Logorrhea

by John Klima

  * * *

  P•O•C•O•C•U•R•A•N•T•E

  po·co·cu·ran·te 'pō-kō-kyu-'ran-tē, 'pō-kō-ku-'ran-tē

  adjective

  : indifferent, nonchalant

  * * *

  Pococurante

  ANNA TAMBOUR

  THE WHOLE TOWN sucked in such a big breath, a fly would of clutched its throat, gasping. Would Pococurante raise a sweat to stay alive? We waved flies away with more effort. Yet at a flick of his wrist, grown men ducked. Dad said a word he shouldn’t of in mixed company, but nobody cared.

  Astride the town’s great river red gum on that blazing day in February, Pococurante didn’t defy death. He humiliated it.

  When finally he landed head up, feet exploding dust, I cheered like I never did before, nor since. Dad made strange sounds like rain hitting dry ground. He was crying! And he wasn’t alone.

  Smooth as a cold beer, Pococurante passed through the crowd and down the street, the gold letters on his shirt-back slithering.

  The next morning I asked Dad, “What’s Pococurante mean?”

  He must of been thinking for breakfast, because he answered right off. “The god of thunder, I reckon.”

  That made sense to me. Before Pococurante, a bullock whip was just a bullock whip.

  As for the circus, I forget its name, but it was a mangy thing. It didn’t have a tent so it wasn’t any more than a man who rode a horse with his head in the saddle and his feet in the air. We could do that before we were six. And a woman with a beard and hairy arms, and a clown who was only funny when he pulled the red nose off his face to sneeze, and a lion who wanted to sleep and a lion tamer who doubled as the fancy-talk introducer, and Pococurante.

  As for the town, it was mangy, too. One of those unloved border towns that straddle two states, where the people on both sides think life on the other side is better but it isn’t, and before you notice, everybody’s slipped away including you, feeling guilty but bloody relieved, like how you leave a funeral.

  As for Pococurante, I had a theory I carried around inside me till I saw my first action in war. I did think, you see, till I really shouldn’t of, that this Pococurante was some sort of god. That my dad had nailed him good, but at the same time missed. My dad, you see, thought Pococurante had named himself in imitation of. But Mrs. Fletcher at school said there weren’t any gods named Pococurante, and she reeled off all the ones there were. Plain God, who we knew. And to some, his son, so that took care of two. And Zeus and Mars and Pluto the dog-god and Neptune with his hayfork, and Tor the blond, and some more that I can’t remember, but Pococurante? No.

  Pococurante, I’d say each night. I knew he wouldn’t like frilly stuff, so I talked to him straight. Be a sport, I’d say, all under my breath. Toss me some of your bravery. You’ve got bags of it to spare. Make my face as still as yours. You can do it, but I can’t on my own. I certainly couldn’t. Make me look like I don’t give a cuss what people think, like you. Tell me what you want from me and I’ll do it. Anything. He never answered directly, but he was the last god on earth I’d of expected to answer anyone like me.

  Before Pococurante, if you’d have said that anyone in my town would ape a man with an embroidered shirt, well, you could spit your teeth good-bye. I imitated his walk, which is funny, looking back on it. But every boy did and many men, so it wasn’t funny with everybody and his dog doing it. And even though two boys killed themselves trying to be Pococurante, no one wished otherwise any more than they wished that the good years didn’t come because of the bad. But there was a limit. When Ridgy Bray was heard whistling “Nobody Cares for Me,” he was given a friendly punch-up for putting on airs. I thought it was sacrilegious.

  One day when a kick in the stockyard punched my kneecap so my leg folded front to back, I bit a hunk off my lower lip rather than scream. Pococurante! He gave me the strength to be a man, but he was as mysterious as weather.

  And then I went to war and saw another Pococurante, and another. I saw four by the war’s end. I felt shy around them. Lots of men did.

  But when I saw Pococurante’s face again on other men, and I saw that walk—all that I copied but knew was never me—I knew then the original wasn’t a god, but what a man could be.

  When the war ended, I asked one of the Pococurantes to be my business partner—the one who saved my life. I thought I’d have to beg him, but he said okay. Just “Okay.”

  I was so taken aback, I couldn’t answer back, but he didn’t seem to need that. I was honored that he thought me good enough.

  He didn’t have any plans so I made up plans for us both.

  We opened a dry cleaning shop in Adelaide. I named the dry cleaners Pococurante, after he said he didn’t care what it was called. It had a classy ring to it, the young girl at the business registry said.

  “About time we had some tone here,” she declared. “Adelaide’s such a sleepy place.”

  I didn’t know what she was talking about so I shut up. My partner leaned over the counter and looked at her, and I thought she’d die right there.

  “Poco,” she said. “Little! and cur-ahhn-tay.”

  She clicked her fingers and cocked her head. “Greased lightnin’! Pronto, current, see? I might work here but…say!” she said to my partner—I was a flyspeck on the wall—“You haven’t by chance, seen the film at the Odeon?”

  “Yar,” he said, giving her a ghost of a smile.

  So, Pococurante the window said, in swirly gold script, close but not quite the same as I remembered.

  It wasn’t as if my partner didn’t work. He did. But the business didn’t thrive. He was so attractive that the counter got mobbed, but he was hopeless with ticketing clothes. So, though we lost some love-struck women who’d been coming in bearing clean twin sets just to see him, I took over the counter and he worked in the back. But he didn’t seem to get the knack of cleaning and pressing, either. Pleats came out cockeyed, buttons were torn off, and if I’d have wanted a wedding dress to look like the next morning after a night at the pub, I’d only have to give it to my partner, Po. Yes, I’d named him that in the war, and it stuck.

  Faithful, many of our customers were. They tried so hard to stay with us. “Jiffy’s open closer to my bus stop,” one said to me. “But you’re the only ones who treat us like intelligent beings.” She was the girl from the business registry, our most fervent customer. And she had one helluva big mouth. Everybody thought of us as some classy Jiffy, though a dog could have slept on our jobs and done a better job than Po, and I couldn’t do everything. I used to come in during the night and redo Po’s work, so’s he wouldn’t know. He never caught on, though thinking back, he should have.

  But Po never noticed. He pitched up every morning on the dot, never took sickies, never loitered at the counter with his many admirers who came in to catch a glimpse of him. I’d say, “Just a tick, Miss Timble,” and ring a bell. “Po!” I’d have to yell, to get my voice past the muffle of clothes, and through the racket of the tumble machines. “Look who’s here.” Po would push his head between the cello’d garments and give the customer his ghost-smile. “Yar,” he’d say and disappear again. “Hard at work, poor boy,” Miss Timble would say. “Just give him this,” and she’d leave a little package of Lamington cake she’d made, and flee. Or Miss Crumb, or old Mrs. Methuine.

  Even the old birds weren’t immune to him, though he was immune to all.

  I married during the first year, and my wife was a mystery as big as Po. I asked her early on why she wasn’t stuck on him instead of me and she asked me back: “What’s there to be stuck on?”

  Sylvia helped in the shop the first few months, trying to teach Po how to press, but he never learned, and then she couldn’t help because the Stoddard solvent made her sick, and she was sick enough anyway. And then Po, our first, came. And then of course she couldn’t help anymore, except for bookkeeping, something that Po and I’d been hopeless at.

  Syl liked Po, too, but—“He’s a sadsack,
isn’t he?” she asked one night after I got home at midnight from my moonlight fixup job at my own place of business. “You’re nuts,” she said. She was peevish, Po being such a teether and her with a bun in the oven ready to come out.

  “Sadsack!?” I regret I snarled. I opened the fridge and found only a chicken and a bottle of milk. Not one damn beer.

  “And where’s my bloody—”

  “Pull your head out, Mal!” Syl wasn’t a simperer. “You don’t even listen to the radio in that place.”

  I didn’t. It slowed me down and there was so much work.

  But her voice did something to me now. I was never one for a fight, but she could knock me out with a word. “Sorry, Syl,” I said.

  “That’s alright,” she said. “Hey, let’s not wake Po. But really, love, any man who doesn’t know a beer strike’s on is a man with a problem to solve.”

  “Beer?”

  “Four days now,” she said.

  “Strewth!”

  “Turn around,” she said, and when I did, she stuck her big stomach into the small of my back and massaged my shoulders. “They’re stiff as coat hangers. The books look better than you.”

  “Hmm,” I said, knowing she was right and wanting her hands to stay doing that, and not wanting tomorrow to come. Please don’t say another word, I silently implored her.

  “He’s not—” she said.

  “I can’t.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  We couldn’t, you see. We couldn’t split the partnership. I couldn’t imagine Po, Big Po, being on his own, out in the cold. Sure, there were a billion women who’d have liked to spirit Po away, but even if one succeeded, then what?

  “I owe him,” I said, and that was that, certainly since Little Po. For though Po wasn’t god—“That’s for sure,” Sylvia laughed, and though it was irreverent to him, I had to laugh, thinking of how often I’d say You bloody gorilla! while I fixed his jobs at night—though he wasn’t god in the dry cleaners, he was godly in the ways that count. Me being alive proved that. And certainly Po as a failed god would damn our newborn to something….

  “It’s not like we’re superstitious,” Sylvia said. “But.”

  Sylvia always could put words in the right place.

  So we had to do something, but what? We couldn’t abandon Po, but we couldn’t keep the shop going like it was. “Is he good at anything?” she asked.

  It was already two in the morning, so she ignored my “lotsa things” and went for the kill.

  “What, precisely?”

  Little Po woke for his twosies. I’d slept through them before, but this time I watched her feed him.

  When she got him to sleep it was almost 3 A.M., and I had nothing to say except “nothing particular,” thinking of something very particular.

  “I suspected that.” She sighed and shifted her stomach. “You’re soft as a cream bun, Mal. He still living in that working-men’s hotel?”

  “Where else would he bunk, except with us?”

  “Horrid places, those.”

  “No they aren’t.”

  “You hated them.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted, snuggling up to her. “But I like my comforts. I guess he doesn’t care.”

  “Yar.” She did him perfectly! I laughed till she hit me. “Wake Little Po at your peril!”

  At that, it was impossible not to wake him, and we did, right and proper.

  Syl had the idea of branching out instead of giving up. “There’s a ton of new migrants we can choose from. Let’s find us a nice little tailoress. We’ll add dressmaking and fashion advisory to the window, and get little cards printed up.”

  So we did. Mrs. Kamensky even spoke a bit of English, and she certainly could sew. She had a very Parisian air to her, the customers thought. Unlike lots of Adelaide men who didn’t talk about it, the women and girls had never been over there, so any Pole could of fooled them. Every Tuesday night was a free fashion advice evening, and it sure was attended.

  I asked Po to come to the nights and sit in as security, but Syl had her own devious reasons and they worked a treat. When fashions were modelled before tea and cake was served, the natural thing was to look to the man in the room. When Mrs. Kamensky said “This is the way to do so-and-so,” eyes would always turn to Po. He brought a great deal of juh nuhsay quah, as Gloria, the girl from the registry office (now Mrs. Braverman) said.

  Shortly after the fashion nights began, a group of brickies’ laborers came in one Friday lunch hour, their beery breath making me miss my bachelor days. “Where’s this Po bloke?” said the guy in front, plonking a fist the size of a pumpkin on the counter.

  “What you want him for?” I asked a bit too loud.

  To my relief, Po suddenly appeared at my side.

  “You Po?” the head bloke asked, looking a bit shaken.

  “Yar,” said Po.

  “You got a ball and chain o’ yur own?”

  Po just looked at them.

  “He’s single, matey,” I said, “but what’s it to you? He pinch your sheilas?”

  “Not likely!” said someone.

  “What’s your gripe then?” I demanded, Po lending me bluster I didn’t own. I felt good defending him against whatever they wanted to accuse him of.

  “He go to these ladies’ nights?”

  “Would you want to?” I asked.

  The room exploded in laughter. Even Po smiled at that.

  “What a man’s gotta do for a quid,” someone muttered.

  “You’re alright, mate,” said the lead brickie, and they walked out.

  The sessions brought us so much business that I could finally hire a girl to do the cleaning and pressing. She didn’t speak much English, but she could put a knife pleat in a bowl of custard, that girl. She was so good that Po didn’t need to do anything. He took to doing only the ug-type work, lifting dirty loads and such, and otherwise sitting on a stool in the back, unless some customer wanted to say hello or ask his advice. His advice was always the same, it seemed to me. He gave them what they wanted, as far as confidence-building went, his smile letting them know that they knew best. But the women who liked him never noticed that. I won’t say I understand women.

  Then he’d go back to his stool. He wasn’t a reader, so him sitting on that stool most of the time bothered me. He looked lost. I thought back to the war and remembered his spoons, so the next day I pinched two from home and gave them to him.

  “Are these right?” I asked. “We could use some music.”

  He started out rusty, but it only took about a day for him to loosen up, and then those spoons clacked out all kinds of songs, and he played better than I remembered. It was okay, seeing him slouched over the stool, banging those spoons against his knee. The girl, Majka, liked his playing, though it was hard for me to hear with all the moaning and hissing and tumbling of the machines.

  Those were good days. I slept so well that even the twosies of little Beatrice didn’t get me up.

  The Pococurante fashion evenings became so popular that we got a half page write-up in the Adelaide Telegraph as the place to be if you want to be in mode, with a big photo of the window:

  POCOCURANTE CLEANERS

  DRESSMAKING & FASHION ADVISORY SERVICE

  The article was feisty: “A poke in the eye to all those who think of Adelaide as not able to hold its head up with the major cities as far as style is concerned.”

  I framed the page and hung it in the window.

  The next week Jiffy Cleaners closed, and within days, I told Majka to bring in an offsider, we had so much business, so she brought in her younger sister. Now there were two girls working in the back of the shop, and Po mainly playing his spoons. It would of been odd if it were anyone but Po. And his songs were so full of life.

  About a month later, I heard two screams and fought my way through a crush of cello’d suits to find Po holding up a redbellied black snake with one hand and picking up a wedding veil with the other.

  “It
want kill me,” Majka said, her hands on her heart. Her sister half hid behind her—their eyes big as oil stains.

  Po dropped the snake into the middle of the wedding veil, pulled up the edges and knotted them. The snake squiggled but it couldn’t get out. Po had bagged that snake so smooth, you’d of thought he bagged a snake a day before breakfast. I’d wondered before where Po came from. He never said.

  He looked to me.

  “Take it away!” begged Majka.

  Her sister pointed. “No, that.”

  I agreed. I pulled a set of Alfred Hotel drapes from their laundry bag and handed Po the bag.

  He dropped his improvised sack into the laundry bag, gave the girls one of his ghost-smiles, and left out the back door.

  The front doorbell had tinkled several times and the counter bell was berserk, so I left the girls with a “You okay?” and their uncertain nods. As soon as I could, I joined them in the back and they told me the story. The red-belly had come out from a pile of musty woollens that looked like they hadn’t been worn for years. “It want kill me!” Majka kept saying, and her sister acted like one of those jerk dolls where you pull the elastic to make its head nod. I didn’t laugh. They wouldn’t know that the snake just wanted to get away. I did say I’d never seen another snake in Adelaide, and then showed them from the style of clothes in that pile and their sheepy smell that the customer was a cockie, and since they didn’t know that word either, I had to say farmer, but they didn’t understand till I said baaah! And then they smiled.