Your Body is Changing (13 page)

“We should head over to the football field,” Duffy said to Henry. “Brother Lampey is always cryptic about his events, but I get a sense of urgency here.” He rattled the paper.

“Are we the only ones?” said Henry.

“Looks that way. There may be others out at the field. I don’t know. People have pretty much lost interest in Brother Lampey.”

Duffy looked over his shoulder.

“Hey, you guys want to join us? I’m giving some background on the artist.”

“Let me guess, he likes scarecrows,” said Josie.

“Okay, never mind. You kids ‘do your thing’ and we’ll do ours, right, Henry?”

They walked toward the leaning rust-bitten towers of stadium lights and Duffy explained to Henry about Outsider Art, looking over his shoulder every few seconds at Josie and Vince, to keep an eye on what they were doing way back there.

Outsider Art was yesterday’s news, Duffy explained. For one thing nobody knew how to tell the good stuff from the bad stuff. Also, it was bound up with what was called in literary circles the “intentional fallacy;” that is, nobody knew if they liked a piece of Outsider Art until they had received a document confirming that the artist was illiterate because of undiagnosed dyslexia or a pipe lodged in his brain. Real art connoisseurs, like Duffy’s friends, cared only about the principles of detached formalism, which was why they couldn’t go to the movies. Duffy said whenever his friends went to the movies they found the coming attractions so atrocious and unbearable on an aesthetic level that it almost gave them a heart attack. It made them cry for the state of humanity. Other people’s taste in music made them feel the same way, and places where their ignorant neighbors went to shop. It was terrible to be alive.

“You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?” Duffy said.

“No sir,” said Henry.

“Well, you’re listening. And I appreciate that. I suppose I just like to hear myself talk.”

Henry knew that a lot of times people just pretended to like art so they could be cool. They would stand around and drink alcohol and eat wienies on toothpicks and make a big deal about some piece of junk that was supposed to be great art, but then it would turn out to be nothing but a knocked-over garbage can or a no-smoking sign or a spot on the floor where somebody had thrown up, which was a situation that Henry had observed in many comedy movies. Like the one where the supposedly great artist had trained a monkey to ride around on a tricycle with paint on the wheels, and that was how he had made his supposedly great art!

Duffy reached down and fingered the sleeve of the tweed.

“Do you want it back?” said Henry. “Because I don’t mind.”

“Oh, that’s very kind. No, I should divest myself of all the relics of the past. You know? Harris Tweed. Ambition. Hope. Things like that.”

“Okay.”

“Self-respect.”

“Mm.”

“Passion and so forth.”

Duffy laughed (it was more like a cough) and directly thereafter went kind of slack and gray all over.

“Jesus loves you,” said Henry.

Duffy seemed not to hear. They reached the broken gate to the football field in silence.

Duffy took another look around. Josie and Vince were gone.

“He died on the cross so that you might live,” said Henry.

“Who did?”

“Jesus.”

“Oh, right. I heard about that. Where do you think they went?”

“Maybe they’re looking at scarecrows,” said Henry.

“Yeah, that’s probably it,” said Duffy.

The self-delusion of the secular humanist! A big aching hole in his heart that only Jesus can fill!

Duffy pushed through the broken gate.

The football field was freshly green and white, the concrete stands sparkling with silver flecks in the sun, the groaning sentinels of the busted and bowed stadium lights lending to the freshness and sparkle a reminder of mortality.

Duffy and Henry settled about halfway up the stands. Otherwise the swept and polished seats were empty of people and of scarecrows.

Duffy pointed out the archway through which the home team had once upon a time roared forth onto the field. That opening, it was said, led not only to the locker room but to untold catacombs beneath the school grounds, where Brother Lampey lived and worked and, the rumors avowed, had put his poor football team through mysterious trials of fire and water, and training rituals of Biblical ferocity, until the State of Alabama had shut him down.

“Kind of gothic, isn’t it?” said Duffy.

“Yes sir,” said Henry.

“Southern grotesque.”

“Hmm,” said Henry. He noticed that there was a single person walking across the football field, carrying something. She seemed to be a big round lady with pink splotches on her face and big fat arms, in a black T-shirt with a colorful picture of a motorcycle on it. Her flat, yellowish hair was dragging in her eyes, which were tiny like rat eyes. When she made it to the fifty-yard line she put her contraption on the ground and pulled a microphone out of it to talk to Henry and Duffy. They had to listen hard.

“Brother Lampey asked me to tell you about his dream. He saw one hundred and eighty rams coming out right over there…” (She pointed to the great porcelain tunnel marked HOME.) “Thundering, rumbling, lumbering from beneath the ground, up a ramp and out into the open, them kind of rams that’s real big and muscle-y with curled horns that look like giant cinnamon rolls. There was so many rams that they stretched all the way from one end of the football field to the other, counting their harnesses. They was four abreast. And if you will do your mathematics you will see that one hundred eighty rams could easily be divided into rows of four, just like the Lord showed it to Brother Lampey in his dream. These mighty rams was pulling on a great rolling platform, and in his dream Brother Lampey seen himself, his own self, at the reigns, and behind him on the platform stood the Ten Commandments, cut from the living rock, almost as big as one of those houses you see being pulled down the road on a tractor trailer, Wide Load. If you will come back here exactly three months to the day, on February fifteenth, you will see all these things which I has told unto you. You will see it in real life. Brother Lampey has done been invited to the Outsider Art Festival in New York City again, and this time he’s up and going. They won’t let us put the Ten Commandments out in front of our courthouses, but Brother Lampey intends on dragging his giant Ten Commandments all the way from Pineknot, Alabama, to New York City by the one hundred eighty spotless male rams like God showed him in his dream, praise Jesus! And as he crosses the country in his chariot pulled by rams he will gather up a mighty army of believers to bring with him into New York. And then, oh brother! I can’t say what happens next, but watch out.”

New York! Where Polly Finch lived! Where God had commanded Henry to go, and now He was providing the way, riding on a giant statue of the Ten Commandments. Henry realized that it was God’s will he had come here—he had been following the signs without knowing it. The signs of the modern day were quiet—“And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice”—not like zillions of locusts and whole skeletons walking around in the street and burning wheels coming down out of the sky with eyes all over them. A sleeping bag, a tweed jacket, a crumpled newsletter, these were the signs and portents of the boring modern world—but Brother Lampey was the old kind of prophet and his army of sheep was the old kind of sign, like the moon turning to blood, and Henry would be back three months to the day to take up his role in the prophecy.

“Will you bring me back here three months from today?” said Henry.

“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t miss it,” said Duffy.

On the way home Duffy said to Josie, “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to travel with that nut, however far he gets. The man of culture versus the man of instinct. And perhaps they learn a little something from one another before they’re done. What a long, strange trip it will have been, to coin a phrase. I don’t know, I think it’s a keen angle. ‘Peachy keen,’ as the vernacular would have it. That’s the kind of thing I could sell to a mainstream magazine, not some fusty academic journal. A Jack London kind of a thing. A man’s man kind of piece. Esquire. I’ll need an assistant, Josie. You ought to think about it. I think it could be the equivalent of a course credit. I could look into that for you. ‘Easy A’ as the kids say! Field work. You’re a bright, talented young woman. I could really use your scientific mind on an excursion like this. Well, it’s something to think about.”

“Somehow I don’t see myself bouncing along on a hay wagon,” said Josie.

“Well, you know, we could take the civilized route. Go by way of recreational vehicle. I’m sure Esquire would foot the bill. Hot showers, the works. Meet up with Brother Lampey at various predetermined points. Do you like hot showers, Josie? Hot, soapy lather? Call me ‘bonkers’ but you seem like a hot, soapy lather ‘gal’ to me! Now don’t get in a ‘rhubarb,’ ‘missy!’ I’m just asking because I want to go ahead and stock up on…”

“I could be your assistant,” said Henry.

Duffy laughed. “There! That’s the spirit!” he said.

God had everything figured out.

Henry stuck pretty close to Duffy and his family after having been given his Revelation. He wanted to be the kind of person that Duffy would take along on his scholarly research trip to New York, where Polly Finch lay like Sleeping Beauty, waiting.

When Henry’s mother and Uncle Lipton had come back from London, England, she was glad to have the extra help looking out for Henry. She let Duffy come over and pick up Henry whenever he wanted. Then she could concentrate on trying to get Uncle Lipton to poop right.

When the time came, Henry planned to volunteer to ride with Brother Lampey for extra observation while Duffy followed behind in a bus or a van, and then at some point he would reveal to Brother Lampey that Duffy was only studying him for secular pleasure and then Brother Lampey would whip the mighty rams into a frenzy of speed and they would “lose” Duffy in an exciting chase scene, so that Henry could obey the Lord by finding Polly Finch in her hospital bed and making out with her until she woke up, or whatever it was he was supposed to do, but that was probably it.

In the meantime Henry pretended to understand and enjoy Duffy’s DVDs of an old TV show where comedians daringly made fun of celebrities Henry had never heard of by singing parodies of old songs that didn’t sound familiar. “It’s so satirical!” Duffy kept saying, or, “What a wonderful spoof of Gore Vidal! You won’t see something like that on corporate network television in this day and age,” and Henry would smile and even laugh. He was being deceptive but he was also being a good sport.

Duffy told Henry a lot of things about how to holistically bolster his self-esteem despite his issues of abandonment because of his mother’s increasing absence and his deformed tongue. Henry pretended to “get it.”

It was true that Henry’s tongue had not healed properly since the night with the owl, maybe because his mother had been too busy with Uncle Lipton to pay attention to it. The tip of Henry’s tongue was split, permanently it seemed, separate sections curling away from one another like horns.

Duffy would say things like, “It’s part of what makes you special as a human individual on this planet,” and Henry would say, “Uh-huh.” And Duffy would say, “I know a lot of ‘real gone cats’ who are ‘totally into’ piercings and tribal scarrings and would ‘give their right arm’—literally! Ha ha!—to have a ‘way out’ tongue like that! I’m sure you’re the envy of many a ‘punkster.’” And Henry would run to the bathroom and cry.

Almost every night Henry sat down with Duffy to watch the Fox News Channel. Duffy watched with his laptop in his lap, firing off what he called “crank emails” to the Fox News anchors. “Listen to this,” he would say, and read aloud to Henry from what he was typing, such as, “You, sir, are a cad,” or “Dear Turd.” Then he would laugh and laugh and have a big drink of alcohol and peer at the TV, his shaky fingers hovering over the keypad. “I’m probably on a government watch list now,” he would say.

Henry pretended not to resist indoctrination, but all he was really doing was watching for a Fox News Alert that Polly Finch had popped out of her coma. And he silently prayed:

“Dear Lord, Just keep her in her coma a little while longer and I will be able to do Your Will.”

Meanwhile Duffy sat in all the luxury the earthly world could offer and suffered from a broken family. The riches and attainments of a college professor are not everything! Aunt Dora was never home. She had begun to enjoy trips to Mississippi for riverboat gambling. Vince never came out of his room. The situation was dysfunctional! Sometimes Josie showed up and honked her horn and Vince ran out to the car and jumped in and they drove away with Duffy watching them from the window.

On one such occasion Duffy grabbed Vince by the arm before he could get out the door.

“Ask her if she wants to come in and play Scattergories,” he said.

“Yeah, right,” said Vince.

After Josie’s car squealed off Duffy got out his cell phone and made a call.

“Hey,” he said, “I was just wondering if you wanted to come over and play Scattergories sometime. With the whole family, you know. And we could talk about those art poses I…hello? I think I lost you. Hello?”

He snapped shut his phone.

“I could have her arrested,” he said to Henry.

“Sir?” said Henry.

“What do you say to a game of Scattergories, ‘champ’? Looks like it’s just you and me, ‘podner.’”

Henry had never played Scattergories before but it didn’t seem like a game for just two people and the loneliness of two people playing Scattergories began to make him depressed. Then they were supposed to think of a color that started with “S” and Henry couldn’t come up with one but Duffy said, “Sunset.”

“Is sunset a color?” said Henry.

For some reason Duffy suddenly became angry and started screaming that yes sunset was a color. He said that he was an art professor and should know whether sunset was a color or not and they could just stop playing if Henry was going to challenge everything he said and he knocked the Scattergories off the table and stormed off to his room and slammed the door.