David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

But how something inside Nunn got left by the impact askew, his interior self messed with, hurting, under strain, all due to the lingering insecurity of the previously busted Nunn temper and moral sense.

"We got frightened of his temper and moral sense," Glory Joy told from a window she was at, standing, curious and distracted, looking out against dark at something against the seam of land and air that stretched tight across the Dirt. "Chuck Junior got scared of hisself."

Ever get scared of your own self? Painful. Glory Joy had mummed up to Nunn, from concern and such, but Chuck Jr. got subsequently informed by friends and civilians about his six-day moral coma, about things he'd done, said, and implied in the privacy of a special padded Hospital wing, things he did not recollect; got told of a unnameable evil and rage directed at the universe in general, one that was diarrhetic and fearsome to see in a previous semi-demiurge, larger than life. It got known around Minogue Oklahoma that while his quality Italian seatbelt had saved his exterior, the impact with V.V. following the rain of sheep had knocked something loose in the center of Nunn. Chuck Junior got informed on this fact, and it chewed at him.

"His temper got scary," Glory Joy said. "It got precious and valuable to us, like only something you is scared to death to lose can get." She'd got to caressing the peeling frame of the window she was at with a mournfulness and musing that repercussed among the civilians piling up in circles at our little table. "His temper got insecure. We lived in around-the-clock fear of when Chuck Junior might possibly lose his temper."

"Focus in on that verb lose, S.R.," I told Simple Ranger. "The lady means it special. Whenever C. Nunn Jr. lost his post-accident temper, he lost the sucker real and true. It became gone. Absent. Elsewhere. Blew away to unfindable locations. A state of nameless and potential eternal rage and evil ever time he but stub his toe or some such shit." I put a earnest hand on the Ranger's deep grey sleeve, tried to get his eyes off the air outside the window. "Chuck Nunn Junior lived in fear of, plus alienation from, his own personal temper."

Was Glory Joy duBoise told us in emotive terms how collision and concussion and coma had left Nunn's interior bent. How the bowlegged pride of Minogue Oklahoma had to scrutinize and rein his own emotional self each minute, for fear that upset or anger could loop him back into a blank white comality of evil and meanness. How his tender gentleness toward G.J. duBoise got so extreme as to crowd pitiful, so scared was he that if he stopped loving her for a second he'd never get it back. How the rare times when a vicissitude of human relating, sheep-shearing, or pasture-status pissed him off, he'd get positively other-, under-worldly with anger, a bearded unit of pure and potent rage, ranging his sheep's ranges like something mythopoeic, thunderous, less man or thing than sudden and dire force, will, ill. How the bright blank evil'd stay on him for a day, two, a week; and Glory Joy'd shut herself in the storm cellar Chuck Nunn Junior hisself had lined with impregnable defensive steel, and she'd stay put, drinking bottled water and watching out for Nunn-activity through a emergency periscope Chuck Jr. had punctured through the storm cellar's roof for just such episodic periods; and how, after time, Nunn would come back out of the blind nameless hate, the objectless thirst for revenge against whole planets; how he'd find his spent and askew temper on some outer range of detonated Nunn land and return, pale and ignorant, to a towering, quivering, forgiving Glory Joy.

"Chuck Junior steered way clear of even thinking about T. Rex Minogue's place for fear he'd kill the old man," I told the Ranger. "Got terrified of even the concept of what T. Rex might could do to his emotions and sensibilities."

"The tenderness and caring Chuck Nunn Junior showed me were inhuman," Glory Joy semi-sobbed, her eyes resembling a St. Vitus of red threads. "Superhuman; not of this landed earth."

Simple Ranger got moved, here, at something.

6. WAS BUZZARDS THAT HAD STAYED ON

Now, the peculiar darkness and peculiarer fluttering outside the Outside Minogue Bar was in fact buzzards, two civilians at the busted-inward bar door told us. Glory Joy and the Ranger nodded absent to theirselves. We took looks outside. There was buzzard-presence and — activity of thought-provoked scope. The air was dark and agitated with wings, beaks, soft bellies. The suckers soared round. The air around the Outside Minogue Bar was swirling and influenced by regiments of the buzzards that had got drawn to Big Dirt by the rain of Nunn mutton two Ascensions past, and had stayed on.

It was like something giant was coming out of the Dirt to die, the Ranger said in a gravelly whisper, staring his eyes past civilians, door, into a swirling soiled grey, looking for signals, his land, his car.

"This sucker's damaged," whispered a civilian, low.

But I commenced to revelate to Simple Ranger about Chuck Nunn Junior's special and secret post-accident strain.

"You knew about the secret post-accident strain when I didn't til it was too late and Chuck Junior was temperless and gone?" asked a disbelieving Glory Joy, pale, tight of lip, hip-shot. She come back over, toting menace.

I sympathied Glory Joy, told her how Chuck Junior had suffered a spell of his optical dislocation over to the feed store once after I once slapped him on his back over a humorous joke, and how he'd dislocated, and I'd seen, and how he'd swore me to a eternity of silence about his secret,

a sworn promise I kept til he wronged T. Rex Minogue and vameesed. I told Simple Ranger and the civilians about the hidden and subterranean strain, suffered by a already askew C. Nunn Jr., caused by his post-impact-with-V.V.-Minogue-spontaneously-de-tachable eyes. Told some historic facts: how the Drs. sewed up Nunn's busted ball-bearing melon eyes with laser and technocracy and left him farther down the line from blindness and blear than ever, but with a hitch: those eyes, sewed with light, was left smaller. Ain't hard to see that the Drs. at the Hospital had to take them some slack up from Nunn's ball-busted eyes to laser-stitch the busts with, and how the deslacking of the eyes left them tight, small, rattling in the sockets, insecure.

"They'd fall out his head," I told the company of men that was round our table about three deep, countless bottles of Rolling Rock already dealt with, stacked in a pyramid and headed for ceiling. "Be like the accidental impact all over again, at times: slap Chuck Junior on the back, or maybe he'd bend down after a untied lace, or (worst)

if he'd sneeze at all — ever see the man sneeze, personally, a post-accident sneeze, Glory Joy?"

Glory Joy's powdered and geometry-eyed face got singular, loose, looked like Walter Matthau a second, out of my stimulating of a old but sudden recognition (unclear but true). She got smaller in her chair, too interested by half in the label on her ninth Rolling Rock.

Was me told Simple Ranger, who kept coughing and sniffing, nervous at the special smell of interested buzzard, how Chuck Nunn Junior commenced to buckle under the emotive strain of two little post-accidental eyes that exited their sockets and dangled by cords down his bearded and near-handsome face at the slightest gravitational invitation. How the twin pressures of fear that the possible sight of his insecure and A.W.O.L. eyes could repulse the love clear out of Glory Joy duBoise, plus how the fragileness of his coma-inclined and skittish temper might at any time dust from Nunn's concussed head any sense of ought, right, love, or concern for men, man, woman, or Glory Joy, how all this shit wore on Chuck Nunn Junior. How he got wore: thinned out, legs bandier, skin loose and paler than land, copper sweat verdigrised, rattling eyes milky and other-directed.