Through Dark Angles: Works Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft (25 page)

I rode with Ragan in a yellow Ryder truck. We had magnetic decals on the side warning other motorists of our explosive threat. No one ever seemed to notice. Do this for me, will you? Next time you see a bobcat truck on the highway with a
Dangerous
Explosives
sign on the back door or the sides, don’t tailgate. Thank you.

Ragan had joked with me on the way down about how patriotic and right-wing the Flapjackers were. I could tell he was being ironic, setting me up for something. When he pulled the truck into the city park by the little hill, I saw the joke. There were three things on the hill. One was a fabulous three-story red-brick mansion, a multi-winged gothically embellished piece of Richardsonian Romanesque. This lordly estate was the “Corman Place”—the home of a railroad baron, who had had the bad taste to get rich in the 1870s rather than the 1920s. For you non-architecture buffs, I won’t be offended if you go Google the style. Two billboards shared the hill. One had red letters on a black ground. THE US MILITARY KILLS OUR BOYS. The other shows a mainly gray and green scene of American soldiers in the jungles of Vietnam, and bore a legend in white: “Why do some people choose which fair-haired boy must die?” Both billboards faced the park; they would be the backdrop of our show. I hoped that they would not be lit at night—this proved a vain hope.

I stared at Ragan and he grinned. “Doc Corman’s antiwar protest. Get the sheriff to tell you when he shows up.”

There was a small artificial lake in the park. There were cottonwood trees and post oak and gray green buffalo grass. Across the lake a barbecue company was setting up next to the rows of picnic tables; beyond them were the small brick buildings that served as restrooms, a playscape full of kids enjoying the July heat, and a fenced-in tennis court.

Clyde Falconer and his two sons had arrived in his blue Lexus. Ragan and I opened the back of the truck and took out the picks and sharpshooter shovels. We began digging the holes for the cannon. Six three-inch cannon four feet apart, six four-inch, four six-inch, and five single-shot eight-inchers. It was hot work, and we were glad when Sharon Falconer showed up with her big brown SUV that held a giant cooler of sweet tea.

We had arrived just before noon and were finished burying the cannon by four. The sheriff drove up across the grass in his tan and brown sheriff car. He was a big man with a sweat-stained Stetson and a white handlebar mustache. He liked to talk, and we had sat out the lawn chairs by then. Following Ragan’s clue, I asked about Dr. Corman.

He wasn’t a medical doctor. He was a
teaching
doctor. Specifically, he had taught anthropology at the University of Texas half an hour north. The name vaguely rang a bell; there had been some articles about him a few years ago.

The sheriff was not a stupid man, but higher education had passed him by. He had also been in Vietnam when Randy Corman encountered a landmine. Not in the same unit, of course. The sheriff had just warmed to Randy’s story when I saw the infantryman near the base of the pictorial billboard. He was a blond-haired white guy dressed like the grunts appearing twelve or so feet above his head. But what caught my eye was the machine gun he was carrying. The bombing in Oklahoma City had happened in April of that year, and to my thinking men in combat fatigues carrying machine guns weren’t a good thing.

I pointed him out to the sheriff, who just said, “I’m getting to that.” The sheriff was like my mother, a Southern storyteller who views his narrative as shots of bourbon to be savored slowly so that the intoxication of the tale builds up over the whole of the evening. I could see how happy he was that the solider had made his dramatic entrance.

The sheriff paused in his story and gave me a brief sketch of the Cormans. The founder of the line had merged two small Texas railroads and one Louisiana-to-Oklahoma railroad, making Flapjack a major hub in the world of post-Reconstruction commerce. Timber from East Texas, cotton from the Dallas area, cattle from hereabouts had access to New Orleans and Galveston ports. The manufactured goods from Europe and the East Coast could come to Texas and Oklahoma markets. He built his “palace” on the hill. I felt smart—it really had been designed by Henry Hobson Richardson just after his asylums had been in built in New York (1870) and Arkham (1872). The townsfolk hated him for his conspicuous consumption—the mansion had ten fireplaces, each of which had won a prize at a fair or exhibition. You can build great stuff if you own the railroad and shipping costs you nothing. His children were set for life. His son Markham had sold the railroad to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe at the beginning of World War I. His grandson Roger had opened the chain of markets and movie palaces across central and south Texas between the wars. His great-grandson Hiram added to the family fortune by opening savings and loans in Austin and Houston and beginning the first large-scale Texas winery, Hiram’s boy Thomas devoted himself to education, gaining a doctorate in anthropology at the University of Chicago and a further Ph.D. in Indian and Burmese Literature at Princeton. This took us to Randall. By this time the barbecue was ready. Brisket and chicken, ranch style beans, cole slaw, German potato salad. A local band was playing Willie Nelson covers. Clowns were making balloon animals for the kids, and coolers everywhere showed forth ice, Lone Star and Shiner Beer—and I knew that when the sun went down I would be running from the big yellow cooler full of three-inch shells to the first cannon line. It was great! Some locals shared watermelon with us from their own patch.

Randall and Sheriff John Haggard went to Sam Houston High School at the same time. Flapjack had been on decline in the sixties, and the graduating class of 1972 was a mere fifteen souls. John Haggard had been captain of the football team—but of course every boy in school played on the football team. Randy had been president of the Spanish Club, leader of the debate team (“We called him a master debater. Get it?”) and even president of the Photo Bugs. Our country was four years short of its 200th birthday, one of the last Japanese soldiers had surrendered in Guam, the war had gone for decades for the poor SOB. We watched
Maude
and
All in the Family.
There were great paperbacks that year—
Journey to Ixtlan
and
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
There was also a little something called the Vietnam War. Now simple high school boys in central Texas didn’t know that Nixon was going to end the war by bombing the pucky out of Hanoi come Christmas time; they just knew they might have to go to the unhappiest place on Earth. The graduating class of fifteen was six girls (they were safe), two black boys (they were going), one Mexican (ditto), and six white guys. The draft board had to pick two of the Anglos.

John Haggard was born on the wrong side of the tracks, so he was an easy pick. The richest kid in town was an easy pick as well. The serfs had risen up. These choices were not only hard on the Corman and Haggard families, the boys had been dating the “Pridy twins, and boy were they pretty.” Gloria for John and Jeanie Mae for Randy. They would wait for their boys.

Randall Hiram Corman had his leg blown off by Charlie. He was airlifted to Saigon and then on to Tokyo, and there he died of an acute infection. He had graduated Sam Houston High in May, was drafted in June, and his body was delivered home a week before Halloween.

Randy’s mom drank herself to death in six months, so she never even heard of the Paris Peace Accords. “Southern Comfort,” a fruit, spice, and whiskey-flavored liquor, is a good drink for Southern tragedy. With a cruel twist of fate, a report that was meant only for Army brass was mailed to Doctor Corman. Turns out that Randy got very inferior care—in fact, negligent drunken care—and the Corman’s lawyers got a lot of money. So the rich get richer. Dr. Corman gave the town a library in Randy’s name. He paid for Jeanie Mae to go to school. She came back as an English teacher at Sam Houston. Then, according to the sheriff, Dr. Corman began writing
them
books till UT fired him. Having reported on excesses of professorial eccentricity, I knew “them books” must be something.

At the next Halloween the Haunted Palace started. The good doctor had his mansion made into a haunted house filled with all sorts of antiwar scenes—villagers broiled in napalm, mine fields, field surgeries—as well as the standard Frankenstein’s monsters and vampires.

Grisly and macabre, it even got a write-up in
Texas Monthly.
In about six years the trouble started. Reagan was president by then and we would all be saved by Star Wars “for real.” Dr. Thomas Emanuel Corman put up the anti-military billboards. Some people were so mad they wanted to move the Fourth of July festival, but the mayor said the Fourth of July was about free speech. Dr. Corman got in some kind of trouble at the University of Texas at Austin, his graduate class on East-West interaction had some kind of party with drugs or something, and the sheriff wasn’t clear on the issues.

The sheriff’s wife spotted the first solider on patrol around the Corman place. It was just before the Fourth. Dr. Corman had hired an actor who looked like a Vietnam-era US solider to patrol the area near the billboards. Well, some people had threatened to burn them down.

But it was worse.

The actor looked a great deal like Randall Hiram Corman.

It was awful hard on Jeanie Mae.

Everyone else came back from the war. The sheriff had married Gloria; the black boys had come back black men and started a gas station/convenience store; the Mexican boy started a taco place. Everybody was settling down, but Jeanie Mae—she still waited. Jeanie got to watching the solider on patrol. She got to thinking that it was Randy. She told her sister, her sister told then-Deputy Haggard. The deputy told her that Randy was dead—they had all been to the funeral. They all knew his ashes were in an urn. It had a blue spotlight on it every Halloween. The deputy told her to get therapy.

Jeanie Mae snuck onto the ground one night with her little cocker spaniel. The soldier made her dance naked, killed her dog and cooked it, making her eat some, and finally raped her. She stumbled into town all bloody. The sheriff and Deputy Haggard went up Beacon Hill and found no soldier. Dr. Corman said he had run off at dawn. The doctor was burning a big bonfire. He invited them to search. They searched and found nothing.

Then a few months later, he hired another actor to impersonate a soldier. This guy looked like Randall, but there was something wrong with his face. People were mad. But there are no laws against such poor taste and insensitivity. The sheriff used these words in his narrative; I wondered what lawyer had taught them to him.

It was time for the show. I had loaded two three-inch red shells for Ragan to light during the “rockets’ red glare” part of the anthem. Then came white titanium salutes. Super-noisy—they set off the car alarms all over Flapjack. Each shell drives the smoke into you; weeks after a show you will smell of gunpowder at the oddest times. I ran my butt off. Sharon Falconer sat on one of the white plastic lawn chairs and did the count.

You count for duds. If 101 fireworks are lit and 100 make their flower-fire in the sky you have one dud. As I mentioned, each shell has two parts. The outer shell that explodes to lift the inner shell into the air, which ignites the stars—the pretty stuff that lights up the sky. If the inner shell should not ignite it falls to earth. It looks exactly like an oversized cartoon firework. It practically begs kids to light it and cover themselves in burning papers and salts. You have to find every dud after a show—no matter how long it takes in the dark.

Now the Gentle Reader will think that I rode back to Austin the next day and looked up Dr. Corman. In fact, I wrote an amusing story of my night of shooting off fireworks in Flapjack. I completely forgot about Dr. Corman.

I didn’t remember any of the shows we shot for the next three years. I moved up from a runner to a lighter. I set off the three-inchers the night that I thought about Corman again. Another of his actor-soldiers had made the news in a terrible way. A Vietnamese family had opened Ng BBQ in nearby Comesee, Texas. The actor-solider (at least somebody dressed as GI Joe) had torched their house. No one could prove it was Dr. Corman’s employee—but said employee could once again not be found. Corman had a little trouble on his own: a fire in one of his storage sheds had burned out of control the late the same night. The sheriff was perplexed, but relieved that Corman hadn’t hired yet another “soldier” to guard his acreage.

But just before sunset, I saw the gleam of the burnt-orange Texas sun on the M16 barrel as Corman’s re-enactor made his martial patrol. I was gleeful. I could smell a big weird story with a big Rob Kenyon byline.

So the next day in Austin, I drove to the Perry-Castañeda Library on the University of Texas campus. I researched Dr. Thomas Emanuel Corman. He wrote fourteen books, fifteen counting his dissertation. You could line them up in chronological order, and they stretched from solid scholarship from academic publishers to pseudo-science bullshit from gosh-wow paperback houses. It seems that everyone agrees that Dr. Corman went mad; the dissent is about
which
of the books marked the French-frying of his gray matter.

His studies focused on the pre-Buddhist cultic practices that were assimilated into early Buddhism in Burma. Buddhism of various unorthodox sorts (heavily mixed with Tantrism and Tibetan shamanism) encountered the Bagan culture of Burma in the sixth century. From this heady blend, a group of wonder-workers called weizzas arose. These forest sages combined the worship of spirits (called Nats) with Indian and Tibetan practices, especially astrology and alchemy. The latter was more focused on the prolongation of life by certain regenerative measures than in the transformation of base metals into gold. If the name “weizza” sounds like “wizard” to you, it is because it is a cognate. In fact, in Myanmar today it is still the honorific for a B.A. degree.

Dr. Corman studied these alchemist sages. As more orthodox Buddhism showed up in the seventh century, the weizzas needed to become organized. They became a monastic order of “Ari Buddhists.” These fellows were a little looser in their ways—they could drink alcohol, practice some Tantric sex, and make good money as fortune tellers. They wrote in Pali, the orthodox Buddhist scriptural tongue.