Logorrhea

by John Klima

  Then I said so that they understood, regardless of whether they believed the rest of what I’d said: “You tell. No work.” They both understood that. We couldn’t have our lady customers thinking snakes were lurking in the Pococurante, eyeing their high heels.

  Po didn’t come back that day, but was security at the fashion night that night, reliable as ever.

  The next morning when Majka and her sister arrived, they carried between them a huge old case made of something that looked like leather. They ducked to get it in the front door, and took it to the back. Po was already there, playing his spoons. The shop wasn’t open yet, thank goodness, or I would of had to close, I was so curious.

  Po stopped playing. We watched as Majka undid the buckles while her sister held the case upright. They opened the hinged lid together and Majka brought out what looked like a taxidermied snake from some Land of Giants, but instead of fangs, it had a little brass cup for a mouth. Majka’s sister laid the case down and stood beside her in front of Po.

  “You take,” Majka said.

  “From us Papa,” said her sister.

  “Wahzsh” or something like that, Majka said. “Snake.” She pointed to the thing.

  Po nodded to them, no smile at all. He got off the stool and took it from their hands like it was a baby. He inspected it as thoroughly as I’ve seen him check a gun. It proved to be some weird musical instrument. Black, thick as an anaconda, and in the shape of an S that then snaked down into another S. He found finger holes in the horizontal places of the snake, and put his mouth to the mouthpiece. He moved his lips around experimenting like you do with a new girl…and blew.

  At first nothing happened, so he wet his lips again and stood up straighter.

  He got a gurgle out of it like a toilet in an apartment house. His eyes crossed, looking at the mouthpiece. He shut his eyes and took a big breath and settled his lips again.

  “Bwaaaah!”

  I hadn’t heard that since I left the place where I grew up. Take a six-month-old calf away from its mum, and if it doesn’t make that bellow right off, give it time and it’ll blast you to the next shire with that sound, and if it doesn’t, you’re deaf, guaranteed.

  The Pococurante is a small place. I stumbled back, holding my ears, and would of fallen but for the press of hanging clothes.

  The girls were prepared. They giggled but didn’t take their hands from their ears.

  Po grinned.

  He took a breath and tried again, producing a more civilized sound. I looked at my watch. I had to open the shop. The girls tore their eyes from Po and the great snake, and turned their equipment on.

  The day was punctuated with the call of the hungry calf. And it was funny, the reaction.

  “You got a bull back there?” asked most.

  I had a great time instructing city people on the particulars of bull calls compared to calf calls. “That’s one hundred percent calf,” I said. “You think a bull’s got a great deep voice like that, don’t you, Mrs. O’Brien? Mrs. James? Mrs. Braverman? No, a bull’s got a soprano, beautiful and thin and high as a lady’s. Like yours!”

  “Get away with you,” said Mrs. Braverman, waving her hand with its flashy wedding ring. “You’re pulling my leg.”

  “Po,” I yelled, but he couldn’t hear so I had to step back and beckon him through. His eyes were closed so I had to get Majka to put her hand on his shoulder.

  He didn’t come immediately but when he did, “I was telling Mrs. Braverman here,” I said, “that a bull’s got a high voice, nothing like that calf call you’re making, isn’t that true?” Ever since that red-belly, I reckoned he must of come from a place like me.

  “Yar,” Po said. His lips were curiously red and swollen and he had a faraway look in his eyes.

  A little pleat formed between Mrs. Braverman’s eyes as she regarded Po.

  “Let’s see you play,” she said.

  I bowed to her and turned to Po.

  He went back and returned, struggling through the clothes racks with the instrument in his arms. At the look of it, Gloria Braverman’s pleat deepened but Po’s eyes were closed by then, his lips pressed to the mouthpiece.

  “Bwaaaah!” yelled the giant snake with the voice of a hungry calf.

  Mrs. Braverman fled.

  It was so funny, I laughed till I cried. But I didn’t tell Syl.

  From that day on, Po played only the snake instrument. All day. After a while, he could play like the wind in the grass, so soft that the equipment overpowered him, but the girls didn’t like that. They liked him to make the calf sound. “Bwaah! Bwaah!” they’d urge, and “Bookat!” or something like that.

  So he made up songs that sounded like they were yelled by a hungry calf. They loved them and they accomplished so much work that they were oftentimes standing around with their hands on their hips, waiting. By the end of a month, I think he could’ve made that snake whisper, but he didn’t. It only yelled.

  The first intimation that I had of anything wrong was when I noticed that women had stopped asking for Po.

  Then one day when I opened the door, I found an envelope that someone had shoved under the door. It was an article clipped from the Melbourne Daily Courier.

  ADELAIDE CULTURE TAKEN TO THE CLEANERS IN A WORD

  In the mushroom culture that is Adelaide, your correspondent has come upon a delicious morsel of farce in the center of town: The Pococurante, where those with fashion at heart come every week, and the crème of Adelaide have their clothes created and cleaned to a T. This center of culture is run by two strange blokes, who must be laughing up their sleeves at the cognoscenti who don’t know their Pococurante from their frankly, Scarlett, I don’t give a damn. They serenade the beauties that flock here with Mozart. Not quite. Follow the sound of the angry bull, and you’ll hit the bullseye.

  All day I drove myself insane. What was the article on about? Some nasty anti-Adelaide bit of snideness? That’s something that Melbourne and Sydney do, but I was trying all day to figure out what to do about Po, who really had to stop playing that snake thing, at least like that.

  I’d never read the Melbourne Daily Courier before, and don’t imagine that any of our customers did. But that article could of been slipped with the ink still damp under the pillow of every Adelaidian, such was the response we got. We hadn’t been this slow since the old days, and the people who did come in, came in with silly questions, not things to clean. I could feel the city’s anger.

  In the back of the Pococurante, Po played his snake for the girls, who were getting through the work faster than it was coming in today. Po hadn’t mentioned that I didn’t call him to the front any more, but then Po never mentioned anything.

  My one comfort that day was that Po didn’t know about the newspaper article.

  I didn’t want Sylvia to find out about it either, but when I got home, she met me with “What’s the bull? And what’s this all about?” And she shoved an open book at me and pointed.

  The dictionary. I didn’t need her to point. On the left hand page, something was circled in angry red crayon.

  I read it.

  “Why didn’t you just punch me in the eye?” I asked.

  “Why didn’t you look it up?”

  “It was a name, not a word,” I said. “He was Pococurante! I told you. Would you have looked up a name embroidered in gold on a bloke like that’s shirt?”

  “Huh!” she said and without taking her eyes off me, yelled, “Beatrice! Get your tea set off the hallway floor this second or—”

  I heard a scuttle and a whimper, while I looked at the thing in my arms and wondered what to do with it.

  “I don’t know,” she said to me. “But honestly…perhaps not.”

  Sylvia and I were just inside the front door. I walked past her and dropped into my chair. I couldn’t decently strangle the dictionary, so it sat in my lap.

  Syl walked over to me, picked it up and flung it against the wall. “There,” she said. “You can put it in the
bookcase later.” She rested her hands on her hips.

  “Now,” she said, “I asked you about that bull.”

  “It’s a calf,” I said. Syl was born and bred in Adelaide.

  “Get on with it.”

  “It’s only an instrument that Po practices in slack times,” I said. “Sometimes it sounds like a calf…only a calf.”

  After a while she said “Mmm,” and then, “Must feed the kids.”

  She put them to bed as soon as they’d eaten. Then she fixed two tall, stiff drinks: brandy and water without the ice and without the water. She put the glasses on the table by my easy chair, shoved me into it, and sat on my lap.

  “You can’t change the name now,” she said, “or everyone’ll think they’ve got you. You must tough it out.” Then she kissed me.

  “I don’t deserve that,” I said.

  “Too right you don’t,” she said, and kissed me again.

  She talked, and we drank on empty stomachs, and I felt after another of her drinks that I could tough it out. But then there was Po.

  “You must face Po,” she said. “Buy him out.”

  “Yar,” I said, but we didn’t laugh.

  I knew I couldn’t do it.

  The next day we might as well of been closed as far as customers giving us jobs went. The ones who picked up jobs were cold as a witch’s tit, excuse my French. But in the late afternoon, a reporter came in from the Adelaide Telegraph, just as Syl had told me to expect.

  “They’ve picked a fight,” she’d said. “And they’ll get it.”

  So I was ready, I hoped.

  I laughed at the Melburnians’ snideness as Syl told me to call it, and shrugged my shoulders at Pococurante, saying that if Melbourne people think that Adelaide people don’t know what it means, that just shows Melbourne’s unworldliness.

  “We can snap our fingers to what they’re obsessed with,” I said (something else memorized from Syl). “We’ve got juh nuhsay quah,” I added. That, I’d remembered from Gloria Braverman, who had said it a lot once, and Syl said that I should repeat that, too.

  “I bet the reporter will ask you to say that twice,” she said. And she was right.

  “And about those sounds of an angry bull?” the reporter asked.

  “You ever been to an opera?” I asked the reporter, and he laughed out loud as he wrote that down.

  I laughed with him, but didn’t feel any too good inside. Po hadn’t come in, and didn’t pitch up all day.

  The article in the Adelaide Telegraph came out the next morning, and it was a triumph. Melburnians were jealous sourpusses, as anyone would be with their weather…. According to Oxford professor W. K. Lister from the Royal Academy of Music, who is visiting his sister here in Adelaide, from descriptions of the instrument being played by Mr. Pococurante— I distinctly told the reporter Clarence Braithwaite, so I don’t know how this mistake occurred—the instrument is a Schlangenrohr, otherwise known as a Serpent, invented hundreds of years ago to be played in churches as a choir enhancement. It is a credit to our city, and possibly of quite venerable age. It is extremely difficult to play. The professor said he would be honoured to meet…

  Customers came in all day waving the Telegraph like a flag. “Hooray for us!” they crowed. “Where’s Po?”

  Po didn’t come in all day. And what’s more, the snake-serpent-whateveryoucallit had disappeared. I’d been too preoccupied to pay any attention to Majka when she’d asked about both the day before. Po had always packed it in its case and left it in the shop before.

  When I got home Sylvia was there to meet me at the door, a frothy glass in her hand and a smile as big as a house on her face.

  I pasted a smile on my face, but couldn’t face the drink.

  The next day the girls were frantic. Still no Po. I served the crowd of customers at the counter and then told the girls I’d go find him, and to take the day off.

  I closed the shop and walked the three blocks to the rooming house where we’d both lived till I got married. The manager went to his room at my request, but Po didn’t answer the door. He was paid up to the end of the week so it was like pulling nails from ironwood to get the manager to open up his room, but finally he did when I said I’d leave and come back with the coppers.

  Inside, a neat room greeted us, with nothing personal in it except what he’d left in the wastebasket: a magazine of physical culture—something of a surprise. A powder blue envelope with no writing on it, but it had once been sealed. A balled-up clipping from, you guessed it before I did: The Melbourne Courier. And a dried-up apple core.

  I felt sick.

  While I scouted around the room, I remembered what it was like living in the one next door. Alone in your room, you’d hear other men breathing, turning the pages of magazines, and the rest. The back of each door had a sign on it that said, NO Women topping a lot of other No s. The view from the window was a brick wall with a painted ad: Bonds.

  I went home to Sylvia, not knowing what to do. We put the kids in the old Morris and drove all over Adelaide, even out to Snake Gully, looking, like lost farts in a haunted shithouse.

  “He’s gone,” I said after two hours of this.

  “Where would he go?”

  “How should I know?”

  We took the kids back. They were crying. I left her and them in the house, and went out again. I didn’t know where, but I had to go out.

  I walked till my feet were blistered. I hadn’t walked this much for years. He could walk, I remembered. He never groused like the rest of us at the length of those tramps in mud.

  When I felt so lost that my eyes were getting misty, I made my way back to my own house, and Sylvia.

  Our stereo ran hot that evening—music took the place of talk. We didn’t have too many records, so she had to play her Benny Goodman twice. That was fine by me. Any noise would do, because nothing would do.

  We went to bed early and I looked at the ceiling for hours. I wanted to strangle whoever those people were—the nasty ones. He had protected me, and what had I done for him?

  “You need your sleep, Mal,” came Syl’s voice through the darkness. She’d been pretending to sleep, too.

  “I’ll be all right,” I said to Syl.

  “Shh!” she said.

  “I was,” I said, miffed. It was Syl who had spoken, not me.

  “Shut up, Mal. Listen!”

  I heard it. A voice—high and thin as the night. One long note. It swelled…and then died away.

  “How beautiful!” whispered Sylvia. “Shh!”

  She didn’t need to shush me. I felt my ears stretch, I was straining so hard to hear.

  Again and again—that voice, and each time, farther away.

  “There’s no words,” she whispered, “but then there aren’t really in opera, are there?”

  She wasn’t wanting an answer, so I didn’t give her one. She shut up again.

  “If only I could sing like that,” Sylvia finally sighed when the voice was too faint to catch anymore.

  When dawn came, I heard her ladylike snores.

  When I opened the door of the Pococurante only a few hours later, Majka and her sister came in as usual, but we each had our jobs to do, so we nodded to each other and got on with it.

  A crowd of customers was already waiting, sounding like a flock of galahs: “Did you hear her too? My word! I wonder who…”

  And they must of breakfasted on radio waves to come up with Call of the Soprano, Phantom Lady of the Night, Dame Melba’s Ghost, Heavenly Disturber of Our Peace and such rot.

  Well, Sylvia had been taken in completely, but I couldn’t let it stand. All the customers got an earful of my correction, as I explained that the lady was a bull. After about an hour of this, an old guy who was quietly waiting, holding a hoary jacket, backed me up. “A bull’s call is unmistakable,” he said.

  Finally, at that slack time just before noon, I was alone in the front, so I went to the back and told the girls that I was sorry they’d been to
o far away to hear that bull, living in their migrant camp, but they said that just around dawn the whole camp heard it, too.

  “Papa say no bull,” Maj said. And just then, a ghost tweaked three sets of lips.

  * * *

  A•U•T•O•C•H•T•H•O•N•O•U•S

  au·toch·tho·nous o-'täk-the-nes

  adjective

  1: indigenous, native

  2: formed or originating in the place where found

  * * *

  From Around Here

  TIM PRATT

  I ARRIVED ON A FERRY made of gull cries and good ocean fog, and stepped from the liminal world into Jack London Square, down by Oakland’s fine deep-water port. I walked, predawn, letting my form coalesce from local expectations, filtered through my own habits and preferences. I stopped at a plate glass window downtown by the 12th Street train station and took a look at myself: dreads and dark skin, tall but not epic tall, clothes a little too raggedy to make robbing me worth a mugger’s time. I walked on, feeling the thrums and creaks of a city waking up or going to sleep or just keeping on around me. I strolled past the houses of sex offenders, one-time killers with high blood pressure, altruists, guilty activists, the good-hearted, the fearful, and all the rest of the usual human lot. I was looking for the reek of the deeply crazy, the kind of living crack in a city that can swallow whole neighborhoods and poison the well of human faith in a place utterly. The kind that could shatter lives on an afternoon spree or corrode them slowly over decades.

  After awhile, I found a street like that, and then I went to get some breakfast.

  It was the kind of diner where you sit at a counter and the menus are sticky with the last customer’s pancake syrup and you hope for the best. There were no other customers—I was between morning rushes, which made me lonely—and when the waitress came to take my order she was frazzled, like nobody should look at five in the morning. I said, “I don’t have any money, but maybe we can work something out.” Either she was from around here, and I’d get some breakfast, or she wasn’t, and I’d get thrown out.