Mere Anarchy (14 page)

I guess physics can explain everything except the softer sex, although I told my wife I got the shiner because the universe was contracting, not expanding, and I just wasn’t paying attention.

A
BOVE THE
L
AW
, B
ELOW THE
B
OX
S
PRINGS

WILTON’S CREEK LIES
at the center of the Great Plains, north of Shepherd’s Grove, to the left of Dobb’s Point, and just above the bluffs that form Planck’s constant. The land is arable and is found primarily on the ground. Once a year, the swirling winds from the Kinna Hurrah rip through the open fields, lifting farmers from their work and depositing them hundreds of miles to the south, where they often resettle and open boutiques. On a gray Tuesday morning in June, Comfort Tobias, the Washburns’ housekeeper, entered the Washburn home, as she has done each day for the past seventeen years. The fact that she was fired nine years ago has not stopped her coming to clean, and the Washburns value her more than ever since terminating her wages. Before working for the Washburns, Tobias was a horse whisperer at a ranch in Texas, but she suffered a nervous breakdown when a horse whispered back. “What stunned me most,” she recalls, “was that he knew my Social Security number.”

When Comfort Tobias entered the Washburn house that Tuesday, the family was off on vacation. (They had stowed away on a cruise ship to the Greek islands, and although they’d hidden in barrels and done without food or water for three weeks, the Washburns did manage to sneak out on deck at 3
A.M.
each night to play shuffleboard.) Tobias went upstairs to change a lightbulb.

“Mrs. Washburn liked her lightbulbs changed every Tuesday and Friday, whether they needed it or not,” she explained. “She loved fresh lightbulbs. The linens we did once a year.”

The minute the housekeeper entered the master bedroom, she knew something was amiss. Then she saw it—she couldn’t believe her eyes! Someone had been at the mattress and had cut off the tag that reads, “It is a violation of law to remove this tag, except by the consumer.” Tobias shuddered. Her legs buckled and she felt sick. Something told her to look in the children’s rooms, and sure enough, there, too, the tags had been removed from the mattresses. Now her blood froze as she saw a large shadow loom ominously across the wall. Her heart pounded and she wanted to scream. Then she recognized the shadow as her own and, resolving to diet, phoned the police.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Chief Homer Pugh said. “Things like this just don’t go on in Wilton’s Creek. Sure, one time somebody broke into the local bakery and sucked the jelly out of the doughnuts, but the third time it happened we had marksmen up on the roof and we shot him in the act.”

“Why? Why?” sobbed Bonnie Beale, a neighbor of the Washburns’. “So senseless, so cruel. What kind of world are we living in when someone other than the consumer cuts off the mattress tags?”

“Before this,” Maude Figgins, the local schoolteacher, said, “when I’d go out I could always leave my mattresses home. Now whenever I leave my house, whether it’s to go shopping or out to dinner, I’m taking all my mattresses along.”

• • •

A
T MIDNIGHT THAT EVENING,
along the road to Amarillo, Texas, two people drove at high speed in a red Ford with fake license plates that looked real from a distance but on closer inspection were clearly made of marzipan. The driver had a tattoo on his right forearm that read, “Peace, Love, Decency.” When he rolled up his left sleeve another tattoo appeared: “Printing Error—Disregard My Right Forearm.”

Next to him was a young blond woman who might have been considered beautiful if she had not been a dead ringer for Abe Vigoda. The driver, Beau Stubbs, had recently escaped from San Quentin, where he had been incarcerated for littering. Stubbs was convicted of dropping a Snickers wrapper on the street, and the judge, claiming that he had shown no remorse, sentenced him to two consecutive life terms.

The woman, Doxy Nash, had been married to an undertaker and worked beside him. Stubbs had entered their funeral parlor one day, just to browse. Smitten, he tried to make flirtatious conversation with her, but she was too busy
cremating
someone. It wasn’t long before Stubbs and Doxy Nash began having a secret affair, although soon she found out about it. Her undertaker husband, Wilbur, liked Stubbs and offered to bury him gratis if he would agree to have it done that day. Stubbs knocked him unconscious and ran away with his wife but not before substituting a rubber blow-up doll in her place. One evening, after three of the happiest years of Wilbur Nash’s life, he became suspicious when he asked his wife for more chicken and she suddenly popped and flew around the room in ever-diminishing circles, coming to rest on the carpet.

• • •

H
OMER
P
UGH STANDS FIVE-EIGHT
in his stocking feet, which he keeps in a large duffel bag along with his actual feet. Pugh has been a policeman as far back as he can remember. His father was a notorious bank robber, and the only way Pugh could get to spend time with him was to apprehend him. Pugh arrested his father on nine occasions; he values their conversations, although many took place while the two men were exchanging gunfire.

I asked Pugh what he made of the situation.

“My theory?” Pugh said. “‘Two drifters, off to see the world …’” Soon he was singing “Moon River” while his wife, Ann, served drinks, and I was given a fifty-six-dollar tab. Just then the phone rang, and Pugh pounced on it. The voice at the other end came across the room with deep resonance.

“Homer?”

“Willard,” Pugh said. It was Willard Boggs—Trooper Boggs of the Amarillo state police. The state police in Amarillo are a crackerjack group, and members not only must be physically impressive but must pass a rigorous written exam. Boggs had failed the written test twice, first being unable to explicate Wittgenstein to the desk sergeant’s satisfaction, then mistranslating Ovid. It was a mark of his dedication that Boggs received tutoring, and his final thesis on Jane Austen remains a classic among the motorcycle police who patrol Amarillo’s highways.

“We got our eye on a couple,” he told Chief Pugh. “Very suspicious behavior.”

“Like what?” Pugh asked, lighting yet another cigarette. Pugh is aware of the health hazards of smoking and so uses only chocolate cigarettes. When he lights the tips, the chocolate melts on his trousers, giving him enormous cleaning bills on a policeman’s salary.

“Couple came into a fancy restaurant here,” Boggs continued. “Ordered a big barbecue dinner, wine, all the trimmings. Ran up a whopping check and tried paying with mattress tags.”

“Pick ’em up,” Pugh said. “Bring ’em in, but don’t tell anybody what the charge is. Say they fit the description of two people we want for questioning about fondling a hen.”

The state law on removing the tag of a mattress that does not belong to you goes back to the early 1900s, when Asa Chones engaged in a quarrel with his neighbor over a pig that had wandered into the neighbor’s yard. The two men fought
over
possession of the pig for several hours, until Chones realized that it was not a pig at all but his wife. The matter was adjudicated by the town elders, who ruled that Chones’s wife’s features were sufficiently porcine to justify the mistake. In a fit of rage, Chones entered the neighbor’s home that night and tore off all the man’s mattress tags. He was apprehended and stood trial. The mattress minus the tag, reasoned the court verdict, “insults the integrity of the stuffing.”

At first Nash and Stubbs maintained their innocence, claiming to be a ventriloquist and puppet. By 2
A.M.
both suspects had begun to crack under Pugh’s relentless interrogation, which was cleverly done in French, a language they did not know, and hence could not easily lie in. Finally, Stubbs confessed.

• • •

“W
E PULLED UP
in front of the Washburn house in the moonlight,” he said. “We knew the front door was always left open, but we broke in just to keep in practice. Doxy turned all the Washburn family photos to the wall so there wouldn’t be any witnesses. I’d heard about the Washburns in prison from Wade Mullaway, a serial killer who dismembered his victims and ate them. He’d worked as a chef for the Washburns but was let go when they found a nose in their soufflé. I knew it was not only illegal but a crime against God to remove tags from mattresses where I was not the consumer, but I kept hearing this voice telling me to do it. If I’m not mistaken, it was Walter Cronkite. I cut the Washburns’ tag, Doxy did the
kids’
mattresses. I was sweating—the room was blurry—my whole childhood passed before my eyes, then another kid’s childhood, and finally the childhood of the Nizam of Hyderabad.”

At the trial Stubbs chose to act as his own lawyer, but a conflict over his fee led to ill feelings. I visited Beau Stubbs on Death Row, where numerous appeals kept him from the gallows for a decade, in which time he used prison to learn a trade and became a highly skilled airline pilot. I was present when the final sentence was carried out. A great sum of money was paid to Stubbs by Nike for the television rights, allowing the company to put its logo on the front of his black hood. Whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent remains questionable, although studies show that the odds of criminals committing another crime drops by almost half after their execution.

T
HUS
A
TE
Z
ARATHUSTRA

THERE’S NOTHING LIKE
the discovery of an unknown work by a great thinker to set the intellectual community atwitter and cause academics to dart about like those things one sees when looking at a drop of water under a microscope. On a recent trip to Heidelberg to procure some rare nineteenth-century dueling scars, I happened upon just such a treasure. Who would have thought that
Friedrich Nietzsche’s Diet Book
existed? While its authenticity might appear to be a soupçon dicey to the niggling, most who have studied the work agree that no other Western thinker has come so close to reconciling Plato with Pritikin. Selections follow.

• • •

F
AT ITSELF
is a substance or essence of a substance or mode of that essence. The big problem sets in when it accumulates on your hips. Among the pre-Socratics, it was Zeno who held that weight was an illusion and that no matter how much a man ate he would always be only half as fat as the man who never does push-ups. The quest for an ideal body obsessed the
Athenians,
and in a lost play by Aeschylus, Clytemnestra breaks her vow never to snack between meals and tears out her eyes when she realizes she no longer fits into her bathing suit.

It took the mind of Aristotle to put the weight problem into scientific terms, and in an early fragment of the
Ethics
he states that the circumference of any man is equal to his girth multiplied by pi. This sufficed until the Middle Ages, when Aquinas translated a number of menus into Latin and the first really good oyster bars opened. Dining out was still frowned upon by the Church, and valet parking was a venal sin.

As we know, for centuries Rome regarded the Open Hot Turkey Sandwich as the height of licentiousness; many sandwiches were forced to stay closed and only reopened after the Reformation. Fourteenth-century religious paintings first depicted scenes of damnation in which the overweight wandered Hell, condemned to salads and yogurt. The Spaniards were particularly cruel, and during the Inquisition a man could be put to death for stuffing an avocado with crabmeat.

No philosopher came close to solving the problem of guilt and weight until Descartes divided mind and body in two, so that the body could gorge itself while the mind thought, Who cares? It’s not me. The great question of philosophy remains: If life is meaningless, what can be done about alphabet soup? It was Leibniz who first said that fat consisted of monads. Leibniz dieted and exercised but never did get rid of his monads—at least, not the ones that adhered to his thighs. Spinoza, on the other hand, dined sparingly because he
believed
that God existed in everything and it’s intimidating to wolf down a knish if you think you’re ladling mustard onto the First Cause of All Things.