“Steer a minute,” Bodine turning around and pointing his shiny pistol at the girl.
“You can’t shoot me,” she screams, “you hoodlum, who do you think you are, hijacking Red Cross property! Why don’t you just—go somewhere and—sniff your dope and—leave us alone!”
“Cunt,” advises Seaman Bodine, in a calm and reasonable tone, “you are wrong. I can shoot you. Right? Now, you happen to be working for the same warm and wonderful organization that was charging fifteen cents for coffee and doughnuts, at the Battle of the fucking Bulge, if you really wanna get into who is stealing what from who.”
“Whom,” she replies in a much smaller voice, lower lip quivering kind of cute and bitchy it seems to Slothrop, checking it out in the rearview mirror as Bodine takes over the wheel again.
“Oho, what’s this,” Krypton watching her ass, “what have we here,” shifting under its khaki skirt as she stands with long legs braced for their rattling creaking 60 or 70 miles an hour and Bodine’s strange cornering techniques, which look to be some stylized form of suicide.
“What’s your name?” Slothrop smiling, an avuncular pig.
“Shirley.”
“Tyrone. Howdy.”
“Tra-la-la,” Krypton now looting the cash register, gobbling Hershey bars and stuffing his socks with packs of smokes, “love in bloom.” About then Bodine slams on the brakes and goes into a great skid, ass end of their truck slewing toward an icy-lit tableau of sentries in white-stenciled helmet liners, white belts, white holsters, a barricade across the road, an officer running toward a jeep hunched up and hollering into a walkie-talkie.
“Roadblock? What the shit,” Bodine grinding it into reverse, various goodies for the troops crashing off of their shelves as the truck lurches around. Shirley loses her footing and staggers forward, Krypton grabbing for her as Slothrop leans to take the handgun off the dashboard, finding her half-draped over the front seat when he gets back around to the window. “Where the fuck is low now? What is it, a Red Cross gearbox, you got to put a nickel in someplace to get it in gear, hey Shirley?”
“Oh, goodness,” Shirley squirming over into the front between them, grabbing the shift, “like this, you drip.” Gunshots behind them.
“Thank you,” sez Bodine, and, leaving rubber in a pungent smoking shriek, they’re off again.
“You’re really hot, Rocketman, wow,” Krypton lying in back offering ankle and taped cocaine bottle to Shirley with a smile.
“Do tell.”
“No thanks,” sez Shirley. “I’d really better not.”
“C’mon . . . aw . . .”
“Were those snowdrops back there?” Slothrop squinting into the lampshine ahead, “GIs? What’re GIs doing here in the British sector, do you know?”
“Maybe not,” Bodine guesses, “maybe only Shore Patrol, c’mon, let’s not get any more paranoid than we have to. . . .”
“Look, see, I’m doing (snuff) it and I’m not growing (snuff) fangs or anything. . . .”
“Well, I just don’t know,” Shirley kneeling backwards, breasts propped on the back of the seat, one big smooth country-girl hand on Slothrop’s shoulder for balance.
“Look,” Bodine sez, “is it currency, or dope, or what? I just like to know what to expect, cause if the heat’s on—”
“Only on me, far as I know. This is nothing to do with dealing, it’s a whole different drill.”
“She’s the rose of no-man’s laaaand,” sings Albert Krypton, coaxing.
“Why you going to Putzi’s?”
“Got to see that Springer.”
“Didn’t know he was coming in.”
“Why does everybody keep saying that?”
“Rebebber, dow,” Shirley talking with only one nostril here, “dot too buch, Albert, just a teensy bit.”
“Just that nobody’s seen him for a while.”
“Be inhaling now, good, good, O.K., now. Umm, there’s a little still, uh, kind of a booger that’s blocking it . . . do it again, right. Now the other one.”
“Albert, you said only one.”
“Look, Rocky, if you do get busted—”
“Don’t want to think.”
“Jeepers,” sez Shirley.
“You like that? Here, just do a little more.”
“What’d you do?”
“Nothing. Wanted to talk to somebody at that SPOG. Find out what was happening. We were just supposed to talk, you know, off the record, tonight in the dispensary. Neutral ground. Instead The Man shows up. Now there are also these other two creeps in civvies.”
“You a spy, or something?”
“Wish I was even that. Oh boy. I should’ve known better.”
“Well it sounds pretty bad.” And Seaman Bodine drives along not liking it much, brooding, growing sentimental. “Say,” presently, “if they do, well, catch up with you, I could get in touch with your Mom, or something.”
“My—” A sharp look. “No, no, no . . .”
“Well, somebody.”
“Can’t think of a soul.”
“Wow, Rocketman. . . .”
Putzi’s turns out to be a sprawling, half-fortified manor house dating from the last century, off the Dorum road and seaward down a sandy pair of wheel-tracks with reeds and tough dune grass growing in between, the house perched like a raft atop a giant comber of a sandhill that sweeps upward from a beach whose grade is so subtle that it becomes water only by surprise, tranquil, salt-pale, stretching miles into the North Sea like clouds, here and there more silver, long cell or skin shapes, tissue-thin, stilled under the moon, reaching out toward Helgoland.
The place never got requisitioned. Nobody has ever seen the owner, or even knows if “Putzi” is anybody real. Bodine drives the truck right on into what used to be the stable and they all get out, Shirley hoorahing in the moonlight, Krypton mumbling oboy, oboy through big mouthfuls of that frau bait. There is some password and security hassle at the door, on account of the pig getup, but Slothrop flashes his white plastic knight and that works. Inside they find a brightly lit and busy combination bar, opium den, cabaret, casino and house of ill repute, all its rooms swarming with soldiers, sailors, dames, tricks, winners, losers, conjurors, dealers, dopers, voyeurs, homosexuals, fetishists, spies and folks just looking for company, all talking, singing or raising hell at a noise level the house’s silent walls seal off completely from the outside. Perfume, smoke, alcohol, and sweat glide through the house in turbulences too gentle to feel or see. It’s a floating celebration no one’s thought to adjourn: a victory party so permanent, so easy at gathering newcomer and old regular to itself, that who can say for sure which victory? which war?
Springer is nowhere in sight, and from what Slothrop can gather from random questioning won’t be by till later, if at all. Now this happens to be the very delivery date for that discharge they arranged sailing in with Frau Gnahb to Stralsund. And tonight, of all nights, after a week of not bothering him, the police decide to come after Slothrop. Oh yes, yes indeed NNNNNNNN Good Evening Tyrone Slothrop We Have Been Waiting For You. Of Course We Are Here. You Didn’t Think We Had Just Faded Away, No, No Tyrone, We Must Hurt You Again If You Are Going To Be That Stupid, Hurt You Again And Again Yes Tyrone You Are So Hopeless So Stupid And Doomed. Are You Really Supposed To Find Anything? What If It Is Death Tyrone? What If We Don’t Want You To Find Anything? If We Don’t Want To Give You Your Discharge You’ll Just Go On Like This Forever Won’t You? Maybe We Want You Only To Keep On. You Don’t Know Do You Tyrone. What Makes You Think You Can Play As Well As We Can? You Can’t. You Think You’re Good But You’re Really Shit And We All Know It. That Is In Your Dossier. (Laughter. Humming.)
Bodine finds him sitting inside a coat closet, chewing on a velvet ear of his mask. “You look bad, Rocky. Thi
s is Solange. She’s a masseuse.” She is smiling, quizzical, a child brought to visit the weird pig in his cave.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Let me take you down to the baths,” the woman’s voice a soapy sponge already caressing at his troubles, “it’s very quiet, restful. . . .”
“I’ll be around all night,” Bodine sez. “I’ll tell you if Springer shows.”
“This is some kind of a plot, right?” Slothrop sucking saliva from velvet pile.
“Everything is some kind of a plot, man,” Bodine laughing.
“And yes but, the arrows are pointing all different ways,” Solange illustrating with a dance of hands, red-pointed fingervectors. Which is Slothrop’s first news, out loud, that the Zone can sustain many other plots besides those polarized upon himself . . . that these are the els and busses of an enormous transit system here in the Raketenstadt, more tangled even than Boston’s—and that by riding each branch the proper distance, knowing when to transfer, keeping some state of minimum grace though it might often look like he’s headed the wrong way, this network of all plots may yet carry him to freedom. He understands that he should not be so paranoid of either Bodine or Solange, but ride instead their kind underground awhile, see where it takes him. . . .
Solange leads Slothrop off to the baths, and Bodine continues to search for his customer, 2½ bottles of cocaine clinking and clammy against his bare stomach under his skivvy shirt. The Major isn’t at any of the poker or crap games, nor attending the floor show wherein one Yolande, blonde and shining all over with baby oil, dances table to table picking up florin pieces and sovereigns, often hot from the flame of some joker’s Zippo, between the prehensile lips of her cunt—nor is he drinking, nor, according to Monika, Putzi’s genial, cigar-smoking, matelassé-suited madame, is he screwing. He hasn’t even been by to hassle the piano player for “San Antonio Rose.” It takes Bodine half an hour before colliding with the man finally, reeling out the swinging doors of a pissoir, groggy from a confrontation with the notorious Eisenkröte, known throughout the Zone as the ultimate test of manhood, before which bemedaled and brevetted Krautkillers, as well as the baddest shit-on-my-dick-or-blood-on-my-blade escapees from the grossest of Zonal stockades, all have been known to shrink, swoon, chicken out, and on occasion vomit, yes right where they stood. For it is indeed an Iron Toad, faithfully rendered, thousand-warted and some say faintly smiling, a foot long at its longest, lurking at the bottom of a rank shit-stained toilet and hooked up to the European Grid through a rheostat control rigged to deliver varying though not lethal surges of voltage and current. No one knows who sits behind the secret rheostat (some say it’s the half-mythical Putzi himself), or if it isn’t in fact hooked up to an automatic timer, for not everybody gets caught, really—you can piss on the Toad without anything at all happening. But you just never know. Often enough to matter, the current will be there—piranha-raid and salmon-climb up the gold glittering fall of piss, your treacherous ladder of salts and acids, bringing you back into touch with Mother Ground, the great, the planetary pool of electrons making you one with your prototype, the legendary poor drunk, too drunk to know anything, pissing on some long-ago third rail and fulminated to charcoal, to epileptic night, his scream not even his own but the electricity’s, the amps speaking through his already shattering vessel, shattered too soon for them even to begin to say it, voice their terrible release from silence, nobody listening anyhow, some watchman poking down the track, some old man unable to sleep out for a walk, some city drifter on a bench under a million June bugs in green nimbus around the streetlight, his neck relaxing and tightening in and out of dreams and maybe it was only a cat screwing, a church bell in a high wind, a window being broken, no direction to it, not even alarming, replaced swiftly by the old, the coal-gas and Lysol, silence. And somebody else finds him next morning. Or you can find him any night at Putzi’s if you’re man enough to go in piss on that Toad. The Major has got off this time with only a mild jolt, and is in a self-congratulating mood.
“Ugly ’sucker tried his best,” wrapping an arm about Bodine’s neck, “but got his warty ol’ ass handed to him tonight, damn ’f he didn’t.”
“Got your ‘snow,’ Major Marvy. Half a bottle shy, sorry, it’s the best I could do.”
“That’s all reet, sailor. I know so many nose habits between here ’n’ Wiesbaden you’d need three ton ’n’ that wouldn’t last the ’suckers a day.” He pays off Bodine, full price, overriding Bodine’s offer to prorate for what’s missing. “Call it a little lagniappe, goodbuddy, that’s Duane Marvy’s way o’ doin’ thangs. Damn that ol’ toad’s got my pecker to feelin’ pretty good now. Damn ’f I wouldn’t like to stick it inside one them little whores. Hey! Boats, where can I find me some pussy around here?”
The sailor shows him how to get downstairs to the whorehouse. They take you into a kind of private steam bath first, you can screw right there if you want, doesn’t cost any extra. The madame—hey! ha, ha! looks like some kind of a dyke with that stogie in her face! raises an eyebrow at Marvy when he tells her he wants a nigger, but thinks she can get hold of one.
“It isn’t the House of All Nations, but we do aim for variety,” running the tortoise end of her cigar-holder down a call-sheet, “Sandra is engaged for the moment. An exhibition. In the meantime, here is our delightful Manuela, to keep you company.”
Manuela is wearing only a high comb and black-lace mantilla, shadow-flowers falling to her hips, a professional smile for the fat American, who is already fumbling with uniform buttons.
“Hubba, hubba! Hey, she’s pretty sunburned herself. Ain’tcha? You got a leetle mulatto in there, a leetle Mayheecano, honey? You sabe español? You sabe fucky-fucky?”
“Si,” deciding tonight to be from the Levante, “I am Spanish. I from Valencia.”
“Va-len-cia-a-a,” sings Major Marvy, to the well-known tune of the same name, “Señorita, fucky-fucky, sucky-sucky sixty-ni-i-ine, la-lalala la-la la-la laaa . . .” dancing her in a brief two-step about the grave center of the waiting madame.
Manuela doesn’t feel obliged to join in. Valencia was one of the last cities to fall to Franco. She herself is really from the Asturias, which knew him first, felt his cruelty two years before the civil war even began for the rest of Spain. She watches Marvy’s face as he pays Monika, watches him in this primal American act, paying, more deeply himself than when coming, or asleep, or maybe even dying. Marvy isn’t her first, but almost her first, American. The clientele here at Putzi’s is mostly British. During the War—how many camps and cities since her capture in ’38?—it was German. She missed the International Brigades, shut away up in her cold green mountains and fighting hit-and-run long after the Fascists had occupied all the north—missed the flowers, children, kisses, and many tongues of Barcelona, of Valencia where she’s never been, Valencia, this evening’s home. . . . Ya salimos de España. . . . Pa’ luchar en otros frentes, ay, Manuela, ay, Manuela. . . .
She hangs his uniform neatly in a closet and follows her trick into heat, bright steam, the walls of the seething room invisible, feathered hairs along his legs, enormous buttocks and back beginning to come up dark with the dampness. Other souls move, sigh, groan unseen among the sheets of fog, dimensions in here under the earth meaningless—the room could be any size, an entire city’s breadth, paved with birds not entirely gentle in twofold rotational symmetry, a foot-darkened yellow and blue, the only colors to its watery twilight.
“Aaahhh, hot damn,” Marvy slithering fatly down, sleek with sweat, over the tiled edge into the scented water. His toenails, cut Army-square, slide under last. “Come on, everybody in the pool,” a great happy bellow, seizing Manuela’s ankle and tugging. Having taken a fall or two on these tiles, and seen a girl friend go into traction, Manuela comes along gracefully, falling hard enough astraddle, bottom hitting his stomach a loud smack, to hurt him, she hopes. But
he only laughs again, loudly abandoned to the warmth and buoyancy and sounds encompassing—anonymous fucking, drowsiness, ease. Finds himself with a thick red hardon, and slips it without ado into the solemn girl half-hidden inside her cloud of damp black Spanish lace, eyes anyplace but on his, aswing now through the interior fog, dreaming of home.
Well, that’s all reet. He isn’t fucking her eyes, is he? He’d rather not have to look at her face anyhow, all he wants is the brown skin, the shut mouth, that sweet and nigger submissiveness. She’ll do anything he orders, yeah he can hold her head under the water till she drowns, he can bend her hand back, yeah, break her fingers like that cunt in Frankfurt the other week. Pistol-whip, bite till blood comes . . . visions go swarming, violent, less erotic than you think—more occupied with thrust, impact, penetration, and such other military values. Which is not to say he isn’t enjoying himself innocently as you do. Or that Manuela doesn’t find herself too, in some casual athletic way, liking the ride up and down the stubborn red shaft of Major Marvy, though her mind is on a thousand other things now, a frock of Sandra’s that she covets, words to various songs, an itch below her left shoulderblade, a tall English soldier she saw as she came through the bar around suppertime, his brown forearm, shirt rolled to the elbow, against the zinc top of the table. . . .
Voices in the steam. Alarms, many feet clopping in shower shoes, silhouettes moving by, a gray cloudy evacuation. “What in thee hell,” Major Marvy about to come, rising on his elbows distracted, squinting in several directions, rapidly getting a softoff.
“Raid,” a voice going past. “MPs,” shivers somebody else.
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