The Truth About Celia by Kevin Brockmeier Page B

from the Brookses, and when Celia was seven years old, she used to invite her over for Kool-Aid and cookies and let her play with Mudpie and Thisbe. They were just kittens then, and they would press against Celia and purr, slinking through her ankles and collapsing onto her feet. It is hard for Sara to believe that someone so young could come and go from the world so quickly. Maybe she is not really gone, though, Sara thinks. Maybe no one is ever really gone. Maybe when we die we simply drift in and out of the people we have left behind, touching each of them in turn, like God does. This is what she likes to imagine, at least. She watches a few of the bigger men go in after the crazy person, braving the shower of glass inside the pavilion, but it is Rollie Onopa who manages to hoist himself into the rafters.
    Rollie crawls over the dusty wooden beams on his hands and the balls of his feet, keeping to the outside edge of the pavilion, where the ceiling slants down to the narrowest wedge of space. Leaves and candy wrappers and potato chip bags have collected there in a deep hummock, and though they crumple beneath him with a sound like burning kindling, the congressman is too busy taking aim at all the people below to notice him. Rollie sees three long rows of bottles behind the congressman, green and brown and crystal-clear—several years’ worth of determined drinking, he would guess. He creeps along one of the cross-beams, approaching his quarry from behind. There is a flat, circular bird’s nest the size of a Frisbee in his path, and when he crawls over it he sees that it was actually constructed
inside
a Frisbee. He has a keen admiration for birds, for their grace and beauty and cleverness, but bird lovers have always seemed a bit nutty to him, and he doesn’t like to tell people about it. Stealing up on the congressman, he feels like he did as a child playing spy, when the giddy hammering of his heart never quite made him laugh but always came close. Before the congressman can turn around, Rollie grabs him in a bear hug. In the moment of silence that follows, he hears his daughter saying that her dad will catch him, you just watch, he’s probably got him already. When he tucks her in at night and she asks him if he loves her, he always says, Honey, you’re the whole ball of wax, and she answers, Dad, that’s really gross. The congressman tosses his head back and forth, growling, That’s-e-nough, one slow syllable at a time. He bucks against Rollie, and Rollie loses hold of him. Then, before he can stop him, the congressman tumbles backward out of the rafters, knocking his head on the ceiling, and falls lurching and thrashing into the arms of the men below.
    Rollie leaps to the floor and helps them carry him down the stairs, past the chairs and the lamps and the picnic tables, and past Enid Embry, who is already tidying up the shards of broken glass, sweeping them into a single long drift with the edge of her foot. This afternoon a guest on
The Art Bell Show
said that aliens have infiltrated every town in America, disguising themselves as drifters, and Enid would not be at all surprised if United States Congressman Asa Hutchinson were one of them. Nothing is beyond explanation. Just look at all the trouble he has caused, not to mention the mess he has made. He is lucky that nobody got killed. She listens to him yelling, Don’t hit me, let me go, thy rod and thy staff, thy rod and thy staff, as those brave men pin his arms and legs to the ground and try to calm him down. After she has finished sweeping the glass from the first row of chairs, she brushes every last speck of it onto a sheet of cardboard that she finds lying by the wastebasket and throws it all away. There, she thinks. She has done her part. Everyone who hasn’t wandered over to help subdue the congressman is standing before the pavilion, watching and whispering, except for the Reverend, who is sitting with his head on his knees, and Janet, who is