Free The Captive Condition by Kevin P. Keating Page B

clattering against an empty can; it reminded the men of the oddball stuff I played on the radio, dissonant, cacophonous, atonal symphonies and string quartets, Bartók, Schönberg, Penderecki, composers who saw the world as a series of bleak, sonic landscapes. Others claimed it wasn’t a name at all but a verb, as when, for instance, the men, who were continually running out of cigarettes, gonked a smoke from one another. A few of the ticks wished to gonk the ladies who frequented the bowling alley and demolition derby. Indeed, a number of them
had
gonked these women, sometimes on a regular basis and to no good end, fiery strumpets of Welsh and Irish extraction in late middle age with hard faces, underslung jaws, and huge, dangling breasts. At the Department of Plant Operations the rates of venereal disease had reached epidemic proportions, and it made me wonder why my colleagues bothered with women at all.
    “Oh, we’re not particular. We like them in all shapes and sizes, but for the Gonk there is one favorite girl. But of course favorites have to fall.” They hooted and barked and stomped their boots against the floor. “Moonshine and women, son. One of them is a vice. But it seems the Gonk hasn’t figured out which one it is. Most men, when they reach a certain age, buy themselves a dog for companionship. Not the Gonk. Oh, no. Fifty years old and he’s still chasing after the pussycats.”
    They loved this bit of phony folk wisdom and played the redneck card to the hilt, stretching out the word “dog” until it sounded like
daaaawwwg,
landing the
g
with a hard glottal stop.
    For weeks they tantalized me with their riddle. Some said the name came from the Gonk’s imbecilic mispronunciation of the word “Glock.” While a Luddite in most respects, the Gonk was an avid gun enthusiast who owned, in addition to a Civil War musket he proudly displayed on the wall of his new backwoods cottage, a first-generation Glock 17 and a brand-new Glock 36. He had guns for shooting empty beer cans off the crooked fence posts around his property, guns for picking off the rabbits and chipmunks that invaded his yard at night, guns for hunting the twelve-point bucks rutting in the valley, guns for firing into the starry sky at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, guns for a hundred secret purposes. He owned night-vision goggles and exploding bullets and glimmering bayonets. He was a veritable one-man arsenal well prepared for the long overdue revolution and the apocalypse that would follow soon after.
    Besides firearms, the Gonk had taken a keen interest in the solitary pleasures of studying genealogies and reading histories of the town, and though he disliked the idea of disclosing personal information, he applied for a library card at the college and ordered stacks of books. Sometimes he requested mystery novels and studied their plots, which like the streets of town were straight, perpendicular, Euclidean in their logic and predictability, cobbled together with prefabricated blocks of prose, a black-and-white world that was precisely structured, carefully framed, and inhabited by characters as flat as the surrounding countryside. In those stories death was a farce, an amusing way to pass the time, but the Gonk, who was building something grandiose and dangerous in his mind, read these novels the same way he might read books on carpentry and electrical wiring—with a craftsman’s keen eye for detail and with the implicit understanding that he was bound to run into unexpected problems somewhere down the road.
    He persisted with this enterprise because he understood the meaning and consequences of failure and because he didn’t want the whole town to think him entirely strange or crazy or just plain stupid, though in truth they thought all of those things and things far worse. The professors, whenever they saw him browsing the shelves in the college library, secured their wallets and purses, worried that his conniving