Frank Portman - King Dork

The crowd started the customary chant of “pussy, pussy, pussy,” though some were saying “kill, kill, kill,” which was ludicrously wishful thinking, under the circumstances. Some of them started trying to shove us farther into the ring toward each other. Mr. Donnelly, his face now throbbing and glow-ing and looking just a bit like a Lava lamp, was still shouting,

“Commence! Commence!”

It was at this point, amidst all the shoving, that someone successfully “pantsed” Sam Hellerman. That is to say, someone grabbed his gay little blue and white George Michael shorts by the hem of each leg and yanked them down, so that he was standing there with the g. l. b. & w. GMS’s around his ankles, looking extremely ludicrous, wearing nothing but his Boogie Knights T-shirt and his rather ill-fitting jockstrap. A wave of giggling from the Rape Prevention girls swept the room and shook the rafters. I was glad it wasn’t me they had pantsed, not least because of that whole ball-spotting thing, but my heart really went out to Sam Hellerman, especially since he had only been standing there in pantsing position in the first place out of kindness to me.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been in Sam Hellerman’s situation, but if you have, you probably already know how difficult it is to pull up any gay little George Michael shorts that may happen to be resting on the floor around your an-199

kles while your hands are encased in boxing gloves. Try it if you don’t believe me. It’s very hard to get a grip. Sam Hellerman, poor guy, gave it a shot, though, exposing himself to even more indignity as he did so. That was enough for him: he looked up at Mr. Donnelly with a transcendent kind of hatred and opened the floodgates. He even leaned his head back so that the blood bubbled up from his nostrils like lava. Mount Hellerman. It was very impressive.

The crowd recoiled and seemed to hesitate between disappointment and disgust, finally settling on the surly, vapid bewilderment that is pretty much the normal person’s natural state. The vein just under the surface of Mr. Donnelly’s shiny burgundy forehead slithered like a shrink-wrapped lizard, and I almost thought he was going to say something like “curses, foiled again!” But he didn’t say c., f. a. Rather, he sputtered inarticulately and turned his attention to me, a snake eyeing a tasty rodent. Fortunately, I was saved once again through the agency of the solid, dependable Mount Hellerman, which even in the midst of a major eruption had the presence of mind to pull the fire alarm on the way out. It was at best a temporary reprieve, but it was almost worth whatever consequences lay ahead to have the opportunity to witness Mr. Donnelly’s face turn from a light burgundy to a hitherto unrecorded shade of deep magenta. One of nature’s marvels.

A B RO OD OF VI P E RS

One thing was certain: the mysteries and puzzles in my life were percolating with more oomph than they ever had previously. Yet I had the distinct impression that I wasn’t getting anywhere with them. At any rate, I now had two people to 200

investigate: Deanna Schumacher, the fake Fiona, and Timothy J. Anderson, the dead bastard. If he was the dead bastard. He probably was. How many dead people could there be in this thing?

Things were pretty much back to business-as-usual between Sam Hellerman and me since he had come clean on the Dud Chart situation. I had hesitated a bit out of lingering resentment, but after he got pantsed in boxing for my sake I relented and decided to let him in on the Catcher code, mostly because I was so pleased with myself for having cracked it and I couldn’t think of anyone other than Sam Hellerman who would be at all impressed by it. And he was impressed, though he claimed he would have easily spotted the French angle—maybe he would have, though I doubt it. I wasn’t planning to include him in the fake Fiona arm of the investigation, but he was totally on the Anderson case and insisted we go to the library the minute I showed him Tit’s note.

The first thing we did at the library was to use a concordance to look up the biblical quotation about stones and children and Abraham. Sam Hellerman knew how to do that because of his long years of experience as the son of weird German vampire religious fanatics, I guess. It was from Matthew 3:9.

The chapter was kind of hard to understand. John the Baptist is telling some authorities (he calls them a “brood of vipers”) that they aren’t as powerful as they think they are, I believe.

Sam Hellerman thought it was a more or less generic

“question authority” message. “Maybe they were trying to say that this Timothy J. Anderson was some kind of rebel.”

He had a point about the Q. A. theme, though it seemed to me there was also a warning of an impending swift and terrible revenge: it reminded me of the movie Carrie. J. the B.

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was saying, in effect, “Okay, guys, just keep dumping buckets of pig blood on introverted girls at proms, and see what happens—you have no idea what you’re playing with here.”

I was doubtful that the actual meaning of the quote would have much to tell us about Timothy J. Anderson’s character, though. It could be a question authority message, but it could also be about the generic power of God, or about the difference between earthly and spiritual reality, you know, stones versus heaven, earth as opposed to air. It could be all of them at once, or none of them. I hadn’t read enough to be sure, but I think the Seven Story Mountain guy was getting at the rocks/air thing; plus maybe he was thinking of the stone walls of the monasteries and cathedrals of Europe, which had inspired him as a child and which, I assume, were intended to foreshadow his eventual monk-ization. Who knows? The SSM guy chose it for whatever reason he might have had; maybe Timothy J. Anderson or his survivors had chosen it because they were under the influence of that book, or maybe for some other unrelated reason. All I’m saying is that as far as the content goes, the epigraph and the epitaph might as well have said “Have a Nice Day” or “I Heart Cats”

for all the difference it would make. You can make something mean anything you want. And you can spend a great deal of time and effort choosing your words and allusions and quotations carefully and hardly anyone will even notice or get it anyway.

But, as usual, while I was giving myself this stern lecture on the meaninglessness of the data we’d just uncovered and how communication is pointless and we’re all doomed, Sam Hellerman was noticing the interesting part. I was jolted out of my daydream by the sound of his finger hitting the page of the Jerusalem Bible that lay open on the library table.

“Look,” he said in a library whisper.

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I went “?” but I soon saw what he was getting at. Right after that quotation comes a kind of threat to the brood of vipers, a variation on the notion of clearing out dead wood:

“Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

If he is talking about the vipers, that’s kind of a mixed metaphor, if I’m not mistaken, but who am I to criticize John the Baptist on stylistic grounds? I’m sure it sounded very convincing at the time. You probably had to be there. Anyway, Tit, remember, had written in the uncoded part of his note:

“The bastard is dead. Thrown into the fire.”

That sounded like it could possibly be a reference to the biblical passage, though it could also be coincidental. I couldn’t decide. But if it was an allusion, this passage from the Bible arguably linked Tit, Timothy J. Anderson, my dad, and the Seven Storey Mountain guy. I wasn’t sure how, exactly, or what it meant. Maybe it was a common, standard quotation that was used all over the place, though. And maybe “thrown into the fire” was just something people in the sixties used to say whenever a bastard died. You never know.