“So finally he says to her, let’s go to your room, have a quiet drink there, you can tell me all about it, I’ll buy the bottle. She’s a sorry-looking red-eyed droop, but, as I say, he has no choice. She shrugs and says okay. She leads the way, and at this juncture in the narration, Carl consecrates a quarter hour or so to the immortalizing of her butt as it joggles up the stairs a few inches in front of his face, her skirt rucking and rippling, and bringing on, in Carl, a certain agitated enlargement.”
While Castle hollered about that, Miller asked, “Hey, Mick, what about those hamburgers?”
“Hunh? Oh, Jesus, Tiger! Hold on!” Mick ran to the kitchen, called out, “Just in time!” Which meant they were black, not white, ash.
“Round of beers, too, Mick.” The bigmouth guy on television, who had earlier been urging fragrant armpits, now spun a large wheel, while a muss of little mousy women stood by mockbreathless, clutching their handbags. Whole goddamn American populace was becoming a bunch of actors.
Mick handed the hamburgers, fresh from cremation, over the bar to Castle and went to work on the beers. Jones puffed on the cigar, took a long swallow of beer, continued: “So they get to the room. He, she, and her prize wazoo. Carl pours out two tumblers. There’s only one chair in the room, and, just his luck, while he’s dispensing whiskey, she’s planting her buns on it. Carl seeks a scheme to decoy her off the chair and onto the bed. He puts her drink on the dresser, thinking she’ll come and get it. No. She sits there looking run-over and commences to stare at her feet. He suggests she go lie down, as she looks a mite peakèd. She hears nothing. He finally concludes he will have to use force, and that is just the which he does not care yet to do.” Jones drinks to the rapt silence.
Mick hung over the bar with a big foolish grin on his broad Italian face, finally came around and joined the others at the table. “What do you mean?” he asked incredulously, without dropping the grin. “You mean he aims to lay this miserable broad?” Mick was a large guy, but he had a funny high nasal voice.
“Well, so he’s thinking about this and he is just about to screw the gentility act and go heave her off, when the goddamn whore herself gets blithely up and humps off to weewee. Carl hastily claps her whiskey down on the night table aside the famous scene of action and appropriates the chair for himself. And, true to form, she staggers back in, still out of the plot, and plumps down on the bed. She picks up the glass, drinks it off like it was water, sets it down again. Still, she hasn’t looked once at our hero, hasn’t let a peep.”
Himebaugh was giggling softly, eyes squinting slightly under his bushy black eyebrows. There was a prudery in him that usually drove him from such gatherings as this—he was a common visitor to this table, but seldom stayed long. Now he tittered and stared at his hands, nervous on the tabletop. Fisher, a flabby old man, sat leaning back on two legs of his chair, chin tucked in the soft fleshfolds of his neck, a smile on his poker face—he frankly enjoyed the story, rarely interpolated. Castle guffawed abruptly from time to time, but not in strict cadence with the tale. He had round leathery cheeks that ballooned when he laughed. Castle could tell at a glance where a man bought his shoes, and, if they weren’t from his place, it didn’t pacify him to explain you had to spread your business around.
“Meanwhile, our man in Waterton is taking it easy with the alcohol. He pumps in a couple stiff swallows, avers it prolongs the action, but too much and he might not fire off at all—”
“Yes, that’s true!” Mick sang, then flushed when everyone roared. Fisher even had to ease his chair down on all four legs momentarily for fear his convulsions would spill him.
Jones smiled around his dead cigar, continued: “Patience pays its way. The whore spreads on the bed and commences to chatter. Carl learns who her brother was and some miscellany about him. She kicks off her shoes. Carl, coolly denying still his throbbing rod, pumps her more about the brother. She tells all. Tears. Very touching scene. Carl waxes sympathetic. It is very sad indeed. He even works up a kind of tear and rubs his eye red. Advises her she ought to turn in for the night, forget all about it, head off tomorrow on that trip she’s been thinking about. She’s grateful. Says by Jesus he understands her. She tells him nighty-night and flops over to the wardrobe, stopping by the dresser to puddle out another tumblerful. Sets the tumbler on the floor by the wardrobe, hauls off her blouse, skirt, and bra, drops her drawers, wriggles into a traditional scrap of lingerie.” Jones paused to light the cigar again, while the others exchanged commentary. Lou could never keep a cigar going and tell a story at the same time.
Miller had finished the hamburgers, delicious in spite of the charring, and wanted another beer, but Mick was hunched over the table in such unabashed absorption, he didn’t have the heart to break the spell. Fisher smoked and chuckled drily, leaning back. Castle brayed and shouted, “Come on!” and beat the table. Himebaugh giggled to himself and stared at his glass, still full of beer.
“She squats for the tumbler and is surprised to discover our boy still in the picture. Look, she says, I’m going to bed. Like you said. Good night. Thanks, but good night. Carl shrugs, tells her don’t mind him, he’s just finishing his drink, and before she can object he switches back to the belovèd brother, jaws on like he has known the poor bastard all his life. So she doesn’t complain now, just quaffs the rye, then nests into the sheets, her famous bun to the breezes, and listens to him. Carl says she holds her goddamn hand curled up against her mouth and reminds him of how his little daughter sucks her thumb at night.”
“A detail only a doting father could provide,” Miller interposed. Fisher laughed drily, but the others seemed not to have noticed there had been an interruption. Jones downed his beer. Himebaugh’s glass sat untouched in front of him. The man’s soft flabby titter was nearly inaudible. Seemed in some world of his own. On the screen above, pain pills were Bigmouth’s product now. Disturbingly graphic.
Jones said, “Carl’s knob, caught wrong in his pants somehow, is paining him, so he decides the time is come. She is gazing placidly and weepily through the far wall, so he quietly slips his pants off and, talking all the time, hooks them on the foot of her bed. Then, just as the whore seems about to emerge from her distant focus, he jumps her, pins her arms behind her, and says: Your brother was the biggest shit I ever knew, he deserved to die!”
“Jesus Christ!” cried Castle, slamming the table, half out of his chair.
Mick was stunned, jaw slack, and even old Fisher lowered his chair, smile sliding to frown.
“Mad!” whispered Himebaugh, glancing at the others. “The man is a psychopath, a lust murderer!” But, strangely, it was as though he were still giggling.
“That cocksucker!” Castle thundered, as always the most vocal. “Why, he’s a damn, a damn, a goddamn—what did you say, Himebaugh?” With that, they started to laugh again.
While Jones relit his cigar a fourth time, Miller ducked behind the bar and pulled five more beers, omitting Ralph. Castle, Fisher, DeMars, and Himebaugh stared at each other with astonished half grins and exchanged condemnations. “No, what I mean, that sonuvabitch oughta hang!” Mick declared in summation.
“Well, the hapless lady is too shocked even to fart,” Jones resumed. “She starts a fierce struggle to break loose, but Carl is twice her size, and, besides, she’s at a real disadvantage there on her belly with two hundred and fifty pounds of hot raging beef saddling her, pinning her wings. And all the time he keeps rubbing it in what a cheap rotten punk her goddamn brother was.” Castle banged. Fisher was over the table. “Only trouble is, Carl complains, he can’t get his reamer in the slot from behind, nice inspirational view of these great nates butting and flushing, but from the style he has her pinned, he can’t jack her up enough to bore in without losing his hold. He tries to tap the devil’s porthole, but there’s too much angry muscle there.” Himebaugh, wide-eyed, watched it in his beer glass. Mick gaped. On the screen, Bigmouth was panned offcamera and a sniveling grandmother admired her new prizes. “
Carl clamps both her wrists in one hand, perforates and diddles her with the thumb of the other. She screams and bawls and then suddenly she twists out of his grip and they punch and wrestle and peck and claw, but Carl downs her finally and plunges it in and she shrieks like she’s been stabbed for the first time. Carl’s getting edgy about the cops or Mrs. Dopey, it’s a scene like that, figures you can hear her all the way to West Condon, but he has locked the door and the time it’ll take them to break it down he reckons will be time enough and he doesn’t give a damn. He digs her how her brother was queer and about the fruity silk shirts he always wore in all kinds of nigger colors, she’d just cut him in, see, on how she had bought the boy all these silk shirts, and that the brother sucked everybody at the mine, and on and on, and she’s screeching and flapping and belting the shit out of him, and now he says there’s a real sweet stink rising, and she tries to pitch him out, but he’s got his talons deep in her tail and doesn’t let go no matter what, and she twists and doubles and sweats and even somehow gets her feet once against his chest, and, boy, he says he is flying blind but there is nothing like it!”
Jones drank beer to let Castle and Mick get a few choice pent-up expletives off their chests. Himebaugh was pale. “I’ll be goddamned!” muttered Fisher, now smiling broadly.
“So they’re crashing around on that bed, blood and feathers flying, she clawing at his eyes, him grabbing a fistful of her hair and arching her head back so she can’t take good aim, and first thing you know they’re whamming away in rhythm and she’s clutching him in the ass and warbling his goddamn name and they both come in a tremendous simultaneous explosion and collapse in a tremor of secondary spasms.”
Castle whapped the table and Mick, in his peculiar twitter, cried out the name of the Savior over and over. Beer was spilled. Jones calmly examined his mutilated cigar. Himebaugh’s eyes lacked focus. “I’ll be goddamned!” Fisher rumbled again, reaching for a wet pack of cigarettes on the table.
“But, Jesus, Lou! Do you mean to say—did she—?” Mick lacked the words for it.
“Yeah,” said Jones. “She liked it.”
“Goddamn!” boomed Castle. “It’s too much!”
“They both admit it was the greatest fuck they’ve ever had, if not indeed the greatest in world history. The rookery is a wreck, all whipped and shredded, blood here and there. Carl is nearly blind, but he can see that those flawless haunches are brilliantly striped and maybe for good. He apologizes about what he’d said, explains he really never knew her brother, he was just trying to snap her out of her doldrums. She says never mind, doesn’t matter. He says he is sure he was a great guy, the greatest, had to be: brother of a woman like her. And silk shirts were his favorite kind. She agrees and cuddles up in Carl’s arms and he ends up passing the night there. They couple three or four more times during the night and this morning. No comparison to the first round, but it is warm and satisfying, quoth our hero. He adds that his old lady really has her feathers up when he appears for breakfast this morning, clawed and bloodied and reeking of strange persons, but he’s feeling so afloat he doesn’t even take the bother to apologize, just eats his Wheaties in blissful silence, and wafts on down to the shop, advising everybody it is spring.” Jones pulled Himebaugh’s untapped beer toward him, leaned back and drained it, turned his attention to relighting the cigar: all signs that the tale was told.
It was too much for Castle’s restricted vocabulary. There was no expletive to do it justice. Finally, he just shook his tanned jowls and said, “What a story, man!”
“If it don’t beat all!” chirped Mick, mopping up the beer on the table with his apron. “Sometimes I think most of us poor bastards just don’t know how to live. This corrupt lunatic is—really!—” He paused for effect and looked around at the others: “He’s a goddamn genius!”
“Yeah, you said it!” laughed Wally Fisher. He propped back on two legs again. “Goddamn genius!”
“It’s a fucking outrage, that’s what it is!” Castle laughed, relocating words. His voice banged in the still room. On the television, somebody won $33. Camera panned on the audience. Pasty sheep-faced smiles. Hands silently and dutifully slapping each other. “But goddamn if it ain’t true to life!”
“And twice as beautiful!” added Mick over his sopped apron, and they all laughed. He still sat, but now Miller’s interest in another beer had passed. He couldn’t help but keep Himebaugh in the edge of his eye: the man sat silently, shaking his bony head, his thin old legs crossed, hunched in such a way that his elbow was pressed into his groin.
“Miller,” said Fisher, “you oughta publish this!” The thought delighted them all.
“What’ll we call it?” Miller asked drily. “A Child’s Visit to a Whorehouse?”
“Now don’t take the fun out of it!” said Castle.
“What if this sort of animal madness were set up as a precept for humanity?” Himebaugh asked earnestly. He cleared his throat, shifted his position, straightened up. “What would we all turn into? It’s ghastly!”
“Aw, shit, Ralph,” Castle protested, “that’s stupid!” Himebaugh glared at the shoe salesman from across the round table, soft underlip turned in. “That’s goddamn plain stupid!” Castle repeated, rankled to have had such a good story tainted.
“Stupid! But this is grotesque! This disaster—I mean, in the middle of all this horror, this tragedy—that, that man—that beast—you’re all beasts!” Himebaugh was losing control.
“I thought it was pretty funny,” said Fisher.
“You’re a beast,” Jones said to him.
Himebaugh glanced darkly at their laughter.
Mick butted in: “Who do you suppose that’d be, Tiger? Reckon that’d be Oxford Clemens’ sister?”
“Sure,” said Miller. Bigmouth had given way on the screen to a smoking hunter. Miller lit one. “Dinah. I always wondered where Ox got those fancy shirts. I thought he stole them.”
“You used to get a little of that, didn’t you, Tiger?” Castle asked.
Miller smiled. For several days, he had felt his past sticking to him here like shreds of flypaper. “Well, she wasn’t the toughest teacher we had in high school,” he said, “but she was the sincerest.”
Mick stretched himself through the loose laughter to his feet and gathered up the beer glasses, lining them up on the bar. He got a bar rag to finish mopping the table. “That was sure one goddamn story,” he coda’d.
“Beasts!” bleated Himebaugh insistently and wiped his mouth nervously with a clean handkerchief. Castle snorted, and they started in again.
For an instant something seems to hover … enters him: his eyes open. They turn to her, blink in recognition. A hand faces its pale palm to her and she takes it. She assures him.
The phone rang. Everyone was gone. Miller, dozing upright in his swivel chair, listened to it jangle. Wouldn’t answer it. Looked at his watch. Seven. Home was an empty icebox and an unmade bed, didn’t feel like going there. Too bushed to go elsewhere. Still it rang, jarring him. He looked at it. Angry black fish, eyeing him with one gleam of reflection. He took it off the spit. “Hello?” He’d tell them it was a wrong number. But it was Marcella. He awoke. Giovanni was conscious and his condition was satisfactory. He listened to her voice, dreamed up questions to keep her talking, knew now there was a better place to go. But there was little more she could tell him. Except that Giovanni had been visited in the mine by the Virgin, a vision, so to speak. Yes, he could publish that. She had come to him in the form of a white bird.
Part II: The Sign
The first woe has passed; behold, two woes are still to come.
—REVELATION TO JOHN 9:12
1
While the mine disaster reduced itself to numbers, repercussions, and causes, Eleanor Norton turned all her time—for school was closed of course—to a review of messages received in Carlyle and West Condon, reasoning that it was the Carlyle crisis that had driven them here, so a relevancy might well be expected. On the first pa
ge of each of her logbooks were the words, which she took from the apocryphal book of Baruch: “Walk in the presence of the light of this book, that you may be illuminated.” On a first reading, she found only familiar admonitions to live a deeper life and lessons in the cosmological verities …
A flower plucked, a fish’s leap: the distant star is tortured!
… preceded in Carlyle by simple warnings of imminent danger. But by Saturday she had read them all six times, and had begun to discover, beneath the placid surface, an emergent design of revelation. There was, for example, that peculiar reference of a year ago December to
… the one who is to come.
At the time, already harassed, she had supposed it to be merely another in the succession of warnings in Carlyle, for the “one” was to bring her suffering and injustice, and Domiron had urged her not to fear him. But now she remembered that she had received similar cautions three or four times in the past—she searched them out, astonished to discover the almost identical wording. Had she misread them all along?
Do not despair if One should come. Faith and truth have fled away, to be replaced by evil and violence and the lust for illusory things of the body. Oh men of the earth! only a cleansing can preserve you! Wash the earth from your hands and feet, and cast your eyes to the limitless stars!
Did this confirm her theory that the earth had formerly enjoyed a higher aspect of intensity? Was a cleansing to occur? And she, was she to be the agent? And then there was that exceedingly strange message, only a month old, that told her to
… look to the east! look to the west! the feet tug downward, but the spirit soars!
The east: the source of light, of course. The west … West Condon? And the tugging downward, was that the miners? These messages troubled her, yet consoled her as well; nevertheless, it was altogether clear that more remained to be revealed.
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