Twisting the Rope

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  “She is the kitchen cat,” said Long with a smile. “You’ll find Pádraig with Martha Macnamara.” He watched Elen stalk away down the hall and out the front door. Long went out the back door.

  Despite his criticism, he found it gratifying when people called Martha by an italicized pronoun. But the smile quickly faded, and Long remained leaning against the wall for some minutes more, as the apparition in the motel room grew less and less real in his memory.

  Ted Poznan and George St. Ives passed by, walking together. “I can help,” Ted was saying. “I really can help.” Long did not greet them and they did not stop.

  He heard the sound of lights being flicked off. Really, he would have to locate that agent. Carefully he blew his sore nose and walked away by himself.

  The Foggy, Foggy Dew

  The connecting door was ajar between the motel bedrooms and all was still in the growing daylight. In one room Marty Frisch-Macnamara lay in the center of a bed so large for her that she had not managed to rumple the covers, while her grandmother sat cross-legged in the corner of the floor, her bottom on a stack of brick-hard motel pillows and her knees on the carpet.

  In the other room was Long. He shared the characteristics of both the others, being as flat out as Marty and as wide-awake as Martha. One black arm lay outside the covers, glistening with sweat, while the rest of him was hidden under layers of sheet and blanket. He shivered occasionally, and occasionally closed a scratchy eye, experiencing the cold virus in its fullest manifestation.

  Martha heard him sneeze. He sneezed again, and then again, until he was in such a fit of sneezing one could hardly tell when one stopped and the next began. The fit ended in a great wheeze. This entire pattern was so much like the roll of the wooden gong in a zendo that she bowed, swayed from side to side, and got up, yawning.

  She found him sitting up, naked to the waist and glistening against the sheets. Crumpled tissues surrounded him like the floral offerings to a god.

  “Bad night, dearie, wasn’t it?”

  His glance was apologetic. “I kept you awake, didn’t I?”

  Martha shook her head violently, sending her hair in all directions, and she sat down on the bed to gather up the offerings. “Nothing ever keeps me awake. Nothing. Probably because I’m selfish by nature. But how are you this morning? Any better?”

  He rubbed swollen eyes with his fingertips. “Martha, the only way I can imagine I will get better will be if I split my skin and leave it behind.”

  She started slightly and dropped her collection of tissues into the great brown grocery bag by the bed, which was more than half full already. “Warn me if you are going to do that.”

  “I doubt I shall,” he said, and with the depth and quality of his voice, these few words held an immensity of pathos. He lay back down again, closed his eyes, and pulled up the sheet.

  Martha slid off the bed and went to the window, which opened after only a few brisk jerks. The sea breeze of morning came in, letting her know how stale the room had been. “Well, why don’t you simply stay in bed, Mayland, and let me handle anything that might come up today.” She forestalled any protest by adding, “I’ve been doing it for a long time, all by myself.”

  He gave a great sigh. “I’m in the middle of things, Martha. How can I explain them all? There is finding Stoughie, and the room confirmation in Los Angeles, and—”

  As a thought occurred to Martha, she cut him off. “Say, did you ever find out why we came up short? The five hundred?”

  There was silence from the bed. She turned to find Long staring at the ceiling. “I think I have,” he answered at last.

  “Well, what was it? Did you miscount?” Quickly she amended her words. “No, no, of course you didn’t miscount. What, then?”

  Two black hands appeared around the edges of the sheets and flexed and drummed together. “I… don’t like to talk about things until I’m sure of them, Martha. It can do more harm than good, I think.”

  “Oh.” She dismissed the matter easily and went to the closet to see if the wrinkles had hung, out of her favorite dress. “No luck. I’ll have to steam it. But then we’re not supposed to have luck while playing at Landaman Hall, are we? Because of the north entrance, or the street, or whatever.”

  The top of Martha’s form had disappeared among Long’s suits and her own dresses, and she did not make a very dignified picture from behind. Yet Long appreciated it, full of virus as he was.

  She emerged flushed and victorious, brandishing a steam gun in one hand and the dress in the other. “I won’t know what to do with myself when this tour is over. Unless I get roped into helping Elizabeth put up the drywall. I hate mudding drywall.”

  Without opening his eyes Long said, “You could try marrying me. That would take up a good afternoon.”

  Martha crowed like a cock. “Hah! If you want to be happy for an afternoon, get married. But if you want to be happy for a lifetime, slaughter pigs. Or something like that—my memory for proverbs is worse than for lyrics.” Still giggling, she darted into the other room to look at Marty.

  “Still sound. It’s a wonder! Probably because she kept waking half up during the night, babbling about Judy.”

  “You said nothing woke you up at night,” Long remarked slyly.

  “Nothing does. Except babies. I cannot help having been a mother, and a traveling mother at that.” Martha filled the steam gun from the bathroom sink, and called out, “Usually you propose with more enthusiasm, Mayland.”

  “Usually you reject me with more vigor.” In a different tone he asked, “Who is Judy, that Marty should babble about her in her sleep?”

  Martha’s head appeared around the door. “I don’t know. Some little friend, I suppose. Maybe it was the babysitter from yesterday morning. Why?”

  He played his lesson scales over the covers without looking either at his hands or at Martha. “The babysitter’s name was Sandy, remember. Judy is… frightened of George St. Ives, I am told.”

  Martha came out of the bathroom, the steam gun making patterns in the air like cigarette smoke. “Did you hear about the problem we had last night—with George?”

  “I gathered, from one look at Elen’s face, that there had been a problem. I might have guessed it was with George, but, no. I didn’t hear about it.”

  “Then what, sweetheart? Was Marty being difficult? Very difficult?”

  Long made a small, unlikely sound, like the hissing of a kettle. “No. Marty did nothing wrong. It was …

  “I don’t really like to talk about things until I’m certain.”

  Martha’s eyes opened very wide. “You think Marty took the five hundred dollars?”

  Long laughed and then of course he started to cough.

  Ted watched a white stripe on the ocean, almost at the limits of visibility. It was fog, he guessed, sailing in from the west, into Monterey Bay. He was glad he had gotten up early, for the sun made a great deal of difference to his day.

  He took off his shirt, though it was only nine-thirty and still brisk on the beach, and placed it carefully on the flattened bag that had contained his juice and his companion’s black coffee. After an energetic stretch (his movements had to be energetic, considering the temperature) he began to do prana yoga.

  George St. Ives watched this demonstration from half-closed, sore-looking eyes. St. Ives wore two woolen sweaters under his denim vest and he had his hands stuffed into his armpits. “If you’re about to blow your nose, do it into the sand, not at me.”

  Ted smiled beatifically. “You know very well what I’m doing, George. There is nothing like the sea air to energize your spine. And what else are we, but long, serpentlike, flexible, and very sensitive…?”

  “I prefer to think of myself as a slimy tube with a mouth at one end and an asshole on the other.” St. Ives settled back against the concrete wall and closed his eyes. With his flattish nose and great amounts of hair, he resembled a bison enduring a worse-than-average winter storm.

  Ted Pozna
n chafed his arms and scooted a few inches forward, away from the pillar and into brighter sun. “Hey, I can resonate to that too. Eating and shitting, eating and shitting… it’s a rhythm like any other. Like the seasons. Sacred in its way.”

  St. Ives groaned. Poznan scooted closer to him. “But you shouldn’t have to feel limited by that. You can be a magical serpent and an asshole, too, if that’s your karma.”

  A tinny little scream, not of fright but of anger, caused both men to look out toward the open water. There was a family group, well bundled, walking the line where wet sand meets dry. And there was a large dog galloping gracelessly away from its masters and toward the land, something hanging from its mouth. It saw the two men seated at the base of the little wall and was diverted by curiosity, or by the smell of their breakfast.

  The dog was a mongrel with a good strain of mastiff in him. His face, with its loose eyelids and pouchy jawline, looked much like St. Ives’s. The two creatures stared at each other intently. The dog mouthed the child’s sweater he was carrying.

  “Put it down, fella,” said Ted. “Come on, boy. Baby needs his sweater. Be an old soul. Give it back.”

  The dog smiled at Ted and flaunted the little sweater teasingly. Ted reached out and missed. The dog gave a heavy little dance.

  “Drop it.” St. Ives’s words were not loud, but they were imbued with threat. The dog dropped it, and St. Ives let the sweater lie in the sand until the owner of it scampered up. The boy, perhaps six years old, glanced uncertainly up at St. Ives, who gave him a look identical to the one he had given the dog. Without a word the boy took his sweater and ran off.

  “So did you get me the drugs?” As St. Ives asked this question a very cold blast of air hit shore, spraying their faces with sand. Ted got into his shirt in a hurry. “Something better than drugs, George. Much better.”

  “Goddamn!” St. Ives beat his fist into sand. “No goddamn trips from you, Teddy! No more fucking Feldenkreis and soy-sauce religion! You know what I need.”

  Very soberly Ted replied, “Yes. You need to be comfortable in your body.”

  “I want to be free from pain for once!”

  Ted was silent for five seconds, listening to the drum of the ocean. He took a breath and began. “You’re undernourished, overfed, and alcoholic, George. You’ve abused that poor—poor slimy tube of yours for twenty years.”

  “Thirty-five!” George St. Ives corrected him, with some venom. “So what do you offer me—bean sprouts?”

  Ted shook his head, causing the wind to lift the bleached layer. His skin was bronzed to a color between biscuit and peach. His every feature and movement, muscular and unconstrained, hurt St. Ives to see. From his shirt pocket the guitarist took a plastic bag with a single capsule in it.

  “Drugs,” stated St. Ives, relieved. He took the capsule and fingered it, as though there were virtue in the green and yellow coloring itself.

  “Not a drug. Something different. MDM.”

  St. Ives’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t need hallucinations, Teddy. D.T.’s are bad enough.”

  “No hallucinations. Adam doesn’t work that way. It… it’s a little like the sun itself. Where things in you, have gone rotten, or are blocked, it opens you up.”

  “Like Ex-lax?”

  Ted’s glance was half reproachful. “Why not? Like Ex-lax. Only no cramps! It promotes healing, George. Believe me, I’ve done it, and sometimes I started out feeling so messed up and off center inside, and then… You’ll feel so good, you won’t believe it!”

  St. Ives continued to play with the little bag, thoughtfully, until Ted asked him to put it away. The heavy head came up, then, and the sore eyes were sharp. “What is it, Teddy? Schedule one?”

  Ted Poznan’s body stiffened with anger for just a moment. “Till last year it was as legal as aspirin. Fascist narcs pushed it into the same class as heroin. No explanation, no excuse. Never a public referendum. And they did it just so they could make a haul. They watched what places and people were healing with it, and then ‘bam!’ Betting that at least one in three would continue trying to use it. Easy marks!”

  “Schedule one,” repeated St. Ives, letting the rest slip by him. The capsule went into his pocket. “With that risk, it better be worth it.” He stood up, brushed the sand off, dropped something into Ted’s lap, and shuffled off through the sand.

  Ted stared at the little roll of bills. “Hey! Hey, George, I don’t want this. Hey!” He took three steps after St. Ives, and then, being Californian, darted back to clean up his garbage.

  “Hey. It’s not that easy, George. There are things I ought to tell you. Dietary restrictions…”

  The wind blew increasingly, carrying spray with it. By the time Ted had caught up with George St. Ives, the fog had touched the beach.

  Mayland Long sat on the bench at the bus stop outside Mr. Stoughie’s office, where his unshakable will had brought him. Unshakable but perhaps ill-advised, he reflected, as he watched the populace walking up and down the flowered street under the flowering trees of Pacific Mall. His sickness was making them all look very strange. But then perhaps they really did look strange. The man with the ill-fitting suit of tails and the orange Mohawk, for instance. Had he not been overweight he might have appeared quite threatening. Long peered out of the corner of his eye at an elderly woman in a loud print dress, trying to decide whether she appeared mad or only dowdy.

  He was really feeling ill now, with every warm breeze hitting him with fever and every cool breeze with chills. His scraped cheek stung, along with the bruise over his ribs. And breathing was such an effort, with both nostrils plugged. Martha had been right. Of course.

  But he had had no intention of allowing Martha this errand. It was the sort of thing he did best.

  Don Stoughie, the booking agent of Landaman Hall, was a man of forty years and generally good appearance. His thinning hair was trimmed in a style that was neither old age nor new, and the Mexican wedding shirts which he wore over his stretch Levi’s were washed and pressed professionally. He was a Santa Cruz businessman.

  Stoughie paid no attention to the bent black man at the bus stop, for he was long past noticing the street people. He put his key into the lock of the door and opened it. Halfway up the stairs he heard a sound behind him and turned to see the old fellow coming behind him. He had a moment’s attack of nerves. “What do you want?”

  Long ascended three more stairs and stopped under the staircase skylight. Stoughie, seeing his apparent harmlessness, relaxed a little. But only a little, for the incongruity of Long’s face and coloring did not reassure him. The suit of raw silk, however, turned the trick. “Sorry. I get nervous in dark places.”

  “Unfortunate. There are so many dark places.”

  Stoughie grunted recognition, hearing the voice. “Long, is it? I spoke to you on the phone last week. Macnamara’s manager?”

  “The manager of the tour business,” Long corrected him. “No one manages the fiddler except herself.” He continued up the stairs, thereby forcing Stoughie up, willy-nilly.

  The office was small and swimming with dust. On the wall was a poster of Big Basin Redwoods? State Park, framed in imperfect glass, and a topographical map of Santa Cruz. Long, without waiting to be invited, sank down into a wicker chair against one wall, next to a low table with a wide, flat book on it. It was difficult in the light from the single window to make out the title. He found that a single sweep of his fingers over the dust made it all much clearer. Investment Property, Monterey Bay. With a Monterey pine against the sunset. And the ocean, of course.

  “Funny,” said Stoughie, seating himself behind his desk. “From your voice I’d assumed you were a much bigger man.”

  Long’s puffed eyes were without expression as he answered, “I have a cold, Mr. Stoughie. It has shrunk me considerably.”

  Stoughie grunted appreciatively. “I can buy that. Every time I get the flu I’m sure I go down from five eleven to five feet even. Lose ten pounds too.” Stoughie slapp
ed his sides in indulgent fashion, as though he wouldn’t mind having the flu tomorrow.

  “I am told that this is not influenza, but merely a cold virus.” Long spoke a touch aggrievedly. “And I will do my best to keep you out of contagion’s way.

  “But as you couldn’t manage to be at the theater last night, as per our agreement….”

  Stoughie’s chin went out. “Did you really expect me to?”

  “Pardon?”

  “After the shambles that you people made of my theater yesterday?” Stoughie had an arctic blue eye, but the effect was marred by the twitching of the left corner of his mouth. “I haven’t even been able to get an estimate of the damage yet, but when I do…”

  Long heard a humming in his ears. He knew a moment’s doubt as to whether he were hearing the man correctly. The virus was responsible for so much.

  “If you are referring to the door which flew out of my hand…”

  “A safety door valued at over a thousand dollars, and that’s just—”

  Long sat up in the position of a cobra ready to strike. “That was nothing but a standard, hollow interior door, as I am in a position to know, Mr. Stoughie. What is more, there is no evidence of any kind to connect that bizarre trick or trap with any of Macnamara’s Band. Further—”

  Stoughie gave a sideways, ironical look. “G’wan. Everyone knows about you guys. Musicians on tour. It isn’t the first time.”

  Long’s anger threatened to dissolve into perplexity. The buzzing in his ears grew louder. “I must assure you this is the first time we have been accused of any sort of rowdiness. The band has only been in existence for a few months, and after all, we’re a folk band, not the Who. But if accusations are to be made, I think that I, who was both snagged and dragged in your theater—”

  “I just represent it,” said Stoughie unexpectedly.

  “In your theater, while trying to see to the safety of our sound equipment, and by parties unknown.” Long found himself lost amid the periods of his own sentence. His eyes were distracted from the agent’s face by a small movement outside the window.