This happened several more times. It appeared to Bull that Morrow hadn’t made much of an impression at the university, or maybe it was just so large that it was impossible to expect him to be readily known. At last someone offered assistance. A girl who looked to Bull as if she had something very bitter tasting in her mouth pointed to a Lego-like building across the river. “It’s the Science Complex you want,” she said. “Just take the bridge over.” Bull thanked her and she smirked, or so it seemed to him.
A security guard laughed when Bull asked where he might find Dr Morrow’s office. But when Bull did not respond, he directed him to a stairwell. “Even when you think you can’t go any farther,” the security guard said, “just keep on going.” And he wasn’t lying. More than once Bull thought he’d come to the end of the line, the subterranean corridor halting in a tangle of water pipes, heating vents and loose insulation, only to find that the passage continued. When it did finally terminate, Bull did not have to read the thin metal tag on the steel fireproof door to know that he’d at last found Dr Morrow. The smell had told him as much.
“Fantastic!” Morrow cried again, leaving the fish on his desk and moving to a cluttered bookshelf. “Help yourself to coffee,” he said to Bull.
The coffee machine, the kind Joe DiMaggio used to peddle, was on a small table in the corner of the room. Bull had to step around several piles of books and a crumpled pair of hip waders. Morrow’s office was beyond messy. The wastebasket was overflowing and candy wrappers and pop cans littered most every surface. There were two recycling containers beside the small table, but both were empty. And the coffee looked as if it had been brewed days ago. Bull laid his hand on the side of the pot. It was cold.
“Yes,” Morrow called out from behind. “Yes, here it is.” He motioned Bull back to his desk. “Sit, sit, sit.”
Bull removed a stack of typewritten pages from a chair and sat down. Morrow spilled forth like an adolescent caffeine addict. Not only did Bull have trouble distinguishing words, but sentences too were lost to him. The snippets he did pick out made no sense to him. “Industrial Revolution … cargo liners … pleasure craft.” “Blasting” caught his ear only because of his constituency’s former industry. Then Morrow stopped. It took Bull a moment to realize he’d gone silent: the professor’s gibber still echoed in his ear.
“Mr Mayor,” Morrow said—he always referred to Bull by title. “Have you ever heard of the myotonic goat?”
Bull looked at him stupidly. “What does this have to do with a goat?”
“The myotonic goat,” Morrow went on, undeterred, “is a scientific, or rather genetic anomaly. It’s called by some, ranchers mostly who like their names a little more colourful, the Tennessee Stiff-Leg. Here, look at this.”
Morrow pushed an open textbook across the desk, knocking a half-eaten Snickers to the floor. Bull looked at the picture. A billy goat with straight horns and a beard, its markings fairly conventional black and white patches.
“Seems pretty regular to me,” Bull said.
“Yes,” Morrow said, his voice cracking with excitement. “But walk up behind this animal and clap your hands, Mr Mayor, and you will find it is anything but regular. In moments of alarm the body stiffens, the muscles actually seize, become as rigid as this desk, and the goat literally falls over in a faint. It is quite, quite fascinating. And if I am not mistaken sir,” Morrow said, a smile cracking his face as he laid his hand on the dead fish, “we are looking at the same here.”
The smart thing would have been to dig a hole in the garden and drop the bloody thing in, Bull thinks. Fish make good fertilizer. His mother used to pay the old man across the street to supply her with perch and sunfish. She’d lay them out in the sun for a couple of days, then till them into the soil around her peas and tomatoes and string beans. She never used them around the potatoes or carrots, though, believing the stink would get into the root vegetables. That’s what I should have done, Bull tells himself. Instead, he’d wrapped it in Cellophane and newspaper and stuck it in the deep-freeze, under bags of rhubarb so Marlene wouldn’t find it.
The Jericho trout, Morrow had called the fish. He called it that after Bull screwed up his face at Salvelinus rigeo. He’d never been good with Latin, already a dead language when he failed it back in high school. Morrow read the description aloud from a mouldy leather-bound book. It had sounded like the same fish, right down to the silver on the pectoral fins. But the trout Morrow spoke of hadn’t been seen since the 1912 gaming expedition on which Sir Holyfield Lewis, an English gentleman, had made the last recorded sighting. That particular fish became the centrepiece of a lavish banquet at which the unfortunate Lewis perished, after a fine rib bone became lodged in his throat, inducing a choking fit that culminated in a massive coronary. Morrow found the last point very humorous, and his laughter, a combination of snorts and squeals, unsettled Bull.
He shouldn’t have left the damn fish with Morrow either. A second chance gone. He’d picked it up after their meeting, but Morrow had grabbed his arm, a tight wiry grip. “No, please, Mr Mayor. Please.” Bull had been happy just to be rid of the thing. At least that’s what he’d thought. Now Morrow and his flakes are creeping around the woods. And Darlene is with them. The porch steps are growing cold beneath his buttocks.
“You’ll get piles sitting there like that, Pop.”
Darryl’s voice spooks him. Bull did not hear his son slip out the front door, and when he turns to look at him he feels a great sadness. Darryl is a large boy, more puffy than fat. He has Bull’s height but Marlene’s delicate features, and the thin equine nose and small parchment ears leave him looking inconsistent. He rarely smiles.
“What are you doing up so late?” Bull asks.
“Darlene woke me,” Darryl replies and moves to lean against the railing.
He is wearing a matching pair of pyjamas with tiny cars racing across the fabric. He has always worn pyjamas and it bothers Bull. It was fine when he was younger, though Bull himself stopped dressing for bed when he was still in grade school. But Darryl is nineteen now; he should be sleeping in his underpants like everyone else.
Like everyone else. Bull knows that is the last thing Darryl will be. And not just because he is big and uncoordinated; or because he doesn’t like sports, or fishing or hunting. And not because he collects wildflowers and doesn’t like girls. Bull knows this about his son: that he doesn’t like girls. That he prefers boys. There is no hiding his effeminacy, which in itself doesn’t ensure what his mother called the delicacy, though Bull has known of his persuasion since Darryl was quite young. There are things that cannot be hidden, that should not be hidden, Bull thinks. But these are not the things that keep Darryl from being like others. It is something else, the something that saddens Bull every time he looks at him: absence of hope.
Darryl is, in the truest sense of the word, a hopeless person. And this despair stains him like a bruise. His deficiencies, as Marlene calls them, only serve to darken the blemish. Bull wishes he could pick Darryl up, all 265 pounds of him, and drop him down some place where he could be happy. Some place that is not Marbleton, where he doesn’t have to live in his father’s shadow, with his mother’s disappointment or under the unkind gaze of his neighbours. But Bull has never said this to his son.
“How’s your stomach, Pop?” Darryl asks, concern in his voice.
Bull hoists the bottle of Maalox and holds it as if on display. “Same as ever,” he says.
Darryl nods his head and for a moment appears lost in thought.
“You know,” he says, finally, “we should really do something about that.”
Marlene was angry. Bull could tell by the way her eyebrows were pinched together and her lips drawn into a tight little line. He expected that at any moment she was going to dig the air freshener from beneath the sink and spray it directly into Dr Morrow’s face. Not that he would blame her. Morrow’s fishy stink had already permeated the entire room, and Bull was becoming concerned that it might seep into th
e upholstery of the couch upon which the man sat, with his feet tucked up underneath him no less.
“I’m thinking, Mr Mayor,” Morrow said, rubbing his hands disconcertingly across his breasts, “that the best course of action would be to cordon the entire quarry. A police barricade, if you will.”
“We don’t have any police in Marbleton,” Bull said.
“None?”
Bull shook his head.
“Then what do you propose we do, sir?”
Marlene slammed a cupboard shut in the kitchen and Bull flinched. He could hear her coming toward the living room and his stomach began to burn. Poor Morrow, he thought, feeling suddenly sorry for the odoriferous professor. Maybe he could shuttle him through the front door before Marlene descended upon him with her Glade aerosol and sharp nails. Of course, if Bull had kept the promise he’d made to her that morning, Morrow wouldn’t need rescuing. “That man is not, I repeat, not, to come into this house,” she’d said. “Yes, honey,” he’d said, “I mean it, Bull,” she’d said, “I know,” he’d said, “Promise,” she’d said. And he’d promised. But there was Morrow. And here came Marlene.
She breezed by him before Bull had the chance to get up out of his chair. She walked straight toward Morrow, stopping in front of him with her hands on her hips. Bull sighed with relief: they were empty; balled into fists, but empty. She stared directly at Morrow, and though Bull could see only the back of her head, he knew exactly the expression on her face. It would be hard: her lips thin and mouth bending down at the edges, her eyes narrow slats and gone cold, the skin around her jaw drawn tight. Bull was familiar with the look; it was very unfriendly.
Morrow saw none of this. He was gormless, and greeted Marlene’s odium with the smile of a child: teeth showing and eyes bright with innocence.
Poor bugger, Bull thought again. But Marlene didn’t strike out, though she was more than capable. Instead she stepped to the window, and with one great heave hoisted the pane. She turned back to Morrow.
“Stuffy in here,” she said. Then left the room.
Morrow had no idea of the danger he’d just faced. It was the second time that day he’d displayed what Bull thought to be a glaring lack of awareness. The professor had been equally oblivious out at the old quarry. Bull had tried to dissuade him from making the trek, but Morrow had been insistent. “I must see it, Mr Mayor,” he’d said, “scientifically speaking, you understand.” So Bull grudgingly accompanied him.
It was worse than minding a toddler. Several times Bull had to stop and take Morrow by the shoulders, look him in the face and slowly explain that he must be careful. “There are flues, shafts, all over,” he’d said in a softly scolding voice, “and you can’t see them. They’re covered over with brush.” There would be nothing he could do, he told Morrow, if he fell into one. And each time Morrow nodded like an imbecile, then started off again on his reckless wander.
When at last they made it safely to the quarry, Morrow paid so little attention to the crater that Bull could feel his face grow flush with anger. Instead, the professor stood with his back to the excavation and took in the surrounding forest. “Yes, I see,” he said again and again, until Bull, his spleen gorged, blurted, “You’re not even bloody looking at it!” But Morrow just smiled his stupid child’s smile and said, “Oh, but I am.”
He said nothing after that. Not a word, not until they had trudged all the way back to the house and Bull, knowing he shouldn’t, knowing he’d promised, held the front door open and led Morrow through to the living room, where the man removed his shoes and parked himself, Indian fashion, on the sofa. Only then did he open his tight little mouth and tell Bull what he was thinking.
“Well, Mr Mayor?” Morrow said.
“Sorry?”
“No proposition for our dilemma?”
“I really don’t think I follow you, Professor,” Bull said.
“No,” Morrow smiled, “I don’t believe you do.”
He pulled his feet from beneath him and slipped them into his tattered loafers. Then he stood up. “Not to worry,” he said, offering Bull a feline grin. “I’ll take care of the cordon myself, shall I?”
Marlene stirs, snorts softly and offers the slightly phlegmy cough her years of occasional smoking have bequeathed to her. Bull freezes, one leg in his trousers, the other crooked and ready to enter. He holds his breath. She rolls on to her side and stretches an arm out for his pillow, which she snatches greedily to her chest. But she is still asleep. At least until he pulls his undershirt over his head. Bull can feel her looking at him before he pushes his head through the neck-hole.
“Where do you think you’re going?” she asks.
“Out.” Bull smiles.
“It’s three-thirty in the bloody morning.”
“Yes.”
“Get back into bed,” Marlene growls, “and stop being so foolish.”
Bull takes a breath, so deep it hurts his lungs, then doesn’t know what to do with it. If he lets it slip out as a sigh, Marlene will think him insolent; if he blows it out in a burst, she’ll take it as a challenge. Neither is agreeable to Bull. He winces at the strain, leans forward and releases the air through his nostrils, as slowly as he can.
“What was that?” Marlene blurts, pushing herself up.
“What?” Bull answers quickly, slipping a hand to his lower back. “Oh, nothing. Just a twinge in the old back, is all. Go back to sleep, honey.”
“Don’t honey me,” Marlene snaps. “And get your ass back to bed.”
“It’s just,” Bull stumbles, “I’m having trouble sleeping again. A short walk to tire me out. I’ll be back in ten minutes.” He smiles through the dark. “Promise.”
Bull had been standing on Forsythe Street, outside the Marbleton Municipal Building, when the old yellow school bus pulled into town. He’d just given Janeane his scribbled notes for a speech he was due to give at the monthly town council meeting—on the merits of the pay-per-bag method of garbage collection—so she could type them up. He’d once before, in the early days of mayoralty, tried to read from his own handwritten draft and the results had been disastrous. His nearly illegible penmanship had produced numerous pauses, and in the end, after apologizing for his error, he’d worked off the top of his head, to similar effect. He’d learned his lesson. Ever since, Bull had made certain that Janeane Pryor, his official assistant—as well as the unofficial assistant to all the other council members—typed up a clean copy of his thoughts. Which was not the easiest task, all things considered.
Bull had paused on the bottom step and was contemplating a return to his office to clarify a few of the more muddled points of the speech for Janeane when he saw it creep around the corner onto Forsythe. To look at it, there was nothing very extraordinary about the bus. A little long in the tooth, as such vehicles go: the rear suspension all but given up the ghost and the requisite yellow faded and flaked; a long unfriendly dent along one side, from just behind the door to the rear tire well. But it wasn’t so much the condition of the bus that caught Bull’s attention— and the attention of those Marbletonians who were making their way along Forsythe to and from the stores downtown—as it was the sound. The sound of singing. It seemed to precede the vehicle, to float out before it, announcing its arrival. To Bull it sounded almost like a hymn, like the softly reverential tones of a church choir. Yet there was something in the tone that was emphatically secular. He could not make out the lyrics, which were muted within the dimpled and scarred canary shell.
All those walking along Forsythe had stopped to watch the bus as it pulled up to the curb in front of the Municipal Building, in front of Bull. Even cars had pulled to the side of the street, their drivers craning to see what was happening.
Bull waited as the singing subsided. He could feel the sweat beginning to rise on his brow and moistening the cotton fabric of his golf shirt where it pinched tightly under his arms. The engine choked and sputtered, and finally died. Then the doors folded back and Bull could have sworn that, as
they did so, he’d seen a small cloud of smoke billow forth.
As the bus emptied its load, Bull did not register faces; rather he saw nose rings, lip rings, eyebrow rings; shaggy hair, shorn hair, rainbow hair; combat fatigues, torn jeans, gypsy dresses. He saw backpacks, rucksacks and duffle bags; guitars, flutes and bongo drums.
And then, he saw Morrow. Standing there on the sidewalk in front of him. His hair bushier than ever; his beard scruffier; his eyes brighter, more mischievous, and lit with a defiance that was anything but childish.
“What’s this?” Bull managed, feeling a little apprehensive at the sight of Morrow’s fiery little grin.
“I told you I would take care of it, Mr Mayor,” Morrow smiled. “And I will.”
“Take care of what?”
“Why the cordon, of course.” Morrow shook his head as if the answer was quite obvious.
Bull looked around him, at the strange bodies that had spilled onto the sidewalk, some already lounging on the steps of the Municipal Building, others mingling with his now-confused-looking constituents. Still others had wandered into the street, oblivious to any traffic, and stood gazing about themselves as if lost.
“I wish you’d told me,” Bull said.
“Oh, Mr Mayor,” Morrow said, clapping a bony hand on Bull’s shoulder. “I’m sure you’ve got more pressing concerns, running the town and all.”
“Not really,” Bull said, trying his best to sound firm.
“Look.” Morrow turned and made a wide sweeping gesture, taking in his flock. “We’re just going to pick up a few supplies and then we’ll be heading on out to get things set up.”
“I don’t know if this is such a good idea,” Bull said, lowering his head. Then he caught wind of something and sniffed at the air. “Is that dope I smell?”
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