Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  You'd be surprised, wouldn't you though? Forty-nine, fifty. Not bad, not bad. Pretty damn good. He flexed his arms for the mirror, then lay down in front of it and began a rapid series of sit-ups.

  Yeah, Hayes has got himself a real bitch. Women don't want a man anyhow. They'd rather have that pansy librarian. I showed her though. I showed her what it was like to have a man, no matter what she said, whining and screaming. Hell, it was worth it to see the look on her face, fifteen thousand dollars but it was almost worth it.

  They're all lesbians and fairy lovers. That Troyes biddy goo-gooing at that faggot priest in a public restaurant. Boy, they'd be surprised what I know. Don't live in this crummy hole this long and not figure how the land lies. Not if you're on the ball.

  Breathing in short gasps, Barnum stood in front of the mirror. He flexed the pumped-up pectorals with satisfaction. Then, his eyes fixed on his face, he removed his shorts and threw them into the corner. He squeezed his testicles and penis.

  From a closet in which hung garments that Barnum never wore outside this room he pulled out and put on gray military tunic, cavalry pants, and jackboots. He brought a belt and a German officer's hat and a wood chair back to the mirror. From a bureau drawer he took a leather-wrapped hammer handle. He put it beside the belt near the chair.

  Barnum stared at himself in the mirror, patted down his hair, adjusted the hat in an exact line with his narrowed eyes. He smiled, then he frowned. "When I tell you to do something, do it," he snarled through tight lips. "Do you think it matters now? Do you think you can stop me? Bring her in here." Expanding his chest, he let out a slow breath and tossed the hat into a corner. "Tie her hands behind her back. Do what I say. Hold her." The man in the mirror unzipped the pants. They fell down over the boots, and in the mirror his swelling penis jerked. He rubbed it roughly as he spoke. "You don't have any choice now, do you? Go on. Go on." He unbuttoned the jacket and pulled it open; sweat was shiny in the hair on his chest. Grinning, he threw his foot up on the chair. "Bring them in.

  You're no different. Shitty, dirty scum. You all do it. She screams but she likes it. When they finish, shoot them."

  His pupils blackened the color from his eyes, eyes rapt on the mirrored eyes. Picking up the belt, Barnum bent himself over the chair and supporting his weight with one hand, lashed awkwardly back with the belt at his white buttocks. His mouth had fallen open and saliva filled it. He watched the black leather welt the skin in the corner of the mirror. Grabbing the wrapped handle, he bent again, reached between his legs, with his breath caught, sweat like tears on his face, Barnum stared up at the man in the mirror. "Clean him out," he told him. "Show them. Bastards. Make her do it. Make her."

  Breath burst from his face. The man was grinning in the mirror, and kept grinning 'til his eyes closed.

  Before he went to bed, Barnum straightened the upstairs room, hung the clothes back neatly in the closet, restacked the magazines, and locked the door. He thought no further of the woman whose imagined presence had been subjected to his will. Different images of women had filled the role in this and other private rooms of Barnum's—some were women in magazine pictures, some strangers who had come into a store or a bar. This particular woman had never been in his store, or in Fred's Fries, or in the Old Towne Inn, though she was not a stranger. While she had never spoken to him except across a grille, he knew her name. Her name was Judith Haig.

  At 2:30 A.M., as thunderhead clouds put out the stars and the weight of the air grew electric, there was only one light on in all of Dingley Falls. As usual, it was Sammy Smalter's. The flame of suspicion in Sarah MacDermott's mind about the man she erroneously called a dwarf would doubtless have been fueled had she seen him now, for Mr. Smalter (in pajama bottoms and one of the little T-shirts so appealing to Sarah's sister, Orchid O'Neal) was pacing his room and making hideous faces. He was also muttering aloud, though completely alone, and while Sarah was a monologist herself, she always insisted on an audience, even if she could find no one better than her sleeping husband, Joe. Smalter, of course, was a bachelor and had no bed partner.

  "It'll never work." He grimaced. "Sweetheart, look…Look, sweetheart. You'd never know if I was coming through this door at night or not.…No." Smalter ran his hands through his wreath of hair, fluffing it out in yellow tufts. "No. You'd always be waiting for that call saying I was on a slab in some morgue with a card tied to my toe, and my face…a mess of blood and bones….My face…shot away.…My face…a scrambled plate of spaghetti…My face…Oh, to hell with it. Enough for tonight."

  Mr. Smalter ripped a page from the typewriter on his desk. He brushed his teeth and took his pill and thought of Mrs. Haig taking hers. He bent over ten times, occasionally touching his toes. He flipped off the desk light, flipped on the bed light, slid wider the covers, and opened his Browning to "Andrea del Sarto."

  The light burned long after clouds had rolled over the moon and stars, long after the reader slept and dreamed whatever compromises, accommodations, or readjustments of reality his sleeping psyche thought it safe to allow him. Out of the third-floor window of the tallest home in Dingley Falls it watched like a lighthouse beacon over all the houses anchored nearby in a bay of night.

  In Argyle a conscientious mortician, working until nearly dawn, studied more earnestly, saw more aesthetic possibilities in Alf Marco's face than anyone in his life had ever seen. Another mortician stroked gently into Sister Mary Joseph's withered cheeks the only rouge they would ever wear.

  In Argyle, while Mr. Oglethorpe's elderly sister, exhausted by her long bus trip and the family crisis, slept on an unfamiliarly large bed at the Holiday Inn near the hospital, the oldest teacher at Hamilton Academy slipped away from the nurses' intensive care and, to their surprise, died. If there are souls, Mr. Oglethorpe became one. If there are gatherings elsewhere, he went to one. If he could come back to earth and say so, Miss Ramona Dingley would be eternally grateful.

  Seven miles away, Ramona sighed in her restless sleep. Gray, haloed clouds knocked against heaven. Rain burst out of them like tears. Summer rain beat down on Dingley Falls. The Rampage rose.

  CONCERNING THE HEART

  The heart of a spider is a single tube. The heart of man and dog, be it false or true, is a four-chambered double pump, simple enough in design and designed to work hard for a living.

  The poets say there is no language but the human heart. The language of the human heart is lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub.

  Translations have made much of it. Over the ages the poets have massaged this hollow muscle into a flabby thesaurus of dead metaphors. A.A. Hayes once made a list of them. We may have a heart, or a change of heart, we may win a heart or lose one. We may cross our hearts, wear them on our sleeves. They may be in our mouths, they may sink, they may flutter, burn, warm, freeze, or throb.

  Our hearts may be whole or cold, or in the right places. Some hearts are bleeding, some are hard, and some are trumps. All this while beating time to the days of our lives. The post office is in the heart of Dingley Falls, for instance, and its postmistress seems to take life too much to heart. Such is the versatility of a double pump.

  Out of Eden rushed grimacing into the world all the diseases of the heart which Hayes had diagnosed in himself: lust, gluttony, sloth, wrath, avarice, envy, and pride. All set loose when, reaching for the first big apple, our parents tripped and fell. We are told that the Lord experiments on the heart; He hardened Pharaoh's, and tested Job's and saddened Ruth's, and puffed up David's. We are told that where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Such is the economy of desire, such is the universal language catalogued by A.A. Hayes that speaks in the hearts of every Dingleyan when Dr. Otto Scaper hears lub-dub, lub-dub.

  Dr. Scaper's concern is the damaged heart. But for most things that may hurt this organ he has no prescription. The doctor has to worry about other vital disorders. Such as murmuring hearts that go lub-dub-dub, lub-dub-dub. Such as heart block, heart arrest, heart attack, heart failure. Guardian of the hu
man heart by which we live, Dr. Scaper must be on the watch for myocarditis, pericarditis, bacterial endocarditis, arrhythmia, thromboembolism, coronary occlusion, angina pectoris arteriosclerosis, rheumatic valvular disease, mural thrombi, atrioventricular nodals, hypertension, and syphilis of the heart. It is, he says, too much work for a deaf old man.

  "Hell's bells, we don't know what we're doing anyhow," Scaper had confessed to Window Abernathy. "Coronary X rays are pretty dangerous, and the damn things don't show up small lesions anyhow.

  Look here, 40 percent of myocardial infarctions (it just means heart attack, like coronary thrombosis means an artery block lousing you up ), 40 percent of coronaries fail to cause symptoms. Somebody gets arrhythmia, blood supply drops, they go into shock, first thing you know the poor bastard's dead. Less than half even get to the hospital. And maybe there were no abnormalities at the exam, nothing on the test. All of a sudden you get balled up in a stress situation, you get a severe pain, heavy pain, a fist in the chest like a vise, it goes shooting down your left arm. Angina pectoris. Nausea, pallor, trouble breathing, crushing pain. All of a sudden congestive heart failure. Necrosis of the muscle—secret fraternity lingo for dead, gone, kaput."

  "Just a minute, Otto, are you telling me to expect all this in the near future?" asked Abernathy with his mournful smile.

  "No, no, no, 'course not. But it could, that's all I'm saying."

  "Can you treat it?"

  "Sure. Thump and listen. Diet. Digitalis for some things. Aspirin for clots. Now we got heart-valve surgery. Give you a stainless steel one. Give you a hog's. Give you a whole goddamn plastic ticker now.

  Sure, we got lots of stuff. Nitroglycerin, cardiopulmonary massage, defibrillators. Trouble is this business does everything ass-backwards.

  Look here, I read in one of these damn journals over there in that pile of mess that the majority of our boys in Korea and Vietnam—now, Winslow, this is boys, average age around twenty-four and supposed to be in pretty good shape—the majority of the autopsies on those soldiers show they had coronary artery disease. Had arteriosclerosis at their age! And of course they didn't know it."

  "Otto. I'm sorry, let me just ask you, how serious is my condition?

  Are you trying to avoid telling me I'm going to die soon?"

  "What? Die? Hell, no. You're not going to die tomorrow, not necessarily. Not unless Evelyn Troyes runs over you. I'm just talking shop. You've got to get this blood pressure down, though, and tell Beanie to cut out some of that rich food, how you keep on looking like a rail post instead of a boxcar like me, I don't know, the way she cooks for you. Well, at least you don't smoke. I don't count that pipe because you never remember to put any tobacco in it. Look, I bet I've got emphysema right this minute, headed for acute pulmonary obstruction. Massive embolus wouldn't surprise me. Well, I'll let you get on your way. Going to Boston, huh? Got Mrs. Haig out there waiting anyhow. Hypertensive, same as you, Winslow. Ought to make you both take up watercolors or this yogi stuff or something.

  Well, you never can tell about the heart."

  That had been Monday, of course. At that time Dr. Otto Scaper had not told his patients how peculiar he found their particular symptoms. How, given the results of all the tests he knew of, their symptoms made no sense to him at all.

  North of the marshlands at Operation Archangel the team of dedicated, diligent young scientists worked cheerfully. Frankly, job security was a comfort, considering that the golden grant-filled days of Sputnik-chasing were now, in 1976, as out of style as the Nehru jacket Dr. Svatopluk had bought in those old times to go drink cocktails with a liberal senator. The young men all knew of MIT graduates standing in un-Euclidean unemployment lines, and even if this base wasn't Cape Canaveral, still, the pay was good and the equipment was great. It was still science. It was research. They had a lounge with color TV, Ping-Pong, a pool table, paperbacks, pornography, and vending machines. Sometimes, though rarely, a few were even given leave to come into the neighboring town for a drink at the Old Towne Inn or at Fred's Fries in Madder, or for a pizza at Mama Marco's, or a movie at the Hope Street Cinema, or to drop something off at the post office. Of course, the scientists purposely did not often visit the town they called "the target." They stayed at the base and worked; they were good boys, their reports said. Race, Caucasian; marital status, single; average IQ, 135; average age, twenty-nine.

  Their chief—known to his young staff as Dr. Splatterpuke, Dr. Faustus, Dr. Flatus, Dr. No, Tom the Bomb, the Archangel, and Herr Snotindernosen—Dr. Thomas Svatopluk had been all that Monday evening in conference with two government representatives who had, all on their own, borrowed a helicopter to come see what the secret base was up to. They had learned of its existence inadvertently and were determined now to take credit for supporting it, or take credit for stopping it, or stop each other from taking credit for one or the other of these actions; as yet, of course, they weren't sure which one, since they did not know yet what it was up to. One of these men was Bob ("Bucky") Eagerly of the executive division. He had on an expensive suit that didn't look it. He looked like the manager of a huge southwestern discount department store, but was, in fact, a media manipulator of preeminent capacity and one of the keys that turned the administration. With him was a man whom he disliked and envied, Daniel Wolton. Wolton was very moral and very handsome, both in a posh New England way, and these two qualities seemed to everyone, himself included, to be connected and dependent on each other. He had silver hair curling around patrician ears, he had an upper-class accent and a stiff upper lip. Moral superiority was what Wolton had to sell, and he had sold it so far to OSS (where he worked) and to INR at the State Department (where, unbeknownst to OSS, he also worked) and to the newspapers.

  The object of Wolton's and Eagerly's inquiry, Dr. Thomas Svatopluk, was a brainy and sinewy naturalized East European, brought to New Jersey ("Of all places!" he afterwards protested) in the steerage of a boat in December of 1929 ("Of all times," he would add) at age three. He was small, sturdy, messy, arrogant, temperamental, full of energy, and congested from a cold he'd been unable to shake for the last six months. Dr. Svatopluk had been cooperating with his visitors (walking them through his labs and offering them excellent coffee) because he assumed that they were his bosses, there in response to long-unanswered reports he'd written Washington asking them to stop the Pentagon from interfering with his work again. He feared, he said, that if those tinkertoy wood-head soldiers were given the go-ahead, they would go ahead until nothing was left in the world but dropsical cockroaches munching on TV antennas.

  "Gentlemen," Svatopluk warned his guests, "we cannot trust the yahoos. And why did you think you needed the military complex?

  You don't even need scientific research for viralization." He waved his arm around his gleaming white laboratory. "Not when you consider how well the industrial complex can mass-produce deadly disease, apparently, if we are to take them at their word, without even trying." With a sardonic grin, the scientist counted on his fingers:

  "Leukemia from ionizing radiation; cancer from a hundred things, say, dust inhalation, say, nuclear reactors, say, H-bomb tests; sterilization from you name it; asphyxia from decompression; brain and kidney damage from lead, beryllium poisoning. Et cetera, excuse me, ah-CHOO!"

  "Allow me, Doctor, please!" Wolton passed the man his own linen handkerchief, and Svatopluk wiped his nose. "Now, Dr. Swátterplök, whom exactly in the military organization would you say you were talking about? Would you wish to call this an abuse of privilege by the Pentagon sphere of influence, for instance?"

  "All I wish to say is Commander Hector Brickhart was a pain in the tuchis, and I don't want any more like him. He was up here pestering me to 'slip him some stuff ' so he could spray it down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Can you believe that? He seemed to think we kept it in giant aerosol cans, like Windex. When those tinker toys started losing that war in Vietnam, Commander Brickbrain really took it to heart. My opinion is he went slightly freaky-fluky bananas
. Flew up here in the middle of the night a half-dozen times and threatened my team and me. Talking nonstop macho nonsense about how we should hand over our experiments, or else, don't you know."

  (This is what the commander had said to the doctor's scientific team: "Those dinks are losing that war for us, boys. But it's never too late until the final whistle blows. Is it? Now we know Charlie's all pissed out by now. Why, we've shot the whole goddamn country right out from under him, haven't we! But these wimps in Washington, you know what they're like. They get a little negative kill ratio incoming, and everybody starts hollering uncle. Are you going to let that happen? Are you going to sit on your butt and let the United States go down on a TKO? Come on. Have a heart! Just give me a little something. My boys can fly it over tomorrow and drop those slopes, in their tracks. Adios amigos. No more Mr. Nice Guy. Let's waste those weasels, hey, what do you say?")

  "Then he tried to bribe me," Svatopluk told his visitors.

  "Would you want to go so far as to suggest actual 'bribery'?" asked Wolton, pinching his aquiline nose as if the odor of possible corruption were insupportable.

  "He did," replied the scientist.

  (This is what the commander had offered: "Want your country to thank you, Svatopluk? Maybe get a medal, maybe get a carrier with your John Hancock on it, U.S.S. Svatopluk, sounds pretty damn good, doesn't it? Son of penniless immigrants comes to the aid of his countrymen? I might be able to throw a little private sector something your way. Squibb. Procter and Gamble. I've got friends.

  How about a nice big fancy lab? Women? I could fly in half a dozen by tomorrow night. The best, too, nothing but the best. Booze?

  Boys? Cash? You know, you could disappear, Svatopluk. Funny things happen, people disappear, turn up dead, I don't have to tell a smart doctor like you. Listen, the Chief would bring you in and give you his personal thanks, now I can guarantee that, his personal thanks. Good God, man! Two hundred years, we're undefeated! Are you going to sit there now, picking boogers out of your nose, and watch a bunch of zipperheads wipe their yellow asses on the Stars and Stripes?!")