Storyteller

by David Crossman

  Storyteller

  by

  David Crossman

  Alibi-Folio Publishers

  Nashville, TN, U.S.A.

  Copyright 2012 David Crossman

  Published by Alibi Folio Publishers

  2479 Murfreesboro Road, #170

  Nashville, TN 37217

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012914880

  All rights reserved. With the exception of brief quotations for the purpose of review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form without prior written permission of the author.

  ISBN 978-1-4791-2196-0

  Other than those individuals familiar to history, the characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to folks living or dead is entirely coincidental, not surprising, given that their characteristics are common to us all.

  Cover design: CiA

  Dedication

  To Darlynne Vrecheck, who wrestled a black rapper

  and an Edwardian-era English butler

  (and has the bruises to prove it)

  A Propinquity of Opposites

  Cummings stood at casual attention on the beach of the desert island and stared out to sea in the direction where he’d seen the plane go down just before dawn.

  He was dressed every inch the proper Victorian butler, from his shoes—polished the bottomless sheen of black chrome—to the perfectly starched and pleated collar and cuffs that protruded exactly five-eighths of an inch from the neck and sleeves of his perfectly tailored Dege & Skinner swallow-tailed coat. The creases in his trousers could have sliced apples and the seven brass buttons on his waistcoat reflected the rising sun with seven tiny lighthouses of welcome to the survivor.

  He stood and waited, a carefully folded white towel draped over the crook of his left arm. His right hand held an ornate silver serving tray upon which rested a siphon of seltzer, a decanter of 120-year-old scotch whiskey, and a sparkling glass of cut crystal that waited, like Cummings, with expectant if not discernibly excited equanimity.

  One glass would suffice. There was never more than one survivor, a regrettable reality of this uncharted corner of creation to which Cummings had long resigned himself.

  If he was warm beneath the wide-eyed stare of the inquisitive sun and his own butlery livery, not so much as a pore bespoke anything but a man perfectly at peace with his world and his place in it. He was a butler and would soon have someone to butle. The best of all worlds.

  He waited.

  Rat-Badger Junkmouth Flash, né Harold Erasmus Jackson and still called “Little Harry” by the grandmother who’d raised him, was known simply as Rat to his friends and fans. At the moment he was floating aggressively. That is, his arms and legs had begun moving earnestly as the upward-tilting wing tip of the plane to which he’d walked himself slipped with a gentle wave into the terrible blue-gray grip of eternity below; a sleek, multi-million dollar coffin for the eighteen souls of his entourage. Perhaps, like the mummies of ancient Egypt, they would be found one day amid the luxury of their burial chamber, leaving their discoverers to ponder the sea-crusted detritus of the funerary objects by which they’d hoped to be accompanied into the afterlife.

  If Rat Badger entertained such notions, it was but briefly as he was struggling to keep his head above water. Not a natural swimmer, he was nevertheless sufficiently buoyed by his thrashing to keep adrift.

  The thing about thrashing though, particularly in the South Pacific, is that it attracts the attention of unwelcome marine specimens. One of these, to Rat’s horror, began rubbing against his leg like an over-affectionate puppy. The hide of this puppy, though—much the texture of 20-grit sandpaper—was wearing his seven-hundred-dollar trousers to shreds.

  Rat stopped flailing, buoyed briefly by the shocked intake of air that filled his lungs. To his aquatic companion he might have seemed an oversized blowfish, though this is speculation. He stared at the sky with wide, pathetic Buckwheat eyes that would have awakened at least a twinge of conscience in the hungriest shark, were sharks given to sentimental introspection, which this shark at least was not. Instead, it seemed to be leisurely removing the wrapper from an afternoon snack.

  One benefit of having his eyes thus widened was that it allowed Rat Badger a broader perspective of his surroundings. At first glance, these had seemed an endless, unbroken expanse of horizon spreading infinitely in all directions. Now, however, he saw that there was in that long, salty sentence—that liquid requiem—one pearl-edged emerald of punctuation. An island not a mile away.

  So close and yet, as a sandpapery pass at his torso reminded him, so far away.

  The proverbial straight-flying crow would sneeze at such a distance. Many of the creatures in God’s menagerie, in fact, would have closed the interval without raising a blush. Rat Badger was none of these. But when a giant white-gray fin rose menacingly from the water and began surrounding him as if it had all the time in the world, he found that, much to his surprise, he could swim after all and at a commendable clip. In between strokes he screamed at the top of his lungs, which may or may not have aided in his propulsion. Nevertheless, he must have taken comfort in the display for he performed it with gusto.

  Graceful he was not. But apparently the shark was not judging as much on style as overall effect, for it held back a moment in thoughtful deliberation. Were this North Dakota in the bleak midwinter and there very little likelihood of a fresh meal elsewhere in the vicinity, it would undoubtedly have scarfed the rap star whole and, burping a little cloud of residual profanity, sallied off amidst the snowdrifts as contented a shark as ever toured the Badlands. But, as observed, this was the South Pacific and meals much less likely to spoil the digestion were not hard to come by. So the shark, pursuing lethargically for a stroke or two—more out of curiosity than gastronomic intent—eventually called an end to the game and undulated away with only an occasional backward glance. No doubt he considered the experience axiomatic and would, later in his lair, compose an appropriate parable for the edification of his fellow omnivores.

  Cummings knew the shark, which he’d nicknamed Hodgekins after an old public-school chum with particularly bad teeth, by the peculiar double-v notch that had been taken from its dorsal fin in some long-distant sub-marine confrontation. The animal, to Cummings’ way of thinking, was possessed of an unpredictable nature, sometimes pursuing his quarry with an almost playful malice, allowing the unfortunate individual to nearly feel the sand under their feet before dispatching them in a few rude gulps. Other times, as now, simply losing interest for no apparent reason.

  Whatever may be said of the beast, it was not British.

  As Rat Badger windmilled frantically toward the shallows, Cummings adjusted an eyebrow slightly, indicative of mild surprise. He had never attended a gentleman of color. There had been the French Canadian, Gaston Montrose, who, given the swarthiness of his complexion, may have had a Corsican or two among the lower branches of the family tree, but his tastes were capable of anticipation, after a fashion, though running a little more to sauces than Cummings would have liked.

  But he was French.

  A Negro though. Cummings had no personal experience of the race, they being conspicuous by their absence among the upper classes that he’d served in the days, long ago, when he’d been a butler in London. His eyes drifted casually to the siphon and whiskey and a small, skeptical thought fluttered across the placid landscape of his mind.

  Perhaps he should have brought gin.

  His gaze returned to the spume-bejeweled figure of Rat Badger who, getting his feet under him a good distance from shore owing to the gradual declination of the sea bed, had begun a kind of spastic marionette-like lope through the surf toward
the beach.

  Rat Badger, for his part, may be excused for not noticing Cummings until this moment, the bulk of his attention having been otherwise occupied. Emerging victorious from the battle for life and limbs—of which a quick inventory assured him he was still in possession—his eyes clapped on Cummings as on an apparition and he halted suddenly amid a corona of foam. His mouth gaped to accommodate the superfluity of sensation his eyes couldn’t handle. He uttered a word often found spray-painted on subway walls—a thesaurus to which he referred often during speech and which, if represented by blanks in the narrative, would result in a lengthy story of empty pages.

  Sufficient to say this edition has been abridged to move the story along.

  One might not say it is anthropologically possible for an individual to express formidable hospitality unless one saw Cummings from Rat’s point of view at the moment. Beneath the rap icon’s overt contempt for anything white was a nameless, unexamined fear that manifested itself as suspicion and he knew at a glance he’d never seen anything more white—hence more suspicious—than the butler who stood waiting on the beach.

  “What are you lookin’ at?” inquired Rat by way of greeting. He wiped at his eyes with the back of his hands, but the apparition remained.

  If Cummings was asking the same thing of himself, nothing in his demeanor betrayed the fact. With a flip of the wrist the towel unfurled from his arm like a flag of welcome. Rat Badger snapped it up and, eyeing the butler warily, dried himself.

  “Your trousers would appear to need mending, sir,” said Cummings.

  Rat Badger emerged from his towel and looked at his sartorial remains.

  “If you would remove them, I shall attend them presently.”

  “You want me to take off my pants?”

  “Heavens no, sir. Only your trousers.”

  This illustrates how two cultures can be divided by a common language, for in Cummings’ England pants were trousers and underpants were pants. At no time during the exchange that followed, however, did the unflappable butler give the slightest indication of flapping. Discerning from the late arrival’s indignation that there must be some misunderstanding relative to terms, he quickly and quietly got to the core of the problem and an international incident was averted.

  At the conclusion of negotiations, Rat’s trousers had taken the place of the towel on the crook of Cummings’ arm and the rap star was standing in his leopard skin briefs, sipping appreciatively at the scotch and soda.

  “How come you ain’t sweatin’?”

  “Beg pardon, sir?”

  “‘Beg pardon, sir’,” Rat mimicked. “I like that. You keep it up and we’re gonna be friends. Even if you are a mirage.” Which is what he suspected. The scotch, especially, convinced him that at any moment he’d wake up in his plane, surrounded by his comforting coterie of sycophants. It was going to be one King Kong of a hangover, but anything was better than a dubious dreamland inhabited by white butlers up the wahzoo.

  “I asked you how come you ain’t sweatin’ like a barbecued pig, all dressed up like that. It’s hot here. Look at me, I’m smokin’.” True, steam was rising from his ebony flesh in soft, mesmerizing clouds. “And I’m from Alabama.”

  “One becomes acclimated, sir.”

  “One does, does one?” Rat Badger laughed, finished his drink and put the glass on the salver. “Well, that’s the best mirage scotch I ever tasted. Now, let’s get down to business. Who are you, what are you doin’ here, and where is here anyhow?”

  Cummings nodded slightly and, clearing his throat, began. “Taking your queries in order, sir, I am Cummings, the butler. I came to this island in 1906. As to the third point, I’m afraid I’ve never been able to ascertain with any degree of geographical accuracy exactly where this island is located. An educated guess (I must qualify my estimate by saying that I am guided by my memories of Captain Cook’s journals, which I read as a schoolboy) is that we are in the South Sea, somewhere between the islands of Tahiti and New Zealand. The stars confirm, at least, that we are in the southern hemisphere.”

  Rat was still several sentences behind. “1906 you say?”

  “Just so, sir.”

  The skepticism with which Rat Badger had been regarding the butler took on a deep, new dimension. He did some quick math, which meant converting all figures to the common denominator of dollars and cents. “That’s ninety-nine years ago. You tellin’ me you’re ninety-nine years old?”

  “I was forty-seven at the time of my shipwreck, in 1906. I have not aged perceptibly since. Not externally in any event, though I hope I am not immodest to suggest that my experience in the intervening years has made me a wiser, deeper man. Be that as it may, to all outward appearance I am as I was.”

  “You haven’t aged?”

  “As I said, not outwardly, sir.”

  Rat Badger had to get a longer rope for his mental bucket as he dipped even deeper into his well of doubt. “Right. And you’ve been here for ninety-nine years.”

  “As to that, I take your word, sir. It is, together with my own apparent longevity, one of many curious anomalies of this place that it is impossible to measure the passage of time. No mark or device so intended will last a night. My previous visitor, a very spirited Argentinian woman named Ana Maria Consuela Conchita Sanchez de Juarez y Ortia, arrived in 1983, so she said. She never gave me reason to doubt the veracity of her assertion.”

  “Where is she now?”

  Cummings demurred. Was it Rat’s imagination, or did the butler whisk away a tear with his gloved finger? “I expect you are desirous of dinner, sir. I regret our menu is limited to those comestibles the topography supplies, but I shall endeavor to see such as we have is prepared to your satisfaction.”

  “Are you gonna keep talkin’ like that?”

  “Pardon, sir?”

  “The more you talk the less sense you make. You gotta use up the whole dictionary every time you open your mouth?”

  “I shall endeavor to be less loquacious, sir. This way, if you please.” So saying, Cummings led the way from the beach up a beautifully-groomed path through thick foliage punctuated at regular intervals by unlit lanterns of conch shells.

  “Where’s the nearest phone, Jack? I gotta call my agent.”

  “Phone, sir?”

  “Telephone. Cell phone, e-mail, iPhone, YouPhone, MePhone. I ain’t fussy. Whatever you got.

  “Previous guests have requested similar devices, sir. For communicating with the world outside, I deduce. I’m afraid you must share their disappointment. I have not so much as a telegraph to offer.”

  “No phone! You’re jerkin’ me around.”

  “I would presume to do no such thing,” said Cummings, concealing his alarm. “In the other instances to which I refer, I have suggested depositing a message in a bottle and casting it into the sea in hopes the current would carry it to some inhabited country.” He lowered his head slightly. “I regret to say response was not forthcoming. However, should you wish to make the attempt . . .” He cocked an eyebrow at the decanter.

  Rat studied the butler with one eye closed, as if this would reduce Cummings’ superabundance of whiteness by half. “Maybe later. First things first. Let’s get to the grub. Lead on, Jimbo.”

  “Cummings, sir,” Cummings corrected.

  “Whatever. I’m right behind you.”

  They walked the upward-winding path in tandem silence for a few steps. “Say, who’s the chief honcho around here?” Rat asked conversationally.

  “You mean the master?” Cummings appreciated the hazards of misunderstanding and wished to diminish them with clarification.

  “Master!” Rat’s atavistic corpuscles bridled at the word. “What are you talkin’ about, master?”

  “That would be you, sir,” said Cummings.

  Rat sifted the notion. This was different. “I’m the master?”

  “Indubitably, sir. There is no other on the island.”

  “I’m the master, you’re the slave?”<
br />
  Cummings cleared his throat into the back of his hand. “Servant, sir. The distinction is an important one.”

  “Right. Hey, you don’t have magical powers, do you? You know, like I Dream of Jeannie or Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

  Cummings gave some thought to his response. “Not that I have discovered, sir. Not directly, at any rate.”

  “Not directly. What’s that supposed to mean?” Rat curvetted around an overreaching oleander.

  “Well, things do seem to happen, sir.”

  “What kind of things?”

  Cummings reserved further comment for several steps. “Perhaps the type of phenomenon to which I refer will make itself evident presently.”

  Further comment on Rat’s behalf was stifled as, rounding a final corner in the path, the vegetation abruptly gave way to a wide expanse of lawns and gardens, with gently gurgling fountains, sweeping gracefully to a hill in the near distance. Squatting atop the hill was an Edwardian mansion, its broad wings embracing an immense courtyard of crushed stone, sprinkled here and there with Greco-Roman statuary. Rat halted in his tracks and breathed a scatological epithet.

  “Sojourner’s Hall,” said the butler, anticipating his companion’s wonder. It was impossible not to detect a trace of pride in his voice.

  “Who lives there?” Rat demanded, sensing that things were getting whiter and whiter.

  “You do, sir.”

  “Me? That’s my crib!”

  So overcome was Rat Badger at this development that only as they began the long ascent through the verdant parklands toward the mauve brick mansion did he realize he was fully dressed. Faux leopard-skin briefs had been supplanted by the full dinner attire of an Edwardian gentleman, exquisitely cut and perfectly tailored to conform to his athletic physique. The discovery, while not unpleasant, was nonetheless alarming. He spun in circles several times, as if trying to get beside himself, the better to take in the sight.