Elephant Bangs Train

by William Kotzwinkle

  Dare we venture out? We must. Out of the dark courtyard and into the swimming streets goes the tale.

  The streets are now a river. And as for the Yellow, it is a torrent, for it has been rising all evening and we are now well past midnight. The Emperor has already retired with his new Flower, and been granted a closer glimpse of the plump little birds who sing in the cloth of her gown. Wood Flower perhaps is sighing, though this cannot be known for certain, but that is how the serving maids tell it, that there was much sighing and some laughter from the Royal Chamber.

  Oh, Gracious Lady, how you have risen! Have you risen as high as Yellow River, which climbs now about the neck of Rag Fellow, that foolish fellow who clings to the last pillar of Tiger Bridge, who awaits you in the downpour, whose tears perhaps now mingle with the river?

  Excellent Rag Fellow, a fish in your pocket, lamentable Rag Fellow, bathed in the spring swelling of Yellow River, do you think you might now release your grip? The water is at your chin, Tiger Bridge is trembling.

  So, then, up it came, over his nose, closing his eyes, finally wrenching him free of the pillar of life, releasing him from his wretched assignation and his unhappy rag suit. Down Yellow River he went.

  In the Palace of the Purple Cloud there was laughter. Does she stand at the window now and seek the hidden moon? And are there tears? And for whom?

  Down Yellow River went Rag Fellow, tossed and whirled in the spring dance, a good fellow, a fine fellow, heart flooded, dead in the waves, faithful to the end and so deceived. His courage is to be admired. His course was eastward towards the sea.

  Day has come upon Yellow River. Yes, and the afternoon is bright. How smooth and clear the water is. The old men are fishing from Tiger Bridge.

  Stroke of Good Luck

  A True Nurse Romance

  'LIFT UP your nightshirt, lover, it's time for a shave.'

  Nurse was young and pretty with large swell breasts. I was fourteen and scared with a large swelling appendix.

  She opened a safety razor and put in a blade. 'Come on, don't be bashful,' she said, and yanked up my white hospital gown. I lay petrified, and she placed her fingers on my stomach, stretching the skin upwards. 'Don't move,' she said, and began to shave, without lather, my secondary sexual characteristics.

  I have a mole in there, be careful.

  The razor moved swiftly through the dense underbrush. 'Don't worry,' she said, looking up at me with a smile, 'I haven't slipped yet,' and laid her free hand on my primary sexual characteristic, to keep it safe, no doubt, from razor rash.

  After scraping me bald, she put away the razor and took a thermometer out of her lapel. 'Roll over.'

  I rolled over on to my side and stared out the window of my semi-private room, high over the city. Suddenly I felt something hard and cold going up my semi-private.

  'Do you want to see a priest before you go into the operating room?'

  'No.'

  She pulled down my nightshirt. 'Don't go anywhere,' she said. 'I'll be back in a few minutes.'

  She went out the door and I lay looking out the window. The night before, I'd got a terrific pain in my side. The doctor came to the house, felt my stomach and said, 'Get him to the hospital.' Now the pain was gone, my appendix was working fine, and would be removed in a few minutes.

  Nurse came in wheeling a table. She threw up my nightshirt and drew out the thermometer. 'O.K., temperature's normal. Get on.' I lowered my nightshirt and climbed on to the table. She wheeled us out the door and down the hall. I knew of a man who had a sponge sewn into his stomach. She brought the table to a stop. 'Let me see if they're ready for you,' she said and walked off. I followed the wiggle of hips inside her tight uniform.

  A priest turned the corner of the hallway. Nurse stopped him and he followed her back to my table.

  'Here's a priest,' she said happily.

  'Hello, my boy.'

  'You'll have to hurry, Father,' she said and hustled off down the hall. I did not watch the wiggle of her hips.

  The priest put the band of the confessor around his neck. I said in a whisper, 'Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.'

  His head was turned and his eyes were closed. 'Yes, my son, go on.'

  'About a year ago, Father—I found a pile of old photography magazines in the cellar. They're filled with pictures—of naked women.'

  'Is that all?'

  'I go down there quite a bit, Father.'

  'Say three Hail Marys and pray for me. God bless you.'

  Nurse turned the corner. 'Time to go,' she said, and taking the head of the table, wheeled me down the hall. I saw a pair of swinging doors ahead, with portholes in them, and we pushed through, into a large operating theatre. Four bright lights were blazing on the ceiling and I was wheeled under them. A doctor came towards me in a white mask and cap.

  'Count backwards from one hundred, please.' A gas mask was pressed to my nose.

  'One-hundred . . . ninety-nine . . .' The four bright lights became the propellers of an airplane burning in white space.

  I awoke in a dimly lit room. A nun was sitting at a table near the foot of the bed. 'Hail Mary,' I said in a whisper, hoping I wasn't dead.

  'Go to sleep,' said the nun.

  In the days that followed I amused myself drawing pictures of women in skimpy bathing suits, particularly my nurse, whom I regularly depicted in a tiny bikini, running to the sea.

  'If I wore something like that, I'd be arrested. Roll over.'

  I spent each day carefully shaping her long legs, her big hips and breasts, but I was too young and shy to remove her panties on paper and reveal the curling mysterious. Occasionally, however, I slipped in nipples peeking through the halter of the bikini.

  'Is that all you ever draw?' asked the nun.

  I drew a picture of Jesus and hung it over my bed.

  'That's beautiful,' said Sister. Nonetheless, I was filled with sinful thought, and now that my secondary sexual characteristics were growing in again, I was spending a good deal of time scratching under my nightshirt. Only the fear of tearing open my incision kept me from having to make another serious confession.

  Nurse appeared each morning with a pan of water and a washcloth, to scrub briskly my primary, secondary, and semi-private. For such treatment it was worth having had the operation, and when the time came for me to leave the hospital I feigned weakness and was allowed to stay, at considerable expense to my parents, for another week of birdbaths.

  At the end of the second week, my father became suspicious.

  'Who are you, Lady Astor?'

  'I'm too weak to walk.'

  'I'll drive you home.'

  My clothes were brought from the closet. Nurse helped me out of bed and dressed me for the last time.

  'Here,' I said, and handed her my best work, a sketch of her in a nurse's cap and three Band Aids.

  I limped down the hallway to the lobby, where my mother was waiting happily and my father was paying the bill. He came towards us, shaking his head. 'Let's get the hell out of here,' he said taking me by the arm, 'before he has a relapse.'

  We rode home. My mother chattered merrily in the car. My father removed a medicine bottle filled with rye from the glove compartment and took a swig, as he did whenever he paid a bill.

  Friends visited me at home and we played Monopoly, but cardboard deeds no longer excited me. I moved my metal hat down Boardwalk listlessly, deep in debt and not caring, longing for green plaster corridors and the smell of antiseptic, and most of all, for my semi-private morning bath.

  My drawings of women became more dangerous. I chased bare ladies through the bush, shaping their fat white bottoms hungrily. I hung breasts like cantaloupes on them, with huge cherry nipples, and brushed in the curling mysterious. When my parents came into the room, I hid these works and showed them a caricature of Winston Churchill.

  When it came time for a visit to the doctor who had removed my appendix, I had high hopes he'd fin
d something wrong and send me back to the hospital for observation and maybe a trim.

  I went into the Medical Arts Building. The doctor felt my incision, removed the fading stitches with a tweezers, and conducted me into his library, where he told me to wait. I sat down on a leather couch and looked out the window to the street below. Voices came through the open door.

  'Take a sperm test, Nurse.'

  'Yes, Doctor.'

  A young, good-looking nurse came into the library and closed the door behind her. 'Hello,' she said, and pulled the Venetian blinds shut. The room fell into half-light. I sat on the couch, waiting nervously.

  She opened a medicine cabinet on the wall and removed a long cylindrical tube. 'This is cocoa butter,' she said. 'It will make your scar heal faster.' A brown finger emerged from the tube, like a large lipstick.

  'Open your trousers, please.'

  I opened them and she brought the stick of cocoa butter to my incision, gently rubbing the soft, sweet-smelling stick into the red smile on my abdomen. When she finished with the cocoa butter, she went to the cabinet again, this time bringing out a white jar. 'Pull your shorts down please.'

  Holy Christ.

  She unscrewed the lid of the white jar. Cautiously, I lowered my jockeys. Despite my dreams of doctoring a nursie, I was shy, and revealed my secondary hairy only. My private primary was still concealed.

  'All the way down, please,' she said, and reached into the elastic of my jockeys. We pulled them down together. My private primary was now public.

  She opened the white jar and dipped her fingers in. They came out covered with white cream. 'Tell me if I hurt you,' she said, and sitting down beside me on the couch, slipped her hand between my legs.

  Slowly she rubbed the cream up my thigh towards my groin, and for an insane moment I thought her fingers brushed over my primary. Then to my astonishment, she began to rub it lightly yes, but deliberately. She rubbed the white cream all around it, and squeezed it gently.

  'Maybe we should take your pants all the way off,' she said, and pulled them off my ankles along with my jockey shorts. I sat up, half-naked and astounded.

  'Lie down,' she said, 'and relax.' My thigh was touching hers. Her skirt was tight, her hips soft, my heart was pounding.

  I sank back down and she returned her hand between my thighs and laid her fingers on Mickey Finn, as my Irish grandfather used to call his primary sexual characteristic. My stomach leapt wildly; Nurse covered Mickey's head with cream.

  A typically modern male, I tried to repress any sign of excitement. After all, what kind of fiend would the doctor and his nurse think I was, if; during the sperm test, just because of a little cream rub on my primary, I got an erection?

  Nurse solved my dilemma by taking Mickey Finn directly in her fingers, toying with him in a manner that could not be misinterpreted. She bent him back and forth, slapped him up and down, and rubbed cream from the balls of Mickey's feet to the top of his swelling head.

  I was facing the window but I could feel Mickey growing larger in Nurse's fingers. She seemed prepared for this manifestation, for she now began a rhythmic stroking up and down Mickey's person. The blood rose to his head, my soft stones rolled, and Mickey Finn came out of his tomb like the Resurrection, dressed in a white robe, standing straight as a shillelagh.

  I lay with arms folded on my chest, in the first realm of forgetfulness. Nurse tickled Mickey's belly with her finger. She pulled him by the collar, massaged his dome, put cream in his eye. She took his rubber suit and pulled it over his head, then let it back down and did this several times. 'I'm not hurting you, am I?' she asked.

  I looked at her deliriously. I was fourteen year old and God had answered my darkest prayer.

  As if building a fire girl-scout fashion, Nurse took Mickey in the palms of both hands and rolled him back and forth like a stick. She was a good scout. Mickey grew hot at the root. I drifted out the window and returned through the ceiling.

  Nurse returned to the jar for more cream. I lay, fixed to her hip. With two fingers, then, she embraced Mickey by the throat, in a most sensitive spot. The veins bulged in his neck. With little strokes, she massaged up and down. Mickey pulsed dangerously. Nurse drew her hand away stopping us on the edge of explosion and Mickey fell backwards on my stomach, descending from his dizzy climb.

  Is this it? Do they just test it out to see if it's still working, and you crawl home on your hands and knees?

  'Would you help me off with my jacket, please?' asked the nurse. I pulled her jacket off obediently, touching the soft shoulders beneath her blouse. 'I don't want to get any cream on it,' she said, and then, with a smile, dipped her fingers back into the jar.

  She fed Mickey Finn some more cream and instantly he grew fat and happy again, dancing in in the half-light, a whipped-cream hat cocked over one eye.

  Her legs were crossed, the knees bare behind sheer stockings. We were sunk together in the soft leather couch with hips full against each other. The window was burning, four propellers were turning in space, her entire hand was closing around Mickey and I was taking off.

  She stopped us on the edge. 'You'd better roll your shirt,' she said.

  I tucked it quickly up around my neck, and Nurse closed her hand around Mickey again, pumping him up and down, faster and more forceful, her fingers slithering with cream, driving Mickey to maddening heights.

  Up came the naked photographic ladies, laughing uncontrollably. Mickey ticked, going nuts, and then, as so often happened to my Irish grandfather's still during prohibition, there came an eruption from the cellar. Mickey's head blew off, and a white jet of homemade brew flew through the air, splashing down on my bare chest.

  She pumped Mickey again and again, until the last drop was out, and my childhood was gone. Then she stood, and opening the cabinet, took out a glass slide. She ran it up my chest, scooping off the sperm for the celebrated test, enclosing it efficiently inside another slide. Then she washed Mickey Finn and tenderly dried him.

  'You can get dressed now,' she said, and handed me the tube of cocoa butter. 'Don't forget to rub this in every day,' she said with a smile, and left me.

  I left the Medical Arts Building, weak in the knees, but wonderfully wiser. In a single afternoon, I had shot past all my friends into a new and exciting world, and the whole deal only cost my father seven hundred dollars.

  The Trap

  OUT OF THE WHIRLING SNOW came a man wrapped so deep in fur he resembled a bear. He moved slowly along, stepping grotesquely, leaving the print of snowshoes behind him.

  Pushing against the wind, he marched towards log cabin set in a grove of frozen hemlock. Smoke rose from the cabin's chimney and its frostbitten windows were bright. He walked to the door, opened it, and plunged into the warm firelight.

  'So you made it,' said a man in uniform, seated at a rough oak desk.

  'Yes sir,' said the man in fur, saluting. 'Constable Turner reporting.'

  'I'm Lieutenant Belfast. Make yourself at home, Constable.'

  Constable Turner removed his coat and hat, revealing the red jacket of the Northwest Mounted Police. Stepping to the stove, he struggled to remove his boots.

  The cabin door opened again and a short potbellied man with an armload of wood stepped in. 'Cook,' said the Lieutenant, 'meet Constable Turner.'

  'Howdy,' said Cook, setting down the wood' and extending his hand. 'You're new to the Mounties?'

  'Yes,' said Turner.

  'You'll like it,' said Cook. 'Good clean work.'

  In the following weeks, Constable Turner was worked into the routine of the post. Assigned to counting caribou droppings, he prowled the snow fields each day with his notebook, determining the size of the herd. He slipped through the trees, and dreaming of gunrunners and fur smugglers, took careful measure of the steaming pellet.

  At night, the glow from the cabin was the only light on Red Deer Hill. Inside a card game of quiet bids and swearing filled the evenings for Belfa
st and Cook, while Constable Turner lay on his bunk studying the Criminal Code.

  After the other men went to sleep, he continue reading ensnarement procedure by the low lamp, until his eyes crossed with fatigue. He closed the manual, blew out the light, and looking at the dark sloping roof over his bed, counted a pattern of knotholes in the wood. Were the other men having him on about the droppings?

  Next morning, Constable Turner climbed from a cold bed on to the freezing floor.

  'Bright enough day,' said Cook, rattling his pans.

  'Plenty of sun,' said Constable Turner. 'Spot a turd ten miles away.' He went out of the cabin towards the woodpile in the rear. Crossing the yard, he heard the distant barking of dogs. Looking down Red Deer Hill, he saw a dog team coming out of the fir trees below.

  'Mail sled,' said Cook, joining him on the hillside.

  'Bonjour, messieurs,' said the postman, a natty little Frenchman. Carrying his pouch into the cabin, he presented Lieutenant Belfast with the correspondence from the post in Regina. Belfast slowly and carefully went through the month's orders.

  'Constable Turner,' he said, getting up and walking to the large wall map of the territory.

  'Yes sir,' said Turner, crossing quickly to his side.

  'There's a man in trouble here,' said the Lieutenant, pointing to a northwest spot on the map. 'You'll leave tomorrow and take him to the hospital in Edmonton.'

  'Yes sir.'

  'You might take a look at this.' Lieutenant Belfast handed Turner a wrinkled letter, written in a thin unsteady hand:

  20 Sept 1909

  Deer sir a trapper name John live up snake lake an is craze for some year might send a man afor He kill someone I saw him summer an he think he a moose I am miner W Nettlebrew

  Turner spent the day prowling restlessly around his laid-out pack, adding and eliminating, finally settling the great bundle in the corner by his bed. He spent the evening by the oil lamp studying the trail map, and traced his 120-mile route carefully with red ink.