors of the glory and well-armed mightiness of Nunn: how he toted his unit's fifty-calibers up sheer and cliff-like impediments to conflict; how he declined to duck, never once crawled or ate mud, however never even once smelled lead in his cranial vicinity; how he got alone and surrounded by VCR's (Viet Cong Regulars) in 71, and through sheer force of personality and persuasion persuaded the whole battalion of sly slanted Charlies to turn their own guns on their selves. How etc. etc. How he sent me a postcard with a red bloom of napalmed jungle on the front, wrote how he wished my personal vision was better so I could leave the feed store and get over there to watch and whiff the trail of his jet.

Simple Ranger's eyes is the color of the sky. There's speculation hereabouts concerning if you look at something long enough does your eyes take its color.

I profess to telling the grey-eyed Ranger, plus a Nunn-happy group of Minogue civilians, how Chuck Nunn Junior returned home from OU Norman and South East Conflict more theory than man. How there was a welcome parade, fussy and proud, with a tuba. How the immoderate and killer twister that hit in 74 (this twister old Simple Ranger, by then more than a tinch damaged, chased for twelve helter and skelter miles in his DeSoto, said he smelled his aloft land in every revolution, finally wound up upside down in phone lines and no sign of his car evermore. Didn't never come down) that hit in spring, '74, the day after Nunn's returning and parade, how that sucker ripped the roof off Nunn's late Daddy's machine shed, sucked two N. Rockwell prints and Nunn's late Daddy out a busted ranchhouse window to follow Simple Ranger's DeSoto in a straight-up, and how it took up the Nunns' TV's aerial antenna off the house roof and flew the electric javelin out a fair quarter mile, flung the pole down into Nunn land like a mumblepeg, and how up from this TV-speared ground, just inherited ex officio by Chuck Nunn Junior, come a bubbling crude. Black gold. Texas tea. How Nunn paid off his late missing Daddy's sheep ranch's mortgage with revenues, put his scrambled and operatic Momma Mona May into institutional caring, and took over the Nunn sheep business with such a slanderous cunning and energy, plus oil money, that soon amounts of CNJ-brand sheep was bulging straining and bleating against the barbed wire limit of Nunn's spread, mating in frenzies, plus putting out wool hand over hoof, plus fighting over which one got to commit suicide whenever Nunn looked like he even might[keep] ("Might," I told Simple Ranger) be hungry.

Was telling the dust-watcher how C. Nunn Jr. passed up multitudes of come-hitherish cheerleaders and oriental princesses to return to Minogue and enter into serious commitment with his childhood sweetheart, the illegally buxom and tall Glory Joy duBoise, closest thing to femininity and pulchritude that to date exists in Minogue Oklahoma, eyes like geometry and a all-around bodily form of high allure and near-religious implication, and just as I was commencing a analogy relating the shape of Glory Joy's hips to the tight curve of the distant Big Dirt horizon, the door to the Outside Minogue Tavern busted inward and there against the dusty sunlight was framed the tall, angstifìed, and tortured frame of Glory Joy duBoise, hand to her limpid and Euclidean eyes, hips (that was similar to horizons) brushing the trauma-struck frame of the busted-inward door. She stood like that for time, looking at me, then come over at the table we was all at. Whereupon she stood, staggered, dropped and flopped in a floor-direction, her wracked and convulsively semi-conscious frame moving in directions like the Minogue Oklahoma H.S. half-time band, spelling out Kicked In The Butt By Love, or, Forlorn And Subject To Devastation Following The Loss Of Chuck Nunn Junior Due To The Hurtful Precariousness Of His Post-Accident Temper.

3. NUNN'S PERSONAL UNDOING WAS THE DAY IT RAINED SHEEP

Nunn's personal undoing was the day it rained sheep, I outlined to Simple Ranger as me and several civilians carried the forlornly swooned and flopping frame of Glory Joy duBoise to our table, smeared cold Rolling Rock on her pulse-points, and propped her up in a splinterless chair to come round to the outlining of our mutual Minogue sadnesses and troubles.

Told Simple Ranger how the success of the Nunn sheep ranch, plus the devotion of the near-beautiful Glory Joy, had aroused the ire and jealousy of T. Rex Minogue, the antique and hermitically reclusive, also malignant and malevolent, Minogue Oklahoma sheep mogul, plus the manufacturer of the illegal and chemically unstable sweet-potato whiskey that kept our neighboring reservation's Native Americans glazed and politically inactive; and how following the spectacular rise of the Nunn sheep operation under the energy and Agriculture Degree of Chuck Junior, who was, remember, a-shtuppin' the little lady T. Rex himself had wanted to a-shtup since she was twelve,[keep] how in light of all this it's comprehensible how T. Rex Minogue repeatedly and with above-average vigor attempted to financially acquire, legally finagle, then violently appropriate the Nunn sheep operation from Chuck Nunn Junior; how Nunn was too petro-leumly rich, well and savvily educated, and martially formidable, respective, for any of the attempts to fructify; how Nunn took all Minogue's shit with good humor, even the complimentary and ribboned jelly jars of yam liquor that T. Rex kept sending Glory Joy, each attached to a note headed NOTICE OF FORMAL WOOING, all with great and superior humor, until finally T. Rex, a man wholly allergic to any distance between himself and his way (least here in this town his own Daddy built before getting fatally harmed by some politically active Native Americans), until T. Rex arranged for his younger antique brother V.V. Minogue — a benign however treatably alcoholic rangehand and poet (his stuff rhymed, I'm told) who was under the thumb of dependency on T. Rex's secret sweet-potato recipe, I informed the ranger — for V.V. and two humungous out-of-town cow-punchers' boys from Enid (yes the old interferers from the climax of the state football title game in '66), for them to explosively dynamite a large and bulk-like portion of Chuck Nunn Junior's ranch's flock-infested grazing land; how whereupon the land was in fact dynamited by V.V. and the geologic Enid boys; and how it rained various percentages of sheep in Minogue Oklahoma for one whole nauseous afternoon two years ago next Ascension.

As Simple Ranger sat up straight at this and informed myself and the civilians that he himself had heard a far-off thunder booming off the dome of Big Dirt space, plus seen a singular pink-white rain from clear out in his shack on Dirt two Ascensions back, and had attributed the experiences to theology, plus the effects of damage, Glory Joy duBoise fluttered her way into consciousness and arousal, smoothed her brass-colored and towering hair with a hand-motion of such special sensuousness that two civilians tipped back over in their chairs and was largely lost for the rest of the duration, and entered into the therapy of it all, getting on the outside of several beers and detailing for the Ranger how it had been, that dark, fluffy, and rusty day, running with C. Nunn Jr. through the blasted heaths of exploded former pasture, ruining her best silk umbrella for all time, watching her man move through turf, mutton, and gore like the high wind of madness itself, floundering bow-legged through gruesome fields of gruesomer detonated wool, catching plummeting major percentages of particular favorite sheep in a shearing-basket, Glory Joy watching his mood and attitude getting more and more definable in terms of words such as grief, sorrow, loss, disorien-tation, suspicion, anger, and finally unambiguous and unequivocal rage. How as coyotes and buzzards began to sweep in off Big Dirt and commence a scavengerial orgy unsurpassed in modern Oklahoma in terms of pure and bilious nasty, how C. Nunn Jr. unhitched his '68 souped-entirely-up Italian Sports Car from his OU Norman quarterback career and fairly flew off the ranch east on rickety two-lane 40 toward the gigantic and private T. Rex Minogue spread, without so much as a kiss my foot to Glory Joy, who watched her man inject his vehicle of light into the chewed-up straight-shot road to TRM, his mind on the noun T. Rex Minogue, the near-gerunds confrontation, reparation, possibly even reciprocation (i.e. detonation).