by D. Foy
“I’m sorry,” Basil said. “It just seemed like a good time to throw caution to the wind.”
Hickory gave him two numb eyes, then went to the CD player and dropped in Murder Ballads, by Nick Cave and his Seeds. A ghost-cold bass sauntered from the speakers, and then that guitar’s staccato chook, the piano leaping at every fourth while the reverb spread like a stain…
So he walked through the rain,
and he walked through the mud
till he came to a place called The Bucket of Blood—
Stagger Lee!
I’D JUST SCANNED AN AD FOR A DILDO INSIDE Dinky’s latest trash, Pink Champagne Bitch, when a turmoil of voices called me back.
“I’m telling you,” Lucille shouted, “someone’s out there!”
Dinky must have heard it, too. He lurched up hideous and swollen and said, “That’s our book… Turn out the lights… No…” Then he cocked an ear to the door. “Who invited her?”
“I came in to check on you,” I said.
“In the dream I was having…” I waited for him to go on about this dream but his words were dribble.
“In the dream you were having what?”
Dinky covered his face with the sheet and coughed. “Maybe we could ask those chuckleheads to put a lid on it. Do you think we could do that, Andrew?”
From the wall above him a clown gazed out with that comically lugubrious expression old people somehow feel compelled to adorn the faces of clowns in art. Dinky’s great-goddamned-grandmother, or someone like her, had probably slapped it up.
“Even if I wanted to,” he said, and looked away, “I couldn’t.” I watched him fumble with his pants. He looked like a child, with a child’s confessional eyes. “Hickory, I mean,” he said, though I’d known what he meant. His lips were trembling. He was speaking of himself as I. “I only wanted someone to hold,” he said. I realized then the clown was staring at me, too, or so it seemed. I hated clowns more than anything, to say nothing of paintings of clowns. And now Dinky had to go and lay a guilt trip out. “About getting her on her back. You know I didn’t mean it… Right?” His hands came up as if with a toxic globe. “Look at me,” he said. I tried to look out the window but only saw myself. “How can a guy get any sleep with that?”
We heard Basil say, “Turn out the lights,” and then Hickory something about a lamp. Meanwhile Lucille had begun to chant: “O my God O my God O my God.”
The sounds were undeniable, clunky and deep at first, like a hammer on a hollow box, scratchy and thin the next. By the time we reached them, Hickory, Basil, and Lucille were at the window again, with just their eyes above the sill.
“Watch it, you guys,” Lucille said. “Someone’s out there.”
“No one’s out there,” Basil said.
Dinky slid down the jamb and turned into a ball. “Is that why we’re all on our hands and knees?”
“There,” Lucille said, and pointed. “Did you see that?”
For just this once I wished she’d been lying, but she had seen what she’d seen. A shadow moved through the rain, then faded into mist. Then the sounds began again, leisurely nearly, steady, like a bridge troll, or maybe a giant, crunching on his bones.
“Who do you think it is?” I whispered.
On a talk show on the tube three enormous women argued round a little man while the singer from his box moaned about a girl with hair full of ribbons and gloves on her hands.
“You’re out of your mind,” Basil said. “I didn’t see dick.”
“Someone is out there,” I said.
“Then that’s it,” Basil said, and strode to the door with his hatchet. “I go out there and holler, and no one answers, I don’t care if it’s the Queen of fucking England, when I see him, he’s as dead as fuck. What’s the matter, baldy?” he said when Dinky wouldn’t budge. “Afraid of the big bad wolf?”
“The guy can hardly walk,” I said.
“He’s good enough to get out of bed, he’s good enough to kick some ass.”
“Blood,” Dinky mumbled. “Bright red blood.”
“Don’t do it,” Hickory said.
Lucille began to wail, something I couldn’t get.
Basil glared. “You coming or not?”
We went into that fist of night, hunched against the rain, scared as hell, too, speaking for myself. Something was out there, in the wallows beneath the deck perchance, lurking and munching, and we were stoned and drunk and tired, to say nothing of critically blind. I looked to Hickory above me, her hand on Dinky’s arm. The best my friend could do was prop himself up to watch. By the way she cradled him, I could tell it was all for show. She wanted him to think she thought he needed checking. The rain had soaked me through again, now. I felt dirty and soft and stupid as could be.
Basil moved crabwise down the stairs, brandishing the hatchet. “Whoever you are,” he said, “you’d better stop fucking around, cause we mean business.”
Once upon a time I’d fancied myself that bearded miser’s secret spy for truth—once upon a time. Because now we were stuck in a game. Anything could happen, anything at all.
“After we go around,” I said, “you stick to the wall, and I’ll slip over by the trees. That way, whoever it is, if he’s got a gun, he can’t get both of us at once.”
“Where’s my knife?”
The water ran down our faces, over the brim of Basil’s hat, his face a glistening shade. I could see his hatchet. I could see his shiny teeth.
“There’s this,” I said, and showed him my Swiss Army pocketknife.
“You little fuck,” he said.
I stepped toward the trees, trying to keep my footing in the mud. Basil crept along the wall until a thick, hollow cloonk sounded through the pitch, and then a muffled humph. He had plunged to the ground and by the time I reached him was rocking to and fro.
“Son of a bitch of a stone slammed me in the balls, man.”
Again we heard the sounds, this time from inside the cabin. My brain was reeling, with gutter rags and dirty socks, and broken teeth, and fingers, and brooms.
“He’s in the basement,” I said.
“I heard the bastard.”
I tried to take his hatchet. “Maybe you should give me that.”
“The hell you will.”
My buddies at the window couldn’t see us or anything else. They couldn’t hear a thing, either—nothing but wind and rain. All they could do was wait, afraid for the sound of a shot, the screams of some twit getting killed. I squinted hard at the trees as their skin crept round their Etch A Sketch limbs, searching endlessly it seemed for the lamest of signs, until just as I was ready to quit a shape emerged from the wall at my right, about twenty feet off, and like a phantom set our way.
“There he is!” I said.
Basil leapt growling to his feet and drove toward the shape, its movements clipped, as if by a wound. The shape came on, a man now, I knew, who might not’ve seen us even, lurching as he was to some alien poise. But just as Basil fell on him, the man feinted one way and dodged the next. The hatchet made an arc of whaleback-blue, then dropped wide of the man, and the man leapt forward and spun and with a boot sent Basil down. Then both fell from sight but as quickly emerged, then fell back again. I heard a crack, and then a grunt, and then, as though by bitter poets, a cry of hurt and rage. To know what was what or who who was hard, but soon the man rose in deep silhouette, the hatchet aimed at Basil’s neck, his face the print of terror.
I rushed in now, my little knife lost, and took the man by his wrist. Straddling Basil, still pinned, he swiveled round to meet me. Those pale eyes—that silver beard and earwig mouth—the hand with the hatchet bony and wet—the tattoos on the fingers—
“You,” I said.
“No, no,” Super said. “Not me.” He still had my friend by the throat. Basil tried to speak, but couldn’t so much as squeal. “You ain’t no bard,” Super told him. “Rest a while, now.”
“It was you in the basement,” I said.
“We weren’t nowhere near the basement.”
“You would’ve killed him.”
The old man snorted. “This little squirrel? Heh. We were just scratching his mortality some. Catch our drift?”
I looked at the hatchet. I looked at Basil. I looked at the hatchet, and then again at this spooky man. And then once more I saw the rain, veiling with its ceaselessness stage and play alike, and knew I was just a groundling.
“I don’t suppose you have any more of that stuff,” I said, hoping Super would know my intent.
With two fingers he picked a blob of mud from his face and studied it like he might a gem. Then he balled up the blob and squashed it. Next to him, as if he’d been there always, sat Fortinbras the dog.
“Laddie,” the old man said, “your telephone has gone kapooey.”
“What?” I said.
“But fear not, fear not. The man we used to be just did a bit of surgery. The wires are fine, we think.”
“Who is this guy?” Basil said, and I just about laughed. With his blackface of mud he looked a wretched minstrel.
“The one we told you about.”
“This crusty boob?”
Super stood quietly by, a quasi-grin working beneath his beard. He’d just topped Basil at his own game, mano a mano. But worse than that, he’d shamed him. Looks made Super the grizzled old man half Basil’s size. And yet here he was carrying on like the matter had been less than a drill in humor. He could’ve been the high school jock laying a yo-yo on a freshman nerd.
“Naw,” Super said. “Don’t say it’s so.”
“You want to cut my throat, dickwad, get on with it. Otherwise, blow me.”
“Tell us, Laertes. Just how is it you expect to get our cousin down the mountain?”
“You have any idea what he’s talking about?” Basil asked.
I shook my head.
“Stuyvesant Wainwright the Fourth, of course. We come to see that old black clown doesn’t carry him off.”
“Let’s get out of this rain,” I said.
“Not till you officiate some manners-making, you won’t.” I looked at the old man. “Your cohort,” he said. “We don’t know him from Hill.”
Goddamn. Crazy as it was, the geeze wanted introductions. “Super,” I said, “meet Basil. Basil, Super.”
Super extended a hand. “Pleased to rub truth with you, son.”
“Basil. My name is Basil.”
The old man scratched his beard. “If we can recollect better than piss in a pot, memory says the name ain’t never the thing. Fools of nature’s all we are, to the last of us.”
Basil turned to me, defeated. “I’m really cold,” he said, almost whispering. “And this guy makes me feel like a mollusk. You mind if I kind of just, you know, go inside?”
I ASKED SUPER IN, BUT HE LEANED AGAINST A boulder and pulled off a boot.
“Something,” he said, “is itching at us.”
Where a foot and five toes should’ve been was a chunk of salmon-colored plastic. He peered into the boot, tapped its sole, turned it down, and shook it.
“Ha!” he shouted. “Someone needs to ring them bells!”
It was hard to believe, but before my eyes, on the old man’s palm, lay a little stone. He examined it, grinning, then looked up like I were a man imprisoned.
“Take this,” he said, hand held out, “and we will set you free.”
“Don’t you ever get cold?”
“We wanted to make sure you got help for Stuyvey. Some investigation after we dropped off you and him revealed that a sore impossibility, hence our return. We are good with wires.”
Again I made away but the old man wouldn’t budge. A pallor had crept over him now, a rich air of sadness.
“Not that we’d recommend such activity beyond the pure necessities,” he said, and turned toward the light someone in the cabin had just switched on, “given our mission’s success and your telephone does now work.”
Dinky and Hickory were gazing down from one window, Lucille from another.
“So how’d you know about that thing anyhow?” I said, indicating the little stone.
“Ever hear that old saw,” he said, “‘All the world’s in a grain of sand?’”
“If I did, I don’t remember.”
Super tossed the stone and donned his boot. The last thing he wanted, it seemed, was to go inside. I recalled his truck’s open windows, his refusal of Dinky’s invite. Finally he stood and called his dog Fortinbras, then cleared his throat for speech.
“After the doctors pitched them boys in the Cong the better half of our two legs,” he said, “—hold on now, let us ponder… that was back in March of ’68, we believe, Tet offensive is when the foul deed done been done—well, like we said, after they snatched it off the way they did and throwed it to the dogs what with only a scratch, we didn’t have any more sense where it had been than a germ has brains. But later we got to feeling these itches down there, and other pains and whatnots. Our ghost foot, they called it. We can feel, all right.”
After that, what I really had to say couldn’t be said. I was just too tired.
“You’re welcome to come inside,” I said. “But whatever you do, I’ve got to go.”
“Well you go on and go, then, though again we must decline. We only hope you and yours got enough of that blister-your-sister up there to last the night or more. In case nobody told you, there’s a bastard of a flood in progress as we speak. The spirits are truly calling.”
A CIRCUS-MUSIC AIR SEEPED THROUGH THE WALLS, a voice croaking on about whispers and dances and the lie that was home. It was the mongoloid glee of pots and pans, and marimbas, and accordions, and guitars that wouldn’t tune. And like the song, all inside was doorway huddlings and splashing wine, the mirth, it’s true, of fantastic ends. The world had changed between now and then, but the cabin had not, nor the humans in it. How is it the strangest people we know are nearly always ourselves?
My boys and girls were at it again, none of them eager, of course, to know how we’d fared. The two girls and Dinky sat round Basil sprawled on the floor with a bottle in his fist.
Lucille was making a pile from the mud she’d pinched off her man. She paused when I walked in, more, it seemed, from the disturbance I’d created than anything else.
Dinky had propped himself on an elbow to motion at his drink. No doubt he’d struck the pose merely to impress. In all our years, our lasting pride was standing off the Comedown.
The Comedown—ah—what’s got to be the nearest drunks can get to Old Scratch’s terror when Sir Nothing cast him out—far from your mother’s kisses and the SweeTarts bought on Sunday with the coins from Saturday’s chores after waffles and bacon and eggs—crushed in that void, totally confounded: Jim Carroll’s lovely at the corner of Seamen and Dripp, who every Friday night bangs this jerk or that to rise come mañana with a frog in her throat and Ding Dongs and beer and rubs on the floor: the tone arm’s bouncing in “Angie’s” last groove, the stench is sick as a cheeseburger’s ghost, the light through the blinds are the fires of hell, and nothing—nothing like a blot—of true love is lost in the depths of her hair. Still, and for all that, you’d never find us giving in to the thing, admitting our defeat, not ever. The Comedown could gouge our eyes and break our teeth, stab us and choke us and carve its name in our heads, but we’d only scream for more. It didn’t matter that we’d slipped down its throat, our hands gone utterly wild. Fuck that beast! It could swallow us whole! And whenever we did find ourselves in that dark fix, really and truly—and we did, we did—you’d not once hear us say it. Someone came along to ask our thoughts, they’d get the old two thumbs. Serve up that grime. Serve up the shit entire. We’d be there sure with bibs besides, slurping it down to the drop.
Something good and mean had Dinky all right, if not the Comedown then some other such piece of woe. Anyone could see it. He gazed out emptily now, frogish and huge. A person could’ve slapped his face with a skunk or crammed his ass full o
f melon, he wouldn’t have squawked a peep. His face didn’t lie. It was a fallen house, in whose halls slunk that oaf, Remembrance.
“You’re back,” he said, struggling to his hands and knees. He couldn’t decide to stay put or stand, or even what to say. “Welcome once again, old pal… to our little… fold.”
And then Hickory rose to greet me, the shag fell away, goofy and light she floated my way, petals in her hair and from her eyes, though still I was numb, still my head was a bucket of sand, that floating blossom, dancing girl, she came my way to pour herself out and smother me gold, it was only for me to cry the word, her with her voice, her with her lips and eyes, for now I was home, made limber and fine, another time yet I’d been brought clear, I could smell her now, she drove me bent, hallelujah, lord, praise be the stars, for man, oh man, this I knew, I was most certainly fucked…
“Look at you,” she said. “Your face…”
They were gawking at me, then, all of them, the mannequin, too, staring me down with its empty eyes. Then clarity took me, and I snatched up the mannequin to kiss it again and again. And then I tucked it in my arm and with my free hand high went forth.
“My friends!” I said. “My friends!” I grabbed a bottle and poured five shots. “I’d like to propose a toast!”
“Come again?” Lucille said.
“A toast, my dear. In fact, a toast to you. In honor of your promotion.” I raised my glass. The spirit of the underground man had crept into my head, through the porch of my sleeping ear. “Let us all drink,” I shouted, “to the success of Lucille Bonnery. May she live long and prosper in her new status as Queen of the Corporate Raiders!”
Dinky found the strength to burble “Hear! Hear!” while Basil sat up with “I’ll drink to that—hell, I’ll drink to anything!” They emptied their glasses with a single draught, Hickory and Lucille, too. “A toast!” they said, and drank.