by Mark Helprin
“Ah, but it does. And you’re in luck.”
IT WAS A MODEST SPACE about the size and shape of the Circus Maximus, with a high roof built over it and galleries for spotlights tucked into the corners just underneath the black ceiling. At one end of the oval arena was a platform about five feet above the sand. Here were two gilded thrones upholstered in cloth of royal blue dotted with golden fleurs-de-lys. On either side of the thrones, rigged on Roman tripods, were Sears Roebuck kettle barbecues below signs that said S.P.Q.R. Blue flame from many cans of Sterno rose from within them.
Upon the thrones sat King Bonticue, also known as Frank Bonticue, and Queen Devore, also known as Gina Bonticue. They were dressed in togas and wore crowns that Freddy understood were appropriate to a viscount. Queen Devore had difficulty squeezing herself into her throne chair, and could not get up without one varlet pulling her out of it by the hands as two others pushed against her behind. King Bonticue was twice her size but his throne had no sides. She wore eight to ten pounds of makeup, he at least three. Both were tattooed, and both wore earrings. On his wrist lived a huge Japanese digital watch with a square orange face, and she chewed gum as if she were being paid to generate electricity with her jaw.
In this kingdom ten miles north-west of Chicago, Freddy was a serf who carried Styrofoam lances for the Jolly Green Knight, who rode his charger half-naked, with a laurel of asparagus and other vegetables upon his head. When he made his appearance on horseback he circled the arena near the perimeter, and as he looked into the faces of a thousand people arrayed upon benches at continuous plank tables, he lifted his sword and shouted, “Ho ho ho!”
To which, almost as one, as if in a secret ritual that was not at all secret, the entire crowd responded, “Ho ho ho!”
Then the Jolly Green Knight shouted, “In the Valley of the Jolly . . .” and paused.
Always, the pause had exactly three beats, before the crowd responded, with massive force that shook the walls, “Green Giant!” To his dying day, Freddy would never understand how each batch of a thousand people knew, at performance after performance, to hold the pause for the requisite number of beats and then answer as if they were as practised as the Vienna Boys’ Choir. Then again, they wouldn’t have the vaguest idea about Andy Pandy, would they? But they never missed a beat or failed to shout, “Green Giant!” although the knight was in no way identified as such. What stupefying force could decree such synchrony?
“Why do they call him the Green Giant?” Freddy had asked one of the knights who was sitting in the sun drinking a beer and eating chocolate-covered doughnuts, “and am I not his valet?” Freddy pronounced valet in the American way, because he was, after all, speaking to an American in America.
“Not valet, valley. He plants corn in the valley,” was the thoughtful response.
“What corn? What valley?”
“You know,” said the knight, “ ‘the Valley of the Jolly, ho ho ho, Green Giant.’ ”
“Where is that?” Freddy asked.
“In California.”
“I see,” said Freddy. “Is someone supposed to kill this giant?”
“Yeah,” answered the knight, unwilling to resist the line of questioning.
“Who?” asked Freddy, hoping to hear that a prince from a foreign land would, in the course of his quest, kill the giant and find the live ash circle.
“The American Tourister Gorilla.”
Freddy cocked his head and looked up. After a moment, he asked, “Who?”
“The gorilla that jumps on the suitcase. You know how they get him to do that?”
“No,” said Freddy, looking dangerously toward the sun.
“They fill it with Baby Ruths.”
“The suitcase.”
“Yeah. He goes apeshit trying to get them out.”
“The babies?” Freddy had no idea what the knight, Sir Rocky Spreckles, was talking about.
“Yeah.”
“Now, let’s summarise this,” Freddy said. “The Green Giant will be killed by the gorilla that jumps on his suitcase because he goes apeshit trying to get the babies out of it. Is that right?”
“Right on.”
“Does this have anything to do with the live ash circle?” Freddy asked.
“The live ass circle?” Sir Rocky repeated, and belched. He had had only eight beers, but it was morning.
“Ash.”
Sir Rocky thought, weighing the question, bouncing his head back and forth a little. “Yeah,” he said, “it does.”
“It does? You’ve heard of the live ash circle?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of it.”
“But you thought it was ass.”
“Sometimes it is ass.”
“It is?”
“What is it?”
“What is what?”
“Whatever it is. Which is it?”
Sir Rocky motioned Freddy to bend in close to hear a whisper. “It’s in Kankakee,” he said conspiratorially, “Kankakee.”
The knights didn’t like any serf, but they particularly hated Freddy be-cause they thought he put on airs. He was always telling them how to ride, hold a sword, or carry a lance. “Hey, what the fuck do you know?” Sir Randy Shifflet had asked. “You’re a fuckin’ serf, so shut up.”
Because of his rodeo background, Sir Randy got to be king three times a day. Sir Mildred of Iraq would shoot a poison arrow at King Bonticue, and in the king’s death soliloquy he would command his knights to fight for succession. He always died in the arms of Sir Randy after Sir Randy had “knocked” all the other knights off their mounts and swung onto the throne platform on a velvet bell rope. That was his job, to become king thrice a day. Freddy hated him, especially because the combat was obviously fraudulent. They carried Styrofoam lances, and their hollow aluminium swords were no more dangerous than deck chairs.
Freddy had picked up one of these swords once and had begun to exercise with it, when a fellow serf said, “Put it down! If Sir Buster sees you, you’re a dead man!”
“Why?”
“We’re not allowed to use a knight’s sword. Are you crazy?”
“Why not?”
“We’re serfs.”
“We’re not really serfs,” Freddy protested.
“Yes we are.”
“Yes we are?”
“Yes. They’re our betters. They can ride, and use swords. They’ll beat the hell out of us if we try to be like them.”
“I can ride and use a sword,” Freddy stated, “far better than they can.”
“Well, you can’t let them know, because they’ll really do it.”
After a moment’s thought, Freddy seized the other serf by his jerkin. “Do what?”
“They’re knights. She’s a serving wench. You know.”
“I know what?”
“They get to take every new serving wench to their trailers. It’s the right of the lord of the manor. Sir Randy wants Popeel.”
“Popeel is my wife.”
“That doesn’t matter. They’re knights. That’s the way it is.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing! Actually, I suppose I have. But why haven’t we been told?”
“That’s because, in the system, Popeel goes to Sir Buster, but Sir Randy wants her and they’ve been arguing about it.”
“What does Popeel get to say about this?” Freddy asked indignantly. “She’s not a slave.”
The other serf looked at Freddy as if Freddy were an idiot. “She’s a serving wench, and her husband is a serf. She doesn’t have anything to say about it.”
“Forget about me for a moment,” said Freddy. “What about the law?”
“What law?”
“The law.”
“As far as I know,” the serf told him, “no one has paid any attention to the law for at least twenty years. Bonticue steals all the money from the show and drives around in a stolen car. Gina’s a fence. Randy’s been selling drugs since before they were invented.”
“Thank you for the
briefing,” said Freddy, graciously departing.
“Popeel,” he said to Fredericka, who, sweating gloriously, was carrying a tray of twenty roasted chicken halves, “I must speak to you at once.” There was an immense traffic of serving wenches going in and out of the kitchen, and they could hear.
“Desi,” she answered, “we’re filling the microwaves up top in preparation for the second show. Might we speak later?”
“No, now,” he said, manoeuvring her and the tray of chickens into a corner, where he told her what he had heard.
“That pig,” she said. “He invited me to his trailer for an apéritif—although I think he may have used a different word.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I would talk to you, and he said he was certain you would say yes. I thought he meant that you would come, too.”
“I’m just a serf. Stay away from him, Fredericka. He’s of immense size and thinks he owns this place.”
“Not even King Bonticue owns the ‘Times,’ ” Fredericka said, using company jargon. “The wenches say it’s owned by investors in Florida. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. Obviously, I can’t let this happen, but, needless to say, the idea of a peasant rebellion makes me ill.”
“WELCOME!” King Bonticue screamed at the top of his voice, head raised and bathed in purple and blue theatrical lighting, “to Anglo-Saxon Times!” He stressed the last word as much as he could, and the crowd went wild, all thousand men, women, and children, as if he had actually said something.
Pressed against the wall of the arena in darkness except for the occasions when a gold or rose spotlight briefly illuminated him as it swept wildly across spectators and performers alike, Freddy wondered why the king put the emphasis where he did. It had to be significant. The king pronounced it in his deep Chicago accent—if something flat can be called deep—as Timsse, with a closing of the lips that made it almost, if not quite, Timessah, or Timessuh. Freddy had noted also the existence in Chicago of bearsse, bullsse, and puhleesse.
“I am King Bonticue! And this is Queen Devore!” the king thundered into a hand-held microphone. “After the show, please stop by the store! There you will find, for your shopping pleasure—what else?—Anglo-Saxon treasure! Swords and shields, flags and flagons, plastic castles, rubber dragons! Perfumes and soaps, foods of all nations, Anglo-Saxon clothes for those of all stations. We take Visa and American Express; if I ask you to shop, you’ve got to say yes. For I am your king, and I talk no jive, this is not now, it’s eight ninety-five!”
The crowd always went wild when so commanded by the king, for they had been trained since birth to respond to advertisement. For Freddy it was very unpleasant, especially because it signalled the onrush of his least favourite part. “And, now,” the king said, cockeyed of emphasis as usual, “in honour, of the serving wenches of Swabia, who will serve you chickens when the music begins, let us enjoy a ritual entertainment made famous by my great-, great-, great-, great-grandfather, King Jerry of the Angles and Jutes. Let the musicians play . . . the . . . Mexican . . . Hat Dance!”
All the lights came up blindingly. As offstage the knights screamed obscenities and made foul gestures, Freddy and a bunch of other serfs ran into a circle at the centre of the arena, put on huge sombreros, and did the Mexican Hat Dance. The crowd seemed not to question the authenticity or appropriateness of this, or anything else, ever, and the king and queen drank from enormous flagons of malt liquor.
As Freddy danced and the knights, hidden from the audience in the passage from which they would burst forth on their chargers, continued to mock the serfs—in parallel dances, by dropping their pants, and in many vulgar pantomimes—Fredericka was working her hardest. She moved along the narrow lines between rows, dishing out half chickens and petite loaves of bread. Following her were beer wenches who filled and refilled the plastic cups. The object of this exercise was to allow the men to look down the dresses of the serving wenches, which they did nearly without exception in tell-tale silence and sudden immobility, as if their wives wouldn’t notice. Fredericka paid no attention, and focussed on the heavy trays of food that lightened mercifully as she served out her half-chickens. After two or three trips she would be sweating as if in a sauna, which put the men in a trance. She felt like an enchantress as one by one their mouths dropped open and they went numb as she passed, even though she smelled like chicken “roasted the Anglo-Saxon way.” In fact, when they got home after the shows, Freddy found her new perfume the most potent aphrodisiac imaginable. “Why?” she had asked him. “You used to hate it when I picked up the slightest smell of food, and would make me bathe, and now all you want to do is lick me. What will happen if we serve fajitas?”
When the hat dance was finished, the spotlight turned on the king, who emptied the last of his half gallon of malt liquor and rose unsteadily to tell a tragic story. As he warbled drunkenly, the crowd was rapt. The audience felt privileged to hear this lay straight from a king, and he would have been believed no matter what. He could have said anything.
“This is a sad story of Anglo-Saxon timsse,” he began, “of tragedy and threnody, royalty and rhapsody, of a chicken separated from its egg, and a castle moaning and groaning in the wind. Do you want me to tell it?”
“Yes!” the crowd screamed in one voice.
“Do you want me to tell it like it is?”
“Yes!”
“Do you want me to sock it to you?”
“Yes!”
“Really?”
“Yes! Yes! Yes!”
“That’s what I wanted to hear. For a king, you know, I’m very insecure. I need constant approval.” At this, Queen Devore staggered to her feet and bashed him on the head with a huge inflatable rolling pin. “Well, not that constant.” The crowd was apoplectic.
From the horse passage, Sir Buster shouted, “Get on with it, you cheap pyromaniac bastard with your goddamn stolen Impala!” Sir Buster had thought that, because of the acoustics of the tunnel, no one but the king would hear this, but it was picked up on the microphones and it echoed around the premises.
“Ah!” said the king. “The knights are discontent. And no wonder. They know not who will be king. You see,” the lights went low, and the king swayed, “no one knows who my hair is, no one knows the true Prince Arnold. He was stolen from Devore and I when he was a baby, one terrible winter night when the Cornish Sea came up on the land and iced over the forests in waves of all this frozen shit. Where did he go?
“Why, the White Eof took him. We knew that he would live, but he was no longer ours, he was hers. She raised him in a cave so well hidden that none of our soldiers could find it, and, for eighteen years, we grieved.
“Then, one day, Cardinal Richelieu was riding in his sedan and one of those sonic brooms scared the crap out of his bearers. They dropped him, and he rolled down an impassable gully—right into the lair of the White Eof!
“And who was there? Why, twelve young men clad in skins and hardly able to speak. We brought them to our castle because we knew that one of them—one of them—was our son. But which one? Who the hell knew? So we had to train them all as knights and put them all on probation. And here they are, the knights on parole!”
Trumpets sounded as the serfs, carrying shields and lances, walked abjectly through the exit of the passageway, immediately leaving the circle of light shining upon it and disappearing into the darkened arena to await the explosion of horses and riders.
“Sir Buster!” said the king, and out shot Sir Buster, bumping around on a western saddle, carrying his plastic armour lightly.
“Sir Ray!” Out burst Sir Ray, cloaked in gold and silver Orlon.
“Sir Joey!” And then the rest, ending with Sir Randy, who was so big and who was on such an enormous horse that everyone knew he was the one.
They lined up in the centre of the arena, and as the spotlight was trained on each one individually—Fredericka meanwhile was dumping chicken carcasses and plastic c
ups into a huge plastic bag that she carried upon her shoulders—the knights proclaimed, “I am Sir Buster, but, really, I am Prince Arnold, and I shall be king,” and, “I am Sir Joey, but, really, I am Prince Arnold, and I shall be king,” and so on through the lot, at the end of which Fredericka was handing out towelettes and double chocolate Anglo-Saxon doughnuts.
The king, who had been drinking from a fresh flagon, rose to say, “Woe is me, for I know not who is my true son, and prithee how shall I tell?”
Out from the tunnel rode Sir Mildred of Iraq, in black robes and black burnous. Chased by the lights, he galloped around the perimeter of the arena until he came to the royal platform and loosed a Styrofoam arrow at the king, who, although the arrow missed him by two feet, fell.
“The king is no more, quoth Sir Mildred,” said Sir Mildred, “and the kingdom will know war. Let the princes and their host prove themselves in combat, to see who will succeed this crazy royal wombat!”
Thus cued, the knights broke into anarchic chase not of each other but of the serfs. The first part of the contest, worth half a doughnut, was for the knights to run down and slaughter the serfs, who fled like rabbits before they were struck. Then they half fell, half limped away, supposedly dead, rushing to the locker room to change costumes for the last scene, when Sir Randy was crowned and they would prance about as wood fairies.
During the battle, with his fellow serfs falling piteously all around him and screaming in pain that was sometimes real, for the swords were not entirely weightless, something arose in Freddy that had been in him, great and glorious, all his life. In this state, time slowed and everything deepened, whether it was the glint of the blue spotlights on the polished aluminium swords, the flash in the eyes of the “war horses,” the trajectory of flying serfs, the golden dust rising in beams of light that slewed madly across the scene, the bellow of the crowd, or just the sense that history was at a turning point, as at Agincourt or Al Alamein. Battle, any kind of battle, cut him from the pull of the ground and gave him grace and resolution.
Up in the galleries, Fredericka stopped, breaking the rhythm of the line and its tasks, and turned toward the chaotic arena below as if she could sense that something was about to happen there.