Pricksongs & Descants

by Robert Coover

  “My name?” She twirled gracelessly on one dropsied ankle and cried to the crowd: “Shall I tell?”

  Tell! Tell! Tell!” shouted the spectators, clapping rhythmically. Paul let himself be absorbed by it; there was, after all, nothing else to do.

  The policeman, rapping a pencil against his blue notebook to the rhythm of the chant, leaned down over Paul and whispered: (“I think we’ve got them on our side now!”)

  Paul, his gaze floating giddily up past the thin white face of the police officer and the red side of the truck into the horizonless blue haze above, wondered if alliance were really the key to it all. What am I without them? Could I even die? Suddenly, the whole world seemed to tip: his feet dropped and his head rose. Beneath him the red machine shot grease and muck, the host rioted above his head, the earth pushed him from behind, and out front the skyscrapers pointed, like so many insensate fingers, the path he must walk to oblivion. He squeezed shut his eyes to set right the world again—he was afraid he would slide down beneath the truck to disappear from sight forever.

  “My name—!” bellowed the woman, and the crowd hushed, tittering softly. Paul opened his eyes. He was on his back again. The policeman stood over him, mouth agape, pencil poised. The woman’s puffy face was sequined with sweat Paul wondered what she’d been doing while he wasn’t watching. “My name, officer, is Grundy.”

  “I beg your pardon?” The policeman, when nervous, had a way of nibbling his moustache with his lowers.

  “Mrs. Grundy, dear boy, who did you think I was?” She patted the policeman’s thin cheek, tweaked his nose. “But you can call me Charity, handsome!” The policeman blushed. She twiddled her index finger in his little moustache. “Kootchy-kootchy-koo!” There was a roar of laughter from the crowd.

  The policeman sneezed. “Please!” he protested. Mrs. Grundy curtsied and stooped to unzip the officer’s fly. “Hello! Anybody home!”

  “Stop that!” squeaked the policeman through the thunderous laughter and applause. Strange, thought Paul, how much I’m enjoying this.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

  “The story!” the policeman insisted through the tumult

  “Story? What—?”

  “This young fellow,” said the policeman, pointing with his pencil. He zipped up, blew his nose. “Mr, uh, Mr. Westerman ... you said—”

  “Mr. Who?” The woman shook her jowls, perplexed. She frowned down at Paul, then brightened. “Oh yes! Amory!” She paled, seemed to sicken. Paul, if he could’ve, would’ve smiled.

  “Good God!” she rasped, as though appalled at what she saw. Then, once more, she took an operatic grip on her breasts and staggered back a step. “O mortality! O fatal mischief! Done in! A noble man lies stark and stiff! Delenda est Carthago! Sic transit glans mundi!”

  Gloria, corrected Paul. No, leave it.

  “Squashed like a lousy bug!” she cried. “And at the height of his potency!”

  “Now, wait a minute!” the policeman protested.

  “The final curtain! The last farewell! The journey’s end! Over the hill! The last muster!” Each phrase was answered by a happy shout from the mob. “Across the river! The way of all flesh! The last roundup!” She sobbed, then ballooned down on him again, tweaked his ear and whispered: (“How’s Charity’s weetsie snotkins, enh? Him fall down and bump his little putsy? Mumsy kiss and make well!”) And she let him have it on the—well, sort of on the left side of his nose, left cheek, and part of his left eye: one wet enveloping sour blubbering kiss, and this time, sorrily, the police man did not intervene. He was busy taking notes. Officer, said Paul.

  “Hmmm,” the policeman muttered, and wrote. “G-R-U-N-ah, ahem, Grundig, Grundig -D, yes, D-I-G. Now what did you—?”

  The woman labored clumsily to her feet, plodded over behind the policeman, and squinted over his shoulder at the notes he was taking. “That’s a ‘Y’ there, buster, a ‘Y.’” She jabbed a stubby ruby-tipped finger at the notebook.

  “Grundigy?” asked the policeman in disbelief. “What kind of a name is that?”

  “No, no!” the old woman whined, her grand manner flung to the winds. “Grundy! Grundy! Without the ‘-ig,’ don’t you see? You take off your—”

  “Oh, Grundy! Now I have it!” The policeman scrubbed the back end of his pencil in the notebook. “Darned eraser. About shot.” The paper tore. He looked up irritably. “Can’t we just make it Grundig?”

  “Grundy,” said the woman coldly.

  The policeman ripped the page out of his notebook, rumpled it up angrily, and hurled it to the street. “All right, gosh damn it all!” he cried in a rage, scribbling: “Grundy. I have it. Now get on with it, lady!”

  “Officer!” sniffed Mrs. Grundy, clasping a handkerchief to her throat “Remember your place, or I shall have to speak to your superior!”

  The policeman shrank, blanched, nibbled his lip.

  Paul knew what would come. He could read these two like a book. I’m the strange one, he thought He wanted to watch their faces, but his streetlevel view gave him at best a perspective on their underchins. It was their crotches that were prominent. Butts and bellies: the squashed bug’s-eye view. And that was strange, too: that he wanted to watch their faces.

  The policeman was begging for mercy, wringing his pale hands. There were faint hissing sounds, wriggling out of the crowd like serpents. “Cut the shit, mac,” Charity Grundy said finally, “you’re overdoing it.” The officer chewed his moustache, stared down at his notebook, abashed. “You wanna know who this poor clown is, right?” The policeman nodded. “Okay, are you ready?” She clasped her bosom again and the crowd grew silent. The police officer held his notebook up, the pencil poised. Mrs. Grundy snuffled, looked down at Paul, winced, turned away and wept “Officer!” she gasped. “He was my lover!”

  Halloos and cheers from the crowd, passing to laughter. The policeman started to smile, blinking down at Mrs. Grundy’s body, but with a twitch of his moustache, he suppressed it.

  “We met…just one year ago today. O fateful hour!” She smiled bravely, brushing back a tear, her lower lip quivering. Once, her hands clenched woefully before her face, she winked down at Paul. The wink nearly convinced him. Maybe I’m him after all. Why not? “He was selling sea-chests, door to door. I can see him now as he was then—” She paused to look down at him as he was now, and wrinkles of revulsion swept over her face. Somehow this brought laughter. She looked away, puckered her mouth and bugged her eyes, shook one hand limply from the wrist. The crowd was really with her.

  “Mrs. Grundy,” the officer whispered, “please ...”

  “Yes, there he was, chapfallen and misused, orphaned by the rapacious world, yet pure and undefiled, there: there at my door!” With her baggy arm, flung out, quavering, she indicated die door. “Bent nearly double under his impossible sea-chest, perspiration illuminating his manly brow, wounding his eyes, wrinkling his undershirt—”

  “Careful,” cautioned die policeman nervously, glancing up from his notes. He must have filled twenty or thirty pages by now.

  “In short, my heart went out to him!” Gesture of heart going out. “And though—alas I—my need for sea-chests was limited—”

  The spectators somehow discovered something amusing in this and tittered knowingly. Mainly in the way she said it, he supposed. Her story in truth did not bother Paul so much as his own fascination with it. He knew where it would lead, but it didn’t matter. In fact, maybe that was what fascinated him.

  “—I invited him in. Put down that horrid sea-chest, dear boy, and come in here, I cried, come in to your warm and obedient Charity, love, come in for a cup of tea, come in and rest, rest your pretty little shoulders, your pretty little back, your pretty little ...” Mrs. Grundy paused, smiled with a faint arch of one eyebrow, and the crowd responded with another burst of laughter. “And it was pretty little, okay,” she grumbled, and again they whooped, while she sniggered throatily.

  How was it now? he wondered.
In fact, he’d been wondering all along.

  “And, well, officer, that’s what he did, he did put down his sea-chest—alas! sad to tell, right on my unfortunate cat Rasputin, dozing there in the day’s brief sun, God rest his soul, his (again, alas!) somewhat homaloidal soul!”

  She had a great audience. They never failed her, nor did they now.

  The policeman, who had finally squatted down to write on his knee, now stood and shouted for order. “Quiet! Quiet!” His moustache twitched. “Can’t you see this is a serious matter?” He’s the funny one, thought Paul. The crowd thought so, too, for the laughter mounted, then finally died away. “And... and then what happened?” the policeman whispered. But they heard him anyway and screamed with delight, throwing up a new clamor in which could be distinguished several coarse paraphrases of the policeman’s question. The officer’s pale face flushed. He looked down at Paul with a brief commiserating smile, shrugged his shoulders, fluttering the epaulettes. Paul made a try at a never-mind kind of gesture, but, he supposed, without bringing it off.

  “What happened next, you ask, you naughty boy?” Mrs. Grundy shook and wriggled. Cheers and whistles. She cupped her plump hands under her breasts and hitched her abundant hips heavily to one side. “You don’t understand,” she told the crowd. “I only wished to be a mother to the lad.” Hoohahs and catcalls. “But I had failed to realize, in that fleeting tragic moment when he un burdened himself upon poor Rasputin, how I was wrenching his young and unsullied heart asunder! Oh yes, I know, I know—”

  “This is the dumbest story I ever heard,” interrupted the policeman finally, but Mrs. Grundy paid him no heed.

  “I know I’m old and fat, that I’ve crossed the Grand Climacteric!” She winked at the crowd’s yowls of laughter. “I know the fragrant flush of first flower is gone forever!” she cried, not letting a good thing go, pressing her wrinkled palms down over the soft swoop of her blimp-sized hips, peeking coyly over one plump shoulder at the shrieking crowd. The policeman stamped his foot, but no one noticed except Paul. “I know, I know—yet: somehow, face to face with little Charity, a primitive unnameable urgency welled up in his untaught loins, his pretty little—”

  “Stop it!” cried the policeman, right on cue. “This has gone far enough!”

  “And you ask what happened next? I shall tell you, officer! For why conceal the truth... from you of all people?” Though uneasy, the policeman seemed frankly pleased that she had put it this way. “Yes, without further discourse, he buried his pretty little head in my bosom—” (Paul felt a distressing sense of suffocation, though perhaps it had been with him all the while) “—and he tumbled me there, yes he did, there on the front porch alongside his sea-chest and my dying Rasputin, there in the sunlight, before God, before the neighbors, before Mr. Dunlevy the mailman who is hard of hearing, before the children from down the block passing on their shiny little—”

  “Crazy goddamn fool he just walk right out in fronta me no respect just burstin for a bustin!” said a familiar voice.

  Mrs. Grundy’s broad face, now streaked with tears and mottled with a tense pink flush, glowered. There was a long and difficult silence. Then she narrowed her eyes, smiled faintly, squared her shoulders, touched a handkerchief to her eye, plunged the handkerchief back down her bosom, and resumed: “—Before, in short, the whole itchy eyes-agog world, a coupling unequaled in the history of Western concupiscence!” Some vigorous applause, which she acknowledged. “Assaulted, but—yes, I confess it—assaulted, but aglow, I reminded him of—”

  “Boy I seen punchies in my sweet time but this cookie takes the cake God bless the laboring classes I say and preserve us from the humble freak!”

  Swiveling his wearying gaze hard right, Paul could see the truckdriver waggling his huge head at the crowd. Mrs. Grundy padded heavily over to him, die back of her thick neck reddening, swung her purse in a great swift arc, but the truckdriver recoiled into his cab, laughing with a taunting cackle. Then, almost in the same instant, he poked his red-beaked head out again, and rolling his eyes, said: “Listen lays and gentmens Fm a good Christian by Judy a decent hardworkin fambly man earnin a honest wage and got a dear little woman and seven yearnin younguns all my own seed a responsible—”

  “I’ll responsible your ass!” hollered Charity Grundy and let fly with her purse again, but once more the driver ducked nimbly inside, cackling obscenely. The crowd, taking sides, was more hysterical than ever. Cheers were raised and bets taken.

  Again the driver’s waggling head popped out: “—man and god—” he began, but this time Mrs. Grundy was waiting for him. Her great lumpish purse caught him square on his bent red nose—ka-raackk!—and the truckdriver slumped lifelessly over the door of his cab, his stubby little arms dangling limp, reaching just below the top of his head. As best Paul could tell, the tweed cap did not drop off, but since his eyes were cramped with fatigue, he had to stop looking before the truckdriver’s head ceased bobbing against the door.

  Man and god! he thought. Of course! terrific! What did it mean? Nothing.

  The policeman made futile little gestures of interference, but apparently had too much respect for Mrs. Grundy’s purse to carry them out That purse was big enough to hold a bowling ball, and maybe it did.

  Mrs. Grundy, tongue dangling and panting furiously, clapped one hand over her heart and, with the handkerchief, fanned herself with the other. Paul saw sweat dripping down her legs. “And so—foo!—I... I—puf!—I reminded him of ... of the—-whee!— the cup of tea!” she gasped. She paused, swallowed, mopped her brow, sucked in a deep lungful of air, and exhaled it slowly. She cleared her throat. “And so I reminded him of the cup of tea!” she roared with a grand sweep of one powerful arm, the old style recovered. There was a general smattering of complimentary applause, which Mrs. Grundy acknowledged with a short nod of her head. “We went inside. The air was heavy with expectation and the unmistakable aroma of catshit. One might almost be pleased that Rasputin had yielded up the spirit—”

  “Now just stop it!” cried the policeman. “This is—!”

  “I poured some tea, we sang the now famous duet, ‘¡Ciérrate la bragueta! ¡La bragueta está cerrada!,’ I danced for him, he—”

  “Enough, I said!” screamed the policeman, his little moustache quivering with indignation. “This is absurd!”

  You’re warm, said Paul. But that’s not quite it

  “Absurd?” cried Charity Grundy, aghast “Absurd? You call my dancing absurd?”

  “I... I didn’t say—”

  “Grotesque, perhaps, and yes, a bit awesome—but absurd!” She grabbed him by the lapels, lifting him off the ground. “What do you have against dancing, you worm? What do you have against grace?”

  “P-please! Put.me down!”

  “Or is it, you don’t believe I can dance?” She dropped him.

  “N-no!w he squeaked, brushing himself off, straightening his epaulettes. “No! I—”

  “Show him! Show him!” chanted the crowd.

  The policeman spun on them. “Stop! In the name of the law!”

  They obeyed. “This man is injured. He may die. He needs help. It’s no joking matter. I ask for your cooperation.” He paused for effect “That’s better.” The policeman stroked his moustache, preening a bit. “Now, ahem, is there a doctor present? A doctor, please?”

  “Oh, officer, you’re cute! You’re very cute!” said Mrs. Grundy on a new tack. The crowd snickered. “Is there a doctor present?” she mimicked, “a doctor, please?”

  “Now just cut it out!” the policeman ordered, glaring angrily across Paul’s chest at Mrs. Grundy. “Gosh damn it now, you stop it this instant, or … or you’ll see what’ll happen!”

  “Aww, you’re jealous!” cried Mrs. Grundy. “And of poor little supine Rasputin! Amory, I mean.” The spectators were in great spirits again, total rebellion threatening, and the police officer was at die end of his rope. “Well, don’t be jealous, dear boy!” cooed Mrs. Grundy. “Charity tell you
a weetsie bitty secret”

  “Stop!” sobbed the policeman. Be careful where you step, said Paul below.

  Mrs. Grundy leaned perilously out over Paul and got a grip on the policeman’s ear. He winced, but no longer attempted escape. “That boy,” she said, “he humps terrible!”

  It carried out to the crowd and broke it up. It was her big line and she wambled about gloriously, her rouged mouth stretched in a flabby toothless grin, retrieving the pennies that people were pitch ing (Paul knew about them from being hit by them; one landed on his upper lip, stayed there, emitting that familiar dead smell common to pennies the world over), thrusting her chest forward to catch them in the cleft of her bosom. She shook and, shaking, jangled. She grabbed the policeman’s hand and pulled him forward to share a bow with her. The policeman smiled awkwardly, twitching his moustache.

  “You asked for a doctor,” said an old but gentle voice.

  The crowd noises subsided Paul opened his eyes and discovered above him a stooped old man in a rumpled gray suit. His hair was shaggy and white, his face dry, lined with age. He wore rimless glasses, carried a black leather bag. He smiled down at Paul, that easy smile of a man who comprehends and assuages pain, then looked back at the policeman. Inexplicably, a wave of terror shook Paul.

  “You wanted a doctor,” the old man repeated.

  “Yes! Yes!” cried the policeman, almost in tears. “Oh, thank God!”

  “I’d rather you thanked the profession,” the doctor said. “Now what seems to be the problem?”

  “Oh, doctor, it’s awful!” The policeman twisted the notebook in his hands, fairly destroying it “This man has been struck by this truck, or so it would appear, no one seems to know, it’s all a terrible mystery, and there is a woman, but now I don’t see—? and I’m not even sure of his name—”