Time had taught him that he might not be able to master his appetites. While still young, he had arrived at the conclusion that he would be a bad priest, which hadn’t been the nature of his dream.
He found self-respect in running a clean and friendly taproom, but it seemed to him that simple satisfaction in his accomplishments would sour into vanity if he named the tavern after himself.
In Billy Wiles’s opinion, Jackie would have made a fine priest. Every human being has appetites difficult to control, but far fewer have humility, gentleness, and an awareness of their weaknesses.
Vineyard Hills Tavern. Shady Elm Tavern. Candlelight Tavern. Wayside Tavern.
Patrons regularly offered names for the place. Jackie found their suggestions to be either awkward or inappropriate, or twee. When Billy arrived at 10:45 Tuesday morning, fifteen minutes before the tavern opened, the only cars in the lot were Jackie’s and Ben Vernon’s. Ben was the day cook.
29
Standing beside his Explorer, he studied the low serried hills in the distance, on the far side of the highway. They were dark brown where scalped by earthmovers, pale brown where the wild grass had been faded from green by the arid summer heat.
Peerless Properties, an international corporation, was building a worldclass resort, to be called Vineland, on nine hundred acres. In addition to a hotel with golf course, three pools, tennis club, and other amenities, the project included 190 multimillion-dollar getaway homes for sale to those who took their leisure seriously.
Foundations had been poured in early spring. Walls were rising. Much closer than the palatial structures on the higher hills, less than a hundred feet from the highway, a dramatic mural neared completion in a meadow. Seventy feet high, 150 feet long, three-dimensional, it was of wood, painted gray with black shadowing.
In the Art Deco tradition, the mural presented a stylized image of powerful machinery, including the drive wheels and connecting rods of a locomotive. There also were huge gears, strange armatures, and arcane mechanical forms that had nothing to do with a train.
A giant, stylized figure of a man in work clothes was featured in the section that suggested a locomotive. Body angled left to right as if leaning into a stiff wind, he appeared to be pushing one of the enormous drive wheels, as if caught up in the machine and pressing forward with as much panic as determination, as though if he rested for an instant he would slip out of sync and be torn to pieces.
None of the animated mural’s moving parts was yet operational; nevertheless, it fostered a convincing illusion of movement, speed. On commission, a famous artist with a single name—Valis—had designed the thing and had built it with a crew of sixteen.
The mural was meant to symbolize the hectic pace of modern life, the harried individual overwhelmed by the forces of society.
On the day when the resort opened for business, Valis himself would set the thing afire and burn it to the ground to symbolize the freedom from the mad pace of life that the new resort represented.
Most locals in Vineyard Hills and the surrounding territory mocked the mural, and when they called it art, they pronounced the word with quotation marks.
30
Billy rather liked the hulking thing, but burning it down didn’t make sense to him.
The same artist had once fixed twenty thousand helium-filled red balloons to a bridge in Australia, so it appeared to be supported by them. With a remote control, he popped all twenty thousand at once.
In that case, Billy didn’t understand either the “art” or the point of popping it.
Although not a critic, he felt this mural was either low art or high craftsmanship. Burning it made no more sense to him than would a museum tossing Rembrandt’s paintings on a bonfire.
So many things about contemporary society dismayed him that he wouldn’t lose sleep over this small issue. But on the night of burning, he wouldn’t come to watch the fire, either.
He went into the tavern.
The air carried such a rich scent that it almost seemed to have flavor. Ben Vernon was cooking a pot of chili.
Behind the bar, Jackie O’Hara conducted an inventory of the liquor supply. “Billy, did you see that special on Channel Six last night?”
“No.”
“You didn’t see that special about UFO’s, alien abduction?”
“I was carving to zydeco.”
“This guy says he was taken up to a mother ship orbiting the earth.”
“What’s new about that? You hear that stuff all the time.”
“He says he was given a proctological exam by a bunch of space aliens.”
Billy pushed through the bar gate. “That’s what they all say.”
“I know. You’re right. But I don’t get it.” Jackie frowned. “Why would a superior alien race, a thousand times more intelligent than we are, come trillions of miles across the universe just to look up our butts? What are they —
perverts?”
“They never looked up mine,” Billy assured him. “And I doubt they looked up this guy’s, either.”
“He’s got a lot of credibility. He’s a book author. I mean, even before this book, he published a bunch of others.”
