More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Well, have they now?” Bagby asked. “Have they, Duffey? Has this thing become less than holy even in the city of its birth?”

  “I suppose it's still holy,” Melchisedech said, “and it hasn't been trashed as much as most of the arts. But Monumental Jazz has lost its green youth and is already playing at its own long, long funeral. Jazz at wakes and funerals is more common in New Orleans than in other places. And it's no odd thing for a jazz man, especially a horn man, to sit up in his coffin and add his own note to his obsequies. This is what several styles of classical jazz are doing now, giving their last licks to their own funerals.

  “The classical jazz has grown old raucously. I don't believe that it was ever intended to become one of the ancient arts. A hundred years for it, maybe, and half of that is already gone. It is too little creative now, and too much reminiscent, and it builds monuments to itself. But, man, man, listen to those three horns build monuments!

  “It hasn't been trashed as much as many other things, but it is hard to talk with it going on.”

  When there was a lull in the morning and mourning, Bascom Bagby went up and took one of the horns and began to blow down the gusty corridors of the ‘Gadarene Swine Song’. And then the Monumental Jazz men took it up. It was really a sea-shanty tune, but the monumental jazz men worked it in.

  2

  A little bit later, the Duffey and the Bagby Nations went out of ‘Good Guy's’ and around and into an art shop on Royal Street. And Bagby, like Duffey, always strode into a new art shop as if he meant to conquer it forthwith.

  “What piece is that?” Bagby asked as he stood before a four-chambered red heart. The heart was made of porcelain or ceramic, and each of its four chambers was as big as a dog house. The four chambers were shelved and filled with pictures and small statues and artifacts.

  “It is by Elroy Redheart, of course,” Duffey said, “and it is an autobiographical work. It changes, but not very much.”

  “Why don't you have it in your own shop?” Bagby asked.

  “I've had it in my own shop several times,” Duffey says, “but now Hennessy has it in his.”

  The first of the dog-house-sized red rooms was filled up with blue sky and red clay and green pasture scenes. It was rural Louisiana or Mississippi or Alabama. There were peanut and cotton patches, and rice fields. There were tractors and come-along plows. There were hundreds of figurines of children and younglings and men and women, working people and negros and travelers, dudes and high-binders. There was a school house with a sign on it ‘School's Out’. There were dancers, with fiddlers to the left of them and a blare-box to the right of them. There was young fun stuff all over the place.

  There was a young girl dead on a sofa in a room with a wall cut away to show the scene. Beside her on a little table was an opened box of candy, and several favors and souvenirs and a party hat scattered about. In the midst of it, and a dozen times as large as the other candy pieces, was her own red chocolate heart. It had been taken out of her opened breast. And her ‘card’ was daggered to a wall there beside her. It was the Jill of Hearts.

  “I will have to own that collection or combination,” Bagby said.

  “I have some pieces for it in my own shop,” Duffey said. “They are the better pieces, really, but they stand out too much and detract from the balance. Elroy Redheart sells some of the miniature statuettes and paintings out of it when he gets hungry. Then he makes others.”

  “We haven't any room for it at home, Bag, and we really haven't any money for it,” Mary Louise objected mildly.

  “Then I will sell you for money, Mary Louise,” Bagby said. “And with you sold and gone, there will be room for it in the house and there will be money to pay for it also. I must have this red-heart cosmos.”

  “I'm a red-heart cosmos myself,” Mary Louise told him, “with rooms that you've hardly ever been in. Time is getting short for it, Bag. You had better make up for your neglect.” Then Mary Louise was examining and later buying a French-Lady Purse-Pistol, very small, very old. It used wad powder and round shot.

  The second of the four red rooms was, in one half of it, of richer interiors and of richer carryings-on. There were brash and opulent people in its crassly figured scenes, some of whom had been in the earlier bucolicity and some of whom hadn't. There was a free-swinging success in the stylized sets here. There were chrome babes and chrome cars and chrome domiciles. This was all a high-toned summertime shuffle with words and music, brag words and brag music.

  In the other half of this second of the red rooms, there was artificial lightning and thunder, very well done, though the thunder was produced by the crackling of a bright sort of parchment paper, and the lightning by the fracturing glitter of it whenever one leaned close to look and breathed on it. This was a totally outdoor scene with some men of the same brash and opulent types as before. Now they were running a shoot-um under green skies and bluish jungle fronds, with great activity coming out of mint-green seas and sidling up on to coral beaches. There were combat buffalos and combat alligators in the show, and other such amphibious armed vehicles coming out of the mouths of landing crafts. The scenes were of war-invasion and its bangy action.

  Then, in an offset scene, there was a bone-thin, after-the-fact man sitting on a stump with his head lolling on his folded arms on another stump. And set out there, on a second and larger stump, were one hand, one foot, one eye, and a flutter-valve out of a heart, almost enough stuff to start to make a new man. All of these things on the stump had somehow come out of the after-the-fact man who was slumped there. A card daggered to the stump identified him. He was the Jack of Hearts.

  “Hennessy, a thousand dollars is too much money for this,” Bagby said. “I am a poor man from up the river, and you are a rich city blood dealer taking advantage of my love for peculiar art.”

  “Bagby, man, this certainly is not too much money for it,” Hennessy protested honestly. “Why do you think that your half-brother Duffey is no longer showing it in his shop? It is because the maker of this, Elroy Redheart, has put a the price of one thousand dollars on it. He says he is selling himself in this, but he wants somebody else to have this essence of him. He says he will not profiteer in his own flesh and soul, and that is why he has put this ridiculously low figure on it. But you haven't seen it all. Nobody could see it all in an hour or a day. We have here more than two thousand separate exquisite miniatures in round and in low round and in painted flat.”

  “You could make one like it yourself, Bagby,” Mary Louise said. “You know how to work in porcelain and bronze and walnut wood and tin and oil paint. And you really make things better than this Elroy Redheart does.”

  “I could make it better, yes, but I would have to pull my own heart out of me,” Bagby said, “and I'm not through with it yet. But here's a big red heart already pulled out of a body and put up for sale with more than two thousand miniatures. I will buy it.”

  The third of the four red rooms was filled with scenes of more hurried and more feverish opulence. There was the bone-thin man again, and he had a black patch over one eye now, but he had become a hectic dude. There was a breathtakingly beautiful young woman romping through episodes and adventures. The cars in the scenes were more chromed, and lower and longer than the pre-war cars had been. There was hurry, high-priced hurry about everything. There were so many things to be done that in one scene the man was using three hands to do them all. There was one little room that was wallpapered with green money, and there were piles of the green stuff everywhere.

  The artist Elroy Redheart had made deft use of new, hot, artificial colors to indicate new, hot, artificial sins. There was an artistic cheapening here, not that the artist was trying to skimp things, but that he was trying to show that cheap quality. Most of the figurines here were plastic-cast little pieces that were made in Hong Kong. They were not made by the artist at all. They were like the little things that are put in cracker-jack boxes for prizes, and they were a dime a dozen on the trifle ma
rket. But they were set in with prismatic reflecting things that gave a fractured light to all of the scenes of this group.

  Small and glinty hints told that here were drinks of a more sophisticated sort and that they would give more sophisticated bang-heads.

  Overpowering sound was there. It was portrayed by deforming the scenes to make it seem as though they were filtered through a vision cracked by ‘hard rock’. And the ghostly powders were somehow indicated, the dip and the deep-sleep, the glow and the snow. A real touch of the odor of them was set there. The beautiful and romping young woman, wherever she had been dancing, now had her feet bloody up to the ankles. But she was not lying dead, not she. She had her own heart out in her hands, and she was sticking pins into it and giggling. Certainly an artist can indicate a giggling figure. There's nothing to it.

  The beautiful woman took a pin larger than the others, a pin with a Moloch face on the head of it, and stabbed her own ‘Queen of Hearts’ card to her own heart in her hands.

  The fourth red room was vacant. There was a noose dangling from the ceiling, and there was a stool standing under the noose on which a person might stand to hang himself. There was a sign there:

  “This room for rent. Will decorate to suit tenant. The noose is an optional feature.”

  “Oh yes, one thousand dollars, Mr. Bagby,” Hennessy said as he counted it out. Baggy always carried his money in ten dollar bills though the rest of the world had gone to twenties. “Shall I send it over to Duffey's shop?” Hennessy asked. “Then you could enjoy it for the remainder of your stay in town, and Duffey could ship it for you to St. Louis.”

  “No. Duffey would steal some of the pieces,” Bagby said. “You ship it to St. Louis from here, Hennessy.”

  “You paid too much for it, Bagby Wrongheart,” Dotty Yekouris said. “It's only a novel, you know.”

  “I paid some of that just for the beauty of Hennessy's spiel about the artist putting a ceiling on the price. I will have to add that one to my own repertoire. A novel, Dot?”

  “Sure. It's one of the Open Heart Novels that are big in paperbacks now. There's a hundred novels with names and plots almost like that, ‘Queen Card High’, ‘Game of Hearts’, ‘High Hand Loses’, ‘Death of Hearts’, ‘Great Red Heart’. You can get them at any paperback stand for forty cents and read it in forty minutes. A thousand dollars is too much.”

  “He is like a kid in a China Shop,” Mary Louise said. “He'll buy anything.”

  “Have you noticed,” Bagby said to Duffey one day, “how our old stalkers, the SFM, have been appearing more and more in the stories and continuities in the rag-pulp magazines?”

  “Why would a man of my class and style be reading anything less smooth than himself?” Duffey asked. “And I don't even know what the SFM is.”

  “The Slant-Faced Men who travel in threes,” Bagby said. “You killed one of them, and I killed one of them, but there must be spares. There are still three of them, or many threes of them. They are given a humor treatment in the letter departments of the pulps, comic monsters like BEMs and HLPs.”

  “They have turned up in three of the comic strips.” Dotty Yekouris said, “In ‘Flame Man’, in the ‘White Avenger’, and in ‘Captain Justice’. I'd find them comic myself if I didn't know that they were real.”

  “Comic strips?” Bagby asked. “Why would a man of my class and style be reading anything less comic than myself?”

  “They are the ones who bug me the most,” Margaret Stone said, “because I know that they really do kill so many people. I can get along with all the others. The assassins of the Jebel Shammar sect flash knives at me and tell me that they will murder me if I don't cease preaching the doctrine of the Real Presence at night. They say that their Djinn is the only Real Presence at night and that he is a jealous Djinn. But I just give them a little Arabian sweet talk and tell them that New Orleans is a truce city like Khamis Mushait. Besides, I'm not sure that there is any Jebel Shammar sect. Those three are all the Arabs there are around here, and they go to Tulane University. They may be wrap-head kidders. And the Red Fisters from Sardinia say that they will wear my guts for scarves. But when I have dawn coffee at Messina's or Anthony Ghost's, they are always there. I tell them a shaggy duck joke every morning, and they say they let me live through the night just to hear the next one even if I am a Whore of Rome. But I'm afraid of the Slant-Faced Men. I tell them that they're zombies with winders between their shoulder blades and that they're getting run down. They do have little humps on their backs under their coats, and they may be winders. But the Three Slant Faces won't talk and they won't joke. They scare me more than any of the people who intend to kill me.”

  “Yes, I think the Slant Faces do have winders,” Duffey said. “But is it a ‘self-destruct’ or a ‘disappearing record’ that they are wound up to act? I saw the death of Sebastian Hilton in a transport or a detached experience. The Three Slant-Faced Men killed him, and they cut the Devil's tetragrammaton design on his chest. But the official report was that Sebastian died of an infectious fever. I flew up there and I demanded to see everything at once, and I did see everything. He had died of an infectious fever (actually, it was the old plague itself), and the plague sores on his chest did form the design of the Devil's tetragrammaton just as I had seen them. But they were fever sores. They were not knife cuts. Whatever winders the Slant-Faced Men have stuck between their shoulder blades, they wind up some pretty tricky records for them to play.”

  “I'll be killed by them myself,” Bagby said, “and yet my death will be attributed to my liver, a gentle organ that never harmed anybody.”

  “How is your liver really, Bag?” Duffey asked him.

  “Oh tell us how's your liver, Mr. B.,” Dotty sang.

  “I believe that, with a little help from some of my creations, we could make a song out of that,” Duffy proposed. Mary Virginia Schaeffer went to the piano (this was in ‘Trashman's Girl-a-Rama’, and several of them hammered out the song then. More songs have been born in Trashman's than in any place in the block. Duffey accompanied them on a house banjo (he hadn't his own banjo with him) and all of the unofficial members of the Pelican Glee Club sang thus:

  “Is it true you have abused it?

  Have you battered it and boozed it?

  Are you sorry you misused it

  Horribly?

  Does it need the Great Forgiver?

  Is it feeling sensitiver?

  Is it shrunken to a sliver?

  Oh tell us how's your liver,

  Mr. B.”

  Why, they were untrashing one of the minor arts there!

  “I certainly prefer Duffey's flute to his banjo,” Letitia said. “He can't sing when he's playing the flute, and the rest of us all sing so well!”

  But Duffey sang with the rest of them as they went on with it:

  “Is it silted like a river?

  Does it rattle like a flivver?

  Does it quake a lot and quiver

  Tenderly?”

  Bascom Bagby added in verses to the Pelican Song to himself, and all the silver-tongued people sang the grand finale:

  “Is it mighty coy and clivver?

  Comes it down to now or nivver?

  Oh tell us how's your liver,

  Mr. B.”

  And Bagby did look rather bad.

  “It's the last time you'll see me in this life, of course, Duffey,” he said. “I'll just go home and create a few more loose ends, and then I'll die. But I've enjoyed it all.”

  The Bagbys were around there for a couple of weeks and they had a mildly festive time of it. Bascom discovered heresies in many of the parishes of the city and he reported them to the Archbishop as well as to Duffey. Then they went back to St. Louis.

  But that wasn't the last time that Duffey saw Bagby in this life. Bagby lived for at least two more years, and Duffey saw him at least twice more, once in St. Louis, once down in New Orleans again. And the Bagby letters were still received every Monday morning.


  Duffey discovered, quite by accident, the names of the Three Slant-Faced Men. These were given one day, almost in throw-away fashion, in the comic strip ‘Flame Man’. The names were Amraphel, Arioch, and Thadal. The slant-faces were depicted as no more than three stooges in ‘Flame Man’, and yet here were their revelatory names. Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings, out of the pens of comic strip writers, comes wisdom.

  These were three crooked kings. Amraphel was the King of Shinar or upper Babylonia. Arioch was King of Ellasar or Pontus or Lower Babylonia. Thadal was King of the Nations, or of the Goyim. These were the opposite kings, the anti-magi, who had no magic at all. It is unnatural, or at least it is inhuman, for a person to have no magic at all. To be human is to have at least a handful of magic, and these three didn't.

  All three of them were followers (though this was not given in the ‘Flame Man’ comic strip) of Chodorlahomor who was King of Elam or Susiana, a Devildom east of the Tigris.

  “I always thought that Abraham was biting off some big chunks there, tackling four kings of such realms as those with only three hundred and eighteen men, and they naught but sheep and camel herders,” Melchisedech said. “Well, so do I think so now, so did I think so then. I don't believe they liked me blessing the man.”

  Duffey had begun to create a great number of small statues and groups. He made several large sets or mansions on the order of the chambered heart display of Elroy Redheart that Bagby had bought. He made displays of his primordial lives and kingships, and also of his twentieth century childhoods and lives.

  One huge, surrealistic assembly was, according to Absalom Stein, intended to indicate the seven hidden years of the Life of Melchisedech Duffey. It was not divided into seven chambers though. It may have followed some other time.