Fat Girl, Terrestrial: A Novel

Thirty-One: Kansas She Says Is the Name of the Star

353 Vivica and I are traveling together to the Garden of Eden, two cramped spars straining at the halyards, two footloose lady longshanks fishtailing forward on a slippery highway in a truck, one in search of prophecy, the other along for the ride, an unseasonal snow falling silently upon the prairie, the tracks of our taxed tires disappearing beneath the white. The Garden of Eden is a cabin made of stones sculpted to look like logs and a biblical bestiary begun in 1907 and finished in 1928 by a veteran of the Civil War and Populist Masonic free-thought farmer who had a certain fondness for God but none at all for banks. As we tool along the barren highway, flanked by occasional outcroppings of limestone dusted with snow, Vivica tells me one of the legends of Gog and Magog, giants born from the coupling of two of the daughters of the Roman thirty-one Kansas She Says Is the Name of the Star 354 Emperor Diocletian and a pair of local demons roaming the island of Albion, to which the emperor’s thirty-three naughty daughters were banished after they murdered their thirty-three husbands. Vivica believes when entering a biblical place, even a concrete impersonation of such a place, one ought to assume an alias, just in case our names turn up on a list of the damned, and she tells me to call her Magog in the company of strangers. That’s how some people flimflam the reaper, she tells me, they pretend not to be the one he’s looking for, give him a quick spin like a roulette wheel, point him south, there she is over yonder, they say and high-tail it north. Then says Magog, “There was a time when everything in the world was much larger, plants and trees, wild climbing, bearded with clouds, the animals gigantic, colossal chickens, and the rabbits, rabbits saber-toothed and tall as water towers . The atmosphere was more hospitable to tall things then. We would have been in danger of being trampled beneath big-footed…ferrets,” says she with a slight quaver in her conviction , “or crushed by saplings blown over in a rainstorm.” Contrary giantess Vivica, antipodal on principle, can sweet talk when she puts her mind to it. She raises her eyebrows at me and says, “Bigbig.” “So what happened?” I ask. “Why did the world go small?” She shrugs her shoulders and looks out the window. “Radiation ,” she says simply. Vivica has a bone to pick with the sun, which, she has told me, she finds too big for its britches. I think she feels a mite upstaged, overshadowed. I’ve caught her glaring reproachfully at the cloudless sky at high noon. I don’t think she would have cottoned to being a small fry in prehistory. 355 We’re on our way to Lucas, and in the unsolved crime that is Kansas, the wee town of Lucas, Kansas, home to the Garden of Eden and a short hop from Paradise, is one bit of evidence I’ve never examined. Somehow it seems to grow smaller and smaller the closer we get, and I start to wonder if we’ll fit. It’s the sort of shriveled way station where a family of four constitutes a convention, leaves the local inn with no vacancies and the two-booth diner shorthanded, the whole dozy hamlet scrambling to accommodate the bump in tourism . Despite being home to the Garden of Eden, Lucas is not set up for dawdling gawkers. In Lucas there is a little girl who visits the Garden each afternoon, sits on the ground beneath the linked arms of Adam and Eve and eats a peanut butter sandwich. Her name is Marjorie. The day before, Marjorie found a man’s body in the Garden, just as Nestor Dethloff’s dead Ezekiel predicted, a shoeless man with a small nose and sad hands, said the little girl to her mother, and the mother went to see if her daughter was being fanciful and found that she wasn’t, but later that evening when they returned again to the Garden , the man was gone, and without a body the local sheriff saw no reason to go to the considerable trouble of believing the little girl, so her mother (great-grandniece of Fleance Shoptaw—I do occasionally get repeat business of a sort) called...