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Between 1961 and 1964, the United States Forestry Service rounded up four hundred turkeys from the deserts of central and southern Texas and released them on the Hawaiian Islands to encourage the development of a native population, and, presumably, the kind of curious but undeniable emotional attachment to eating turkey that afflicted the majority of Americans.
Murray didn’t know about any of that. He only knew that sometimes, when Gudrun started up the Studebaker engine, the sound of it made him tremble, made him remember, if dimly, a terrible silver bird, so much larger than himself, than any bird could ever be, so vast and loud and monstrous it could be nothing but God, God incarnated and migrating from the Great All-Twig Paradise Nest, God coming for him, taking him, Murray, an ordinary tom, nothing special at all, into its fearsome clanging belly of blessings and flying, flying like death, flying forever until he passed out cold from sheer, shivering religious terror.
When Murray awakened, God had left him, and everything smelled like rain.
10. The Scotsman and the Shepardess
Published 1921, Galatea Books, 156 pages
Ruby’s rules lasted long after she died. But not forever. Gudrun did try. She knew how important it was to eat only what you could grow or kill yourself, to keep your body pure and free of toxins, to check monoxide and radon levels regularly, to never install a telephone no matter what anyone said, to trust in wholesome herbs and flowers instead of industrial poisons that only mask symptoms and lull you to complacency, to sleep with a Geiger counter and a gun close by in case of emergencies. Gudrun governed herself by these principles because Ruby couldn’t anymore.
“If we’re careful, baby, we can live forever,” Ruby told her with black nebulas screaming out of her eye sockets, seeping blood and pus like miracle tears spattering a statue of the Virgin. “Or at least until they burn out the earth from under us twenty years from now. Death was invented by corporations to ensure a constant stream of new customers. We don’t need death. We don’t need anything they want to sell us. We just need each other and a patch of good earth.”
“But Mama, you’re so sick…”
Ruby sopped up her disintegrating eyes with a cloth soaked in red clover oil and Cold Palace Brand No. 1 Silver Needle Tea. “I started too late, Guddy, that’s all. I sucked up all the poison the bad old world had on tap and asked for more because I didn’t know better. By the time I got right with the cosmos, I was already rotting. But I got you out in time. I did that.”
Gudrun sat back on her heels and watched her mother lying in her last bed. Maybe this was what happened to you if enough people threw you away. You just rotted to pieces at the bottom of the bin. Or maybe Ruby really was holding the entire starry universe together by the arrangement of her coffee mugs.
“And you cheat,” she whispered, barely able to squeak it out.
“Don’t be disrespectful,” Ruby sighed. She handed her daughter the washcloth to rinse and re-soak. Gudrun did it, but she didn’t stop talking. She hated herself for talking but she couldn’t undo it now.
“There’s a pack of menthol Tareytons under the rain barrel outside and there’s always a pack of Tareytons under there and you’ve got a bag of Oh Boy! Oberto Teriyaki Jerky in your underwear drawer and those have sodium nitrite in them and I’m pretty sure whiskey is, like, its whole own kind of poison, so you cheat, even though I have to have carob instead of chocolate and no friends.”
Ruby folded her hands in her lap like a little girl. Gudrun laid the fresh washcloth over her weeping eyes—real tears, now, turning the blood and pus and thready nameless black bile pale.
“I’m just a person, Guddy,” she whimpered softly. “Mumsy’s pretty weak, when you add me up.”
“It’s okay,” Gudrun answered, because it was the only answer.
“I order my whiskey special,” Ruby offered, as apology, defense, defiance. “Small batches, no factory processing. Made by real Scottish people.”
9. Lovepig
Published 1961, Blue Fairy Books, 156 pages
Gudrun was shaking the first time she changed her order with Mr. Abalone. She was twenty-four. She wanted to live forever. She wanted to be better than Ruby. She did. But she also remembered what hot dogs tasted like. And ketchup. And white sugar in her tea. They were part of a broken history that belonged to her but did not—dimly remembered hotels overflowing with room service, individually packaged sweeteners, creamers, condiments, convenience stores snuck to in the middle of the night, brown bag lunches left out in the sun.
And Ruby couldn’t stop her anymore.
Gudrun ate that first forbidden slice of fried spam with a cold, shining glob of red ketchup alone in the dark. She cried so hard her eyes burned and throbbed and all she could see on her plate was a swimming blackness.
8. The Sword of L
ust
Published 1950, Harem House Press, 199 pages
Gudrun never had any kind of reaction to the Oskander Special Collection. No hives, no vomiting, no silver stains. For a long time, she didn’t understand it. You couldn’t say The Sin Pit or Confessions of a Rent Boy or The Butler Did Me were masterworks. They were certainly no better than The Curse of the Werewolf, which had, in the end, left her with a pale, watery scar on her forehead and down the hairline on the left side of her face. Jack’s dirty books were the definition of bad art. But she could curl up in the bathtub and listen to the rain and read The Sword of Lust over and over and feel nothing more than desire, despite its obvious failings:
Vuvula, Queen of the Night Demons, sat upon the Throne of Desire, her jeweled bodice glittering in the light of the thousand golden candelabras that hung from the rafters of the Sacred Hall. Nubile slave girls dressed only in rose petals combed her raven tresses and moaned in ecstasy. Her emerald eyes flashed haughtily at the interloper.
“Come forward, Sir Quicktongue, and kneel before me!” cried Vuvula, her breasts quivering with rage and secret yearning.
“Nay, my Lady,” answered Sir Quicktongue, Knight of the Hidden Flower. “I am bound by my sacred oath to kneel only before she who can reforge my shattered sword with her own bare hands. This is the curse and the riddle that drives me from town to town, bed to bed, through forest and swamp, over mountain and sea, and I may not rest until it is satisfied!”
The answer came to her many years later, after she had planted Ruby in the mountain earth like a sweet potato. Those books were just what they aspired to be, nothing more and nothing less. They achieved their ambitions and fulfilled their purpose. Against all stylistic, narrative, and technical odds, they performed the function of fiction and imitated a certain delicate reality perfectly. Not the reality of Ruby and Gudrun and Murray and the Secretary of Agriculture and the Uptown Grand Cinema, but something better, a cohesive universe of total generosity, of events occurring in perfect order and quick succession, want expressed and immediately satisfied, all else besides want jettisoned, unnecessary, left far behind.
