Chapter 5: The Skull of Doom Part 5

EPISODE in the CATTARAUGUS CREEK VALLEY, Continued

July, 2006

EAST OTTO, NY

4

Eighty people have assembled around an odd cross between a sculpture and a pyre. Metal rods have been welded into a frame that could have held a refrigerator, and the space within is filled with scrap wood and branches that spill out on all sides. A few still-green boughs with their foliage stem up out of the core making it seem like a Bigfoot-bouquet. Commercial fireworks, even small rockets, sprout from it.

The inch-thick plywood silhouette of a giant baby is mounted on the spectator side of the contraption. Facing right, its position could be that of an astronaut at takeoff or the bas-relief of a Mesoamerican king reclining in a throne meant to be the mouth of the serpent-god. One undersized arm is outstretched as though groping for an imaginary nipple.

A small crew is finishing the stocking of the effigy/pyre. From time to time, others rush up and toss small items onto it. The Frenchman presumes them fireworks or even offerings to be taken up by the blaze. The big artist comes up to him. "Once this gets going, it might be a bad idea to get too close unless you have eye gear." The goggles drop back into place, and off he goes.

A surge in the human energy announces a change. Howls, hooting, and staring to the Frenchman's left announce that something is on its way from that direction. The goggled artist emerges from the dimness at the right of the pyre, surmounts a picnic table, stares to the left, and calls out a few lines that seem like poetry.

The human frenzy increases like the anticipation before a famous rock band steps onto a darkened stage. With the breaths of a dragon, a torchlit, flame-spouting golf cart approaches, painted and paneled to make it look like the head of a crocodile. Two men in Kermit-the-Frog-like headpieces occupy the seats, one driving. A tall fellow in burnt orange robes stands between them, a green lizard-head atop his own, and surmounting that is the tinfoil pseudo-crown that the Frenchman had worn earlier. He calls a few lines back to the artist.

The Frenchman smiles; if the goal is to make the newcomer a saurian Mordred, somebody is being droll. His mask is little more dreadful than the head of a Ninja Turtle. But from his lines and the onlookers' calls toward the cutout-baby, it's clear that the group is calling upon the Lizard King to free the world from "the Abominable Infant," surely a reverse of the customary symbolism. It's also clear that this is the opening and closing night of a play whose imprecise text exists only in the minds of this cult of artists - and this final scene is all that anyone will ever see.

The three lizard-men dismount and stride to the pyre like the envoys of an invader approaching a throne. Their chief carries a blowtorch like a scepter, and the voices and laughter rise. After some limber gesturing and a faux-Arthurian, likely improvised speech, he does the lighting. Most of the crowd backs away.

The fire takes quick hold behind the cutout baby, making a shadow of it and, by showing through the hole in its head, giving it a lurid orange eye. Cell phones rise and cameras flash.

Soon the blaze finds the fireworks. There is a staggered outburst at the start. Some manifest as simple percussions and some soar in arcs and pinwheels. Then the crescendo rises, and at its peak the assembled group react like it's midnight on New Year's Eve.

Some explosives are hidden deep, and it takes awhile for the blaze to discover them. For minutes they react unpredictably, most huffing invisibly under their scrap-wood thicket, but some finding their way to the surface. With each delayed whistle, peal, pop, or burst, people laugh and cheer as if they are at a sporting event and the percussions are athletes making plays.

The young Frenchman is amused. He knows a variety of substances are consumed here; he has done a bit of them himself. In no state has he ever found a bonfire exciting - or funny. More than one camera is trained on the scene, and to him it seems possible that all the spectators are acting, lending their sounds and presences to a film.

The display falls back into a normal fire, one that figures to go on far into the night because of all the unseasoned boughs that have been tossed atop it. The fire's last gesture before lapsing into a glow is to overtake "the Abominable Infant." As its edges char and glimmer, the immodest comments resurge, as if the effigy is a real baby no one cares much about - or else the true opponent of human society. By the time the shrimpy T-Rex arm blackens, it looks like an appeal for rescue.

5

The shadow-baby has scorched and crumbled into a rough half-moon. The pastoral furnace is just a glow and an uneven crackle. The structure around it continues to work like a chimney, launching vivid sparks into the firmament like souls bent on finding their way back to the Source.

Leaning on a trunk at the edge of the gleam, the French youth tracks them as they rise. He has studied the Western poets and thinks of Shelley's lines about the power of words to inspire speculation like ashes and sparks "from an unextinguish'd hearth." He can envision these streaking, strangely uniform glows as biological winged beings, many of whom at forty feet up grow distracted by the world they are about to leave, decide quickly to tour it, then tear off in lateral directions and don the camouflage of night.

He senses things moving overhead and looks up. The high branches are alight with green glows like elfin beings leaping from one perch to another, and he wonders if they could be signs of the valley acting up in sympathy with the human frenzy. He remembers the revolving lasers at work earlier at the ground level and looks back to find that this, at least, has a material explanation. From one of the high windows of the farmhouse, someone has trained a multiple-beam show into the treetops.

He turns back to the level around him and notices again the beat-driven music coming from the house a hundred yards away. The ceremony and other human activity had drowned it from perception, and its effect amuses him again, so mechanical and yet so primal. He notices that the many conversations within twenty feet of him are astonishingly clear. He can follow none of them; he can hear only occasional phrases, but, like someone enjoying the natural sounds of a forest, he is fascinated by the tones. He tracks individual voices, a little like listening to the music of a band and choosing different instruments to follow.

The Frenchman's pierced, tattooed, and experimentally-coifed companions have reassembled from their various points about the fire and grove. As if their absorption in the rite had been a journey in time and territory, they seem stricken with joy to be back with their fellow beings. Some dart from group to group. Others huddle in shadowy handfuls, greeting each new arrival with delight like the shades in Virgil's Hades, piecing the picture together after the fall of Troy and trading the stories of their own transitions.

Most of them are thirty-somethings, and they are wonderfully uninhibited. They express themselves in motion as they speak. Elbows twitch, bodies rock, and heads duck or loll. They are irreverent, too. Swearing is as reflexive to them as breathing.

One small-statured fellow in a top hat bearing a Riddler-style-question mark is particularly charismatic. He dips and rears with laughter among the small throngs. Every group he joins takes on new energy.

A few others, though, are overcome, including the Frenchman's new friend, the big artist. Peeling off his shirt and hooting like a Native warrior, he breaks through the tree line and trots into the field. Two or three others follow as the same mood takes them, sallying into the meadow, loping like coyotes. Faintly illumined, their forms stand out against the emptiness until they, too, fall invisible. Now and then they stray back into the fire-glow like predators hoping to pick off foragers from a camp.

Several times people come to talk to the youth under his tree. He responds brightly, but he is enjoying the scene and his own processing of it. He wants to observe the experience in its full integrity and affect it as little as possible.

The bare-chested metal-artist makes one of his spontaneous returns to the light, drifts over to the Frenchman, and lifts his hand for a high-five. "You see what an English degree will do for you," he says, nodding at the craze around him, rolling his head back and grinning like someone ready to turn into a werewolf just to show that he can. His nose has a dip as if it had once been broken, and his upper front teeth are short and jagged as if imperfectly repaired after many fights. Then he is off and soon invisible. The Frenchman fancies that his eyes would have gleamed if he had looked directly into a light.

Two women come into the fire-glow from different directions and begin to dance slowly. One is fine-featured and curvaceous, with a selectively-shaved blonde Goth 'do. The other is taller and slender, in a form-fitting jaguar-suit and with startling, artificially red hair. Barely glancing at each other, they sway and shake to the percussion-driven music. Though often far apart and on opposite sides of the ebbing pyre, they appear to be stalking each other in a balky, hard-to-get duet.

A tall, pale, short-haired lad in minimal costume - a cut-out lycra speed-suit - steps out, a seven-foot chain over his shoulders and a torchlit lantern at each end. He commences a captivating routine, slinging the lanterns about like the leader of a marching band.

The Frenchman studies all this for a few more moments. Then he strolls into the dimness behind the fire-frosted trees.