Mr. Irony, in the lead, then approved of this sentiment with a pursing of his lips barely noticeable before his face filled with rare emotion, in time with the stepping of his elephant into a stream from the bank of which could be seen sliding crocodiles, or something that looked like crocodiles. I was given the lead, following the fording.
Lanxang is small but important because it is contiguous to—a bridge connecting, therefore—two other small and likewise important places of the earth. The smaller the place, we have come to note on this tour, the more important. “What is a continent but spoonfuls of dirt?” Mr. Irony asked, early on, before the rest of us had arrived at this logic.
“Oh brother,” one of the Traveling Women said. She became with that remark not Mr. Irony’s but my Traveling Woman.
“Indulgences!” Mr. Irony proclaimed, his call to order for word jazz. He slapped his elephant’s hide. “The head of my animal is a small V-8 engine covered by slab bacon.”
“Fatback.”
“Fatback with hairs.”
“A hemi. A flat-head. Not a V-8.”
“Who said that?” Mr. Irony asked. “The girl from Pampa or the girl from Borger?”
“The girl from Borger,” the girl from Pampa said. “Her daddy raced.”
“Flat-head has some merit, indeed.”
“Gray twelve-gauge Naugahyde,” the girl from Pampa said.
“Fatback, gray-brown, boar-bristled, flat-head six underneath,” said Mr. Irony.
“Never forgetting,” said Pampa.
“An elephant’s timing chain of memory never breaks,” said Borger.
“We are astride some fine beast.”
I don’t indulge. I am beginning to doubt the wisdom of my appointment to Mr. Irony.
The tent was filled with censers and their various sweet smokes, and we were sitting foursquare to a hookah in the middle.
Someone, holding breath, said, “What kind dope?”
Someone else, holding, shrugging, said, “’on’t know.”
“Man at His Best,” Mr. Irony intoned, “asks not what specie of intoxicant his hosts provide.” Then he addressed the girl from Pampa. “Her daddy raced. What yours?”
“My daddy sat on his Texass in a Barcalounger size of a Lincoln.” She pulled on the hookah. Mr. Irony studied her. With her lungs at full expansion, letting no smoke escape, she said: “Come I know Naugahyde.”
In relation to elephants, to the canvas and skins around us and under us, Naugahyde was a mysterious thing to think about just then, and Mr. Irony accordingly announced “Indulgences!” and slapped a provision crate with sufficient speed and force that everyone exhaled, losing smoke.
Spontaneously, my girl from Pampa indulged: “He was a lardass from the gitgo. Had all he ever wanted, so all he wanted was to git rid of that and git shit he didn’t want. We had land, oil, stock, and three TV’s in a wall-bank, like Elvis and Lyndon. The recliner had motors in it like a hospital bed—drive it around, too. Vibrated, heated up, everything. Air brakes. It came in leather. Then he heard about Naugahyde. Had to have it. Drove the lounger down to the upohster’s, rip rap.”
“One is cautioned by all sense against becoming fond of an Available Traveling Woman,” Mr. Irony said. “Damned if the temptation does not accrue.”
“Who?” his girl from Borger said. “Her? Shoot. She’s a card. I coulda tole y’all that.”
“Had a refrigerator in it, under his ass.”
We started laughing then, unstoppable dope laughter, fueled on knowing there’s nothing so finally funny enough to cause such paroxysms. To the upohster’s, someone kept repeating as we came up for air, sending us back under again. We were prostrate in a tent carpeted of animal hides, noses in fur, thinking of Naugahyde, unable to breathe.
At Jack London’s Trading Post and Juice Bar/Trail Foods, Inc., we outfit for a brief walk on what Duke details as “the tundra.”
“The parka with raglan sleeves for me, I favor Lord Raglan,” Mr. Irony tells a clerk. “Anoraks for the anorectics,” he says, with an impatient wave at the Traveling Women, who ignore him. They are feeling the goods: the down-filled, the corduroy, the leather, siliconed, mink-oiled.
Dressed out, fat as bales of cotton, we look not unlike designer astronauts, and we clod into the Juice Bar, where we all four enjoy White Fang Smoothies before stepping out on the tundra.
“Tundra? I’ve led cheers on ground worse’n this,” a Traveling Woman says. “In Pampa.”
“Just enough bad ground to scuff up our moon boots, ladies,” Mr. Irony says. “That’s the objective here, I daresay. Man at His Best not to be seen in new shoes.”
Riding a Galapagos tortoise, Mr. Irony says, “I do not recall ever feeling so at home.”
The tortoise’s head, high up, looks not altogether different from Mr. Irony’s head, which is only a bit larger and a little higher than the reptile’s. Mr. Irony’s knees are up also, his cowboy boots in carved notches of the carapace.
“It seems to me all we do on this Duke tour is ride things, jump off things, slip and bust our ass on things,” one of the Traveling Women says.
“Man at His Best,” the other offers.
“Komodo dragons next, ladies. Flesh-eaters,” Mr. Irony says. They do not respond. They have read ahead the literature and know that we are scheduled to ride no dragons. Next we dance in grass skirts before tourists drinking drinks from coconut shells, dance across an atoll.
Mr. Irony’s reptilian steed stops to graze on what looks like a small cabbage. Mr. Irony sits sidesaddle, lights a cigarette. “These old boys know what they are about. I would not presume to hurry the duocentenarian.” The tortoise eats with surprising waste, cabbage bits at times even on top of his head. “It is possible,” Mr. Irony says, watching him scatter his meal, “to hazard another end for the dinosaur: inefficient table dexterity.”
“I shall inquire if one is permitted to own for himself so measured a hedon,” Mr. Irony says. “I shall walk him in Central Park, at night.”
“Mr. Irony, what is your position on the Good Ole Days?”
“What you mean?”
“I get the notion, from no particular event, that when one is correctly minimalized and hedged up with self-deprecating irony, et cetera, that one doesn’t—can’t, by definition—afford to care about the Good Ole Days.”
“I don’t understand you,” Mr. Irony says.
I take this for an evasion. I am on to something but I have asked it too directly—I have asked it at all.
This whole business of his sitting with such fondness on a two-hundred-year-old turtle is a way, as I see it, of disowning a more recent time, a time, say, of tricycle-sitting sullied somehow by a dominating father; a time after which boyish enthusiasms became adolescent agonies became adultish early losses and defeats, leading Mr. Irony to the defensive position of assuming that things don’t turn out well. Sitting astride a dinosaur confirms him, proves in a tacit, cabbage-bashing fashion that the Good Ole Days are the fluff of myth. The truth for Mr. Irony is extinction, a brief run through the ironic daily maze and not dying yet. On his tortoise, Mr. Irony looks as composed and serene as an underfed Buddha.
“You been having both the women?” he suddenly asks.
“Sir! Both got in my tent, both—well, pleasured. But the seed only in one.”
“Still, you put your trocar in mine, too.”
“Yes, sir. It’s—”
“Understandable. My fault. I shall seek to win back my Available Traveling Woman shortly.”
“Good, sir. I—”
“Shut up.”
For three days we live in enamel tubs, under steamed towels, on massage tables, in Hot Springs, Ark.
“This is geezerhood, but it’s nice, but it’s still geezerhood,” the Borger Traveling Woman says. After the second day, Pampa says, “I feel like a grub.”
Mr. Irony has acquired a laboratory wash bottle, one liter Nalgene, which he fills with vodka before a day in the baths, and when an attendant instructs him to
drink the hot spring water (“to warm your insides”) from a proffered folding paper cup, Mr. Irony produces from the tub of 110-degree water in which he reposes the wash bottle—he smiles and squirts a stream of hot vodka in, nodding the attendant away.
“Nice rig,” Borger comments.
“Germ-free,” Mr. Irony instructs.
Mr. Irony does not attain the parboiled look we three have, and his step is sharp, his stride long. The rest of us, mineralized and boiled and sober, veer along softly.
“Now I feel like one of those catfish that live in caves,” Pampa says after the third and final day in steam.
“The white ones, dear?” Mr. Irony asks.
“White, blind ones, dear.” She looks around, suspicious of Mr. Irony’s term of affection. The Traveling Women share a low-lidded squint with one another. Something fishy.
In a bar across from the grand row of baths, Mr. Irony declares that he will help us. “I propose to restore you to your electrolytical feet. Allow me.” He orders a pitcher of vodka and three ponies of liqueurs for us each. “Sup at these as you would side dishes. This,” Mr. Irony says, lifting the pitcher, “is the roast beef.”
In fifteen minutes we are well along onto our electrolytical feet. The Traveling Women are crying with affection for Mr. Irony, hugging him, and I cannot shake the sensation that I am an eel. Mr. Irony tenders a speech. “Ladies, forgive me my earlier curtnesses with you. I meant no harm. Sexism is, if you will, etiological.”
“Do what?”
“A long time ago,” Mr. Irony says, “a crocodile bit a hippopotamus on the nose and effected, voilà”—Mr. Irony touches his nose and slides his arm away from him into space, trombone style—“an elephant.”
The Traveling Women enjoy a look of profound eye-widening comprehension. “And elephants don’t forget,” they say, nearly in unison.
“Precisely. And I am sorry,” Mr. Irony says, bowing his head. With tears the Traveling Women look at him, and they hug each other.
“Mr. Irony,” I manage to say, “were the liquid in me not absorbed into cottony cells, had I fodder at all, sir, if I felt like anything but a starved moray eel, I’d throw up.”
“Hedge up, boy. Minimalize your self-importance. Limn with humility.”
“Rock breaks scissors,” I say, feeling my way, speaking automatically. “Scissors cut paper. Paper covers rock. Poon breaks irony.”
Mr. Irony purses his lips, looks at the end of his cigarette, as if waiting for my tirade to end. “Not bad. Keep it to yourself.”
“Mr. Irony, have you been bitten hard?”
“Elucidate.”
“The—the Ingenue thing. There are, apparently, life’s Ingenues and life’s Vietnam Boys, and—”
“The inconsequential and the consequential?”
“Yes, sir. The bitten-hard.”
“The bitten-hard. I see now. I see.”
We are in hot-air balloons, jetting on a blue plume activated by a pull cord over desert. Mr. Irony watches the ground carefully to spot something at which a ballast bag might be thrown. “I would not counsel your courting the hard bite,” he says. “Is that a shack?”
“Looks like it, sir.”
“Bombs away.” The flour sack speeds in a miraculous arc down to the tin roof of the shack and strikes with a sound not unlike a child striking an oatmeal box. “Gabby Hayes should dash out in a state of confusion, precisely now,” Mr. Irony says. As we drift away, no one emerges from the shack. “He consumed—that prospector—too much red-eye last night.” We are in a silent, unfired drift, only the creaking of the basket to be heard.
“I have the feeling,” I say, “that there are hardbitten folk walking around with a certain advantage over those of us who haven’t had … well—”
“Do people with one arm have a certain advantage over those with two? Yes, in a way: they know something unstandard. Same for the bitten brain, the psychological one-arm. But, son, listen: irony will not survive the bite, the truly hard bite.”
Mr. Irony shimmers at the word, perhaps more clearly than I’ve seen him shimmer before, because, I think at the time, of the clear desert air and our altitude.
Mr. Irony hefts up another bag. “You may be silly, on the one hand, or wounded, on the other, but you do not elect to be wounded. Is that a dune buggy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Helmets on ’em?”
“Looks to be, sir.”
“Your shot.”
I let the bag go and it hits the desert in a broadening white puff.
“Missed by a quarter mile, I’d say,” Mr. Irony assesses.
“It’s a moving target, sir.”
“And from a moving gun.”
“It’s the girls, I think.”
“Hand me a bag.”
Following a column of mountain goats, Mr. Irony, angular and bearded, looks not unlike a common goat chasing its betters.
“We’ll never shoot one of them things,” Pampa says.
“We’re not supposed to,” Mr. Irony impatiently declares, sighing, stepping carefully up the rocks. “We’re supposed to tire and drop our rifles from fatigue and descend to the lodge with our blisters.” There are tiny radio transmitters on the rifles which would seem to corroborate Mr. Irony’s assessment of what we’re to do on Duke’s Man-at-His-Best Rocky Mountain Goat Safari. There’s a curious footnote in the brochure: “If hunters wish, they may, as in recent American combat experience, jettison their weapons.”
“Thing to do,” Mr. Irony says, “is put these damned cannon someplace they can’t get to with the helicopter—make ’em hike in.”
“Chap some ass,” Borger says.
“Chap some ass,” Pampa adds.
“Chap some ass,” Mr. Irony says.
As the goats continue to move vertically, their powerful bushy rumps just out of range, we turn laterally and head for a close-looking space between two peaks. Mr. Irony says: “Mine shaft’d be nice.”
We were given the opportunity to choose means of transport during the next leg of Duke’s Man-at-His-Best World Tour. The territory to be crossed was Georgia and South Carolina, south to north. We could take I-95 with a life-insurance salesman who had once been an oil rigger and then had tried to be a bass guide for Roland Martin, or we could take back roads in a log truck with a crew of pulpwooders. Duke said, “Excuse the indelicacy, but in local parlance these fellows, black or white, are known as pulpwood niggers, and they stink to high heaven, have potted meat and Mellow Yellow for lunch, do not visit dentists.” There was no question which Mr. Irony would choose, and we were not surprised to see Borger and Pampa pile into the insurance salesman/bass guide’s 4×4 Blazer Silverado with smoked glass all around. As the doors closed, we saw the salesman spray a shot of Binaca into his mouth.
“His hairdo was not unreminiscent, was it, of Woody Woodpecker?” Mr. Irony asked.
“I thought so myself,” I said, and I had, precisely. The coiffure looked artificially blown up, almost teased, into a topknot at the front of the fellow’s head, and it was in fact carrot-colored. Mr. Irony and I, by this sight, were reassured that we had made the correct choice of transport. We sat together on the cooler of beer Duke had advised us to prepare for our ride with the pulp-wood niggers, patient in our waiting, for Duke had also advised that, though we would arrive at the destination (Dillon, S.C.) well before the insurance salesman would have gotten us there, we might depart up to two hours later.
The pulpwood niggers were three. The driver was white, wearing a blue mesh cap that read I’m a Rebel and Damn PROUD OF IT. At shotgun was a black with his hair plaited into spikes, over which he had tied a black nylon scarf in Arab fashion, with two nylon tails down his back. “Healthy-looking individual,” Mr. Irony remarked of him. “Got them Husqvarna arms.” In the middle of the seat was a suggestion of human form, as a cicada hull on a pine tree suggests an insect. He was chinless, chestless, slumped down bleary-eyed between his larger colleagues. We came to learn he was “the oiler,�
� by which title was signified his entire raison d’être: when the other two ran equipment, he carried and administered the lubricants. If it was chain saws, he carried a pistol-style oil can, squirting the hot blades, muttering every time, “Self-oilers don’t work for shit.”
The driver, with a motion of his thumb, indicated we were to get on the truck flatbed. We got aboard and were arranging ourselves on the boat cushions we bought with the cooler when the cab rear window slid open and the oiler extended both arms through it. Mr. Irony and I managed to interpret this, and I handed the oiler two cold beers.
“Fatherlaw died last week,” he said, pulling back into the cab with the beer. With a jolt we were off.
Several miles down the road his arms came back through the window, and he was delivered two more beers. “Wife daddy died,” he said, going back in.
Through a rare, obvious communion, Mr. Irony and I were clearly taking extreme pleasure in the ludicrousness of our scene, glancing squarely and without expression at one another during these utterances from the oiler. We were bouncing clear off the truck, on a clay road that now had over it behind us a cloud of dust as far as we could see.
We braked to a halt, and while Mr. Irony and I were still struggling for balance, the driver and the black guy were pissing in the road beside open cab doors. “Pit stop,” the oiler informed us, a bit gratuitously. We got off to piss.
Mr. Irony was boring into the clay in front of him when the black dude said to him, “Nice boots, homeboy.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Pointy-like. Match your head.”
“They do, sir.”
“Spensive, bet. How much they coss, homeboy?”
“Three.”
The oiler interrupted this discourse by letting himself out of the truck and collapsing on the roadside.
“Lumpy daddy died!” he said, rocking on the ground like a child in a crib. Mr. Irony bent to inspect the bereaved form.
“Pay no mine, homeboy,” the black said to Mr. Irony. “He in moning. Would like them boots.”
“For the asking, sir.” Mr. Irony was already seated on the truck bed pulling hard on one of his Luccheses. It was this willingness, this anticipation, I think, that saved Mr. Irony’s boots. The black looked with just a hint of surprise at Mr. Irony sitting unshod, swinging his socked feet.
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