“When that tape come off, this fuzz ain’t got him no eyebrows anymore,” Shai Shiv-T said. He and Qwarq stowed the prop cop in a closet in the back of the warehouse, and Qwarq said, “Take the go-truck and roust the brothers. Then hustle your butt back. I be here to overwatch the trove.”
Hustling, Shai Shiv-T drove the stolen go-truck through Satan’s Cellar to the Droogs’ basement HQ. On one of its walls hung a poster with a photo of five homeboy gangbangers: say yes to droogs. The slogan was Hi-Quince’s invention. Tonight, Hi-Quince wasn’t around, but Anthony and Papa Mel Mel were playing slash card at the basement’s only table. They heard Shai Shiv-T out and came along. Anthony rode up front with Shai Shiv-T in the doorless cab, but Papa Mel Mel hunkered in the cargo bed amidst rolling soda cans and crumpled cigarette packs.
At the warehouse again, Qwarq said, “Most of this stuff ain’t for shit, but Bro’ Therac might repay a ride.” Grunting and wheezing, the Droogs lifted the Therac 4-J over the go-truck’s drop-gate, shoved it into the loadbed, and blocked it up against the cab. After kicking soda cans and coffin-nail packs aside, they hooked the machine into place with a leftover bungee cord.
Hello, Cracker Land, Shai Shiv-T thought. Here we come. . . .
*
After Qwarq and Shai Shiv-T dropped off Anthony and Papa Mel Mel two blocks from the warehouse, Qwarq ran the truck at fifty mph out Highway 42 toward Silvanus County and its bohunky county seat, Philippi. With its doors chopped, the truck was a wind tunnel, and side-of-beef cold. Shai Shiv-T’s teeth chattered the fifty-some miles between Salonika and the piny edge of Philippi. Qwarq kept waiting for an Oconee Highway Patrol car to come wailing up, but it never did. Sheer luck.
Cherokee Junque & Auto Parts Reservation dawdled across a quarter mile of highway on Philippi’s eastern outskirts. All Shai Shiv-T could see of it was starlit hulks among the scrub brush, and dying kudzu vines strangling the midget trees growing in the shadow waste: stove-in sedan tops, wheel-less limos, an up-and-down row of lookalike jalopy husks. Driveway gates popped up at uneven lengths along the blacktop, and eventually a two-story gas station and office shack slotted back from one gate rose out of the darkness. Studying the place, Shai Shiv-T felt like he’d been smoked and shipped to a ratty hell planet.
“Too early to crash the man,” Qwarq said. “Better park and let ’er cool.” He drove them up to the gas pumps. A metal sign, visible beyond the last pump, said cherokee junque & auto parts reservation / Gas Oil Hot Sandwiches Worms / Tune-ups Fishing Licenses Videos.
A yellow bulb in the downstairs office winked on, and Juitt, a long-haired cracker in a suit of tree-bark camouflage, kicked open the inner door. Squinting, he slapped the screen wide and limped toward the driver’s side of the go-truck. “You niggers mighty brave to ride into Silvanus County in a stolen vehicle this time o’ the moon.”
“You mighty brave to talk yore honky dis shit,” Qwarq said.
Juitt eyed the truck. “You brung that? Larry Glenn’ll have to recoat the sucker.”
“Naw.” Qwarq nodded tailward. “That gleamer piece of rad e-quipment.”
Juitt sidled away to assess it. “To do what with, pray tell?”
“Cut ’er down.” Qwarq followed him to the loadbed and rubbed the machine’s nameplate. “Looky here: Therac 4-J.”
“Give you twenty-five for Brother Therac,” Juitt said. “And three C’s, cash, for th’ truck.”
“Three hunnerd!” Qwarq said. “Thass insultin’ cockroach scale!”
“I got overhead. I got cop trouble. I got paint to buy. ’Sides, Larry Glenn’s gonna taxi you back to the Cellar.”
“Praise de Lawd,” Shai Shiv-T said.
Juitt regarded him as if a ventriloquist’s dummy had come alive.
In the end, the Droogs took the deal, and Larry Glenn Wilkins, Juitt’s flunkie, drove them back to Salonika, gut-scared the whole trip that they’d roll and ditch him. They didn’t though. They were three hundred heavier in their pockets than they’d been before tying up the prop cop and boosting the Therac 4-J.
*
At a pay phone in Satan’s Cellar, Shai Shiv-T dropped a quarter and called police central. “Prop cop down but not dirt-napping in a Satan Cellar warehouse. Put a thermometer in the pig.”
His duty done, Shai Shiv-T hung up.
30
Bad Time at the Parataj
Tchaikovsky proved to Xavier that doubt and fear were rational responses to his hunch that the Suit was losing its powers. A month after the Shaker art exhibit, the city’s towers reduced to dullness by mist and river fog, Xavier took in one of the Metropolitan Ballet’s yuletide performances of The Nutcracker at the Parataj Theater.
Houselights down, the inner dome of the Parataj glowed purple. On the worn upholstery of their seats, kids fidgeted beneath this off-world planetarium show, some awestruck, some bored. Gratingly, the orchestra tuned its instruments. And when The Nutcracker actually began, Xavier got into it, for this production was in every respect superior to last year’s. He’d say so in print, for the Metropolitan Ballet relied heavily on Christmas revenues to make up for its less popular offerings.
A pair of ten-year-old boys next to Xavier regarded him with disgust. He recalled that at one crescendo in the score a painful twinge had rippled across his knuckles. His hands, arranged on his knees like two pale tarantulas, were exuding pus from between his fingers and a cheesy-sharp smell. While their female guardian beamed at the doings on-stage, the boys pinched their noses and looked askance at him. The stench got worse. Xavier spread his fingers to make room for the pus oozing out. Worse, he had to reach into a hip pocket, further smearing his clothes, to fetch a handkerchief with which to stifle both the ooze and the smell. The brats next to him looked vilely green-gilled. “RrrUPPH!” went one, letting go of a half-digested slaw dog and the unabsorbed remains of a soda. The boys’ mama, aunt, or nannie saw this substance crawling between her feet. She said, “Oh, Spencer,” rose halfway from her cushion to help him get his face out of his own duodenal overboil, and caught Xavier’s eye. Xavier, heedless of those behind them, got up, nodded coldly, and eased himself out of the row.
“Oh, believe me, sir,” the woman said, “Spencer’s sorry.”
Xavier backpedaled away. Once in the aisle, he strode toward the lobby. He left the Parataj without looking back or regretting his deception of the woman.
What did she know about real suffering, anyway?
*
“The Suit’s not working as it should,” Xavier told The Mick later, once safely back at Franklin Court.
“Nobody feels tiptop all the time. Forget it.”
“It’s not ‘all the time’ that worries me. It’s during, or soon after, an aesthetically rich experience when I ought to feel great, and instead I feel . . . crappy.” Xavier sat in a recliner with his handkerchief-bandaged hands deep in the pockets of his robe. He slowly withdrew and clumsily started to unwrap his hands. “The Nutcracker was great,” he said, “but see what happened during the dance of the Sugarplum Fairies.” He raised his hands and spread his fingers.
“Yuck,” said The Mick. “Phieuw.”
“It’s starting again. The Philistine Syndrome. What it means is . . . my doom.”
“Be glad it’s your hands. Think what else could’ve happened at a performance of, you know, The Nutcracker.”
Xavier continued to display his hands as if they’d been mangled by an unoiled chain saw. Eventually, The Mick decided to show Xavier some low-grade celluloid art with the VCR. He located a bootlegged video of Ray Dennis Steckler’s The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, shot in the early 1960s in a process dubbed by Steckler “Hallucinogenic Hypnovision.” Once this video started rolling, the cracks between Xavier’s fingers began to heal and his hands to drop toward the thighs of his Fred Flintstone pajamas. His look of wary fascination hinted that in a numbed-out way he was enjoying the movie.
31
A Rival?
Bari seemed to be avoiding him. Whenever he telephoned, an answering machine intercepted his call. A voice—not Bari’s—asked that he leave a message at the sound of the bleeping beep. The insecurity of his teenage quasi-nerdhood rising from his past like a fumigatory cloud, he feared that she’d grown bored with him, that in Tokyo, Milan, or London she had succumbed to the big-shouldered charm of some jet-setting moneybags, the sort of hunk she’d belonged with from the get-go, the incongruity of her fling with a bush-league newspaper critic finally striking even her as, well, incongruous.
Across the avenue from the drawbridge into her fashion factory, Xavier saw a light in a half-shuttered second-story window. At one o’clock on Sunday morning, she was still at it, or else finally relaxing after a long day sketching, cutting cloth, draping dummies, and starting over when the results proved cockeyed or clichéd. An industrious gal, this illustrious Bari person. The door beyond the drawbridge, a broad mahogany plank screened by a portcullis, boomed as if taking a jolt from a battering ram. The portcullis ratcheted up, the door groaned open, and a man in a pea jacket left the atelier to cross the bridge linking the old mill to the barren winter street: a young, virile-looking guy with shoulder-length hair, a despicable December tan, and blue eyes sparkling like chiseled diamonds.
My cuckolder, thought Xavier. Probably a millionaire playboy from Aruba, Majorca, or Saint-Tropez. In short, a jerk.
Xavier accosted the jerk as he came clomping heelwise down this side of the bridge. The man’s eyes overflowed with panic, his chin tick-tocked in search of a beat cop or a taxicab, and his gloved hands fisted at his chest in a reflex that may’ve been more face-saving than menacing.
“Who the hell are you?” Xavier huffed. “And what’re you doing here?”
The guy started stammering, hurling saliva from his lip corners like Sylvester the Cat: “St-st-st-stop. Don’t s-s-sock me.” He grabbed the lapels of his own pea jacket and pulled it open with the anxious disdain of a flasher. What Xavier saw then was a costume, the mottled frost-and-charcoal bodyshirt of the Snow Leopard, a UC stalwart. Well, that was a hot meringue in the kisser. Had Bari come to such a pass that she’d developed a fetish for guys gussied up in superhero drag? (Holy roentgens.)
“Give me a good reason not to—shove you into the river,” Xavier improvised.
“I’m a r-r-registered tr-trademark of Uncommon C-C-Comics,” said his leotarded rival. “You m-m-might get s-sued.”
Then the jerk in Snow Leopard garb struck Xavier in the chest and galumped off at a Quasimodo-ish clip bewilderingly out of synch with his svelte physique. Xavier picked himself off the sidewalk, found a grease stain on his trench coat, and, cursing, seized a handful of gravel from the planter beside the drawbridge. Because the seven staffers living downstairs made crossing that bridge and rattling her portcullis an unhappy option (someone other than Bari would intercept and deflect him), Xavier stepped back and hurled his gravel at the second-story window. He was scooping up another round when someone came to the window and, seeing him, struggled to lift the sash. (Ah, Bari herself!) She raised it high enough to ask him who the holy hell he was and why he’d rained pebbles on her window.
“Bari,” Xavier pleaded.
“Xave? God, lover, haven’t you got the feeble motherwit you were born with?”
The balcony business from Romeo and Juliet or Cyrano, achingly bittersweet. But when Xavier only stood there mute, Bari vanished and showed up a moment later at the downstairs entrance. Then she led him into the meat-locker-cold foyer as if he were a foundling in need of adoption.
“Who was that guy? What was he doing here?”
“Hold your ponies. Come upstairs.”
The foyer had an elevator, a cage with a long mirror, two dented metal stools, and an old cherrywood hat-tree on which various off-the-wall accessories hung—hats, gloves, scarves. As the cage creaked upward, Bari slipped a sheepskin vest from the hat-tree over a jumpsuit in which Xavier knew she often worked. She wasn’t, thank God, in a French peignoir or a leather teddy with revelatory cutouts.
“His name’s Howard, Xave. Howie Littleton. He’s both a model and a couturier. We were working.”
Bari’s studio, when they entered it, floored Xavier. He almost staggered back from the sight of her in-progress designs—surrealistically airy skirts, Technicolor blouses, decal-covered leggings, copper-lamé capes, flocked jerseys—which Bari and her assistants had placed about the studio on wire armatures, or hung like parachutes from the ceiling, or fanned out against the umber bricks like street-rad tapestries. But there was more happening here than hue and dye, fabric and stitchery. Xavier recognized the clothes—or at least the style that had dictated their patterns and color schemes—as a homage to the garish costumes of the characters in the Unique Continuum of Uncommon Comics: gangsters and palookas, stalwarts and sidekicks, baby-faced kids and scar-faced psychos.
“My spring line,” Bari said. “The motif is—”
“—Nick City camp. It’s lifted, wholly secondhand. Bari’s of Salonika will have to change its name to . . . to Bari’s of SatyrFernalia.”
“Hold on, Thaxton.”
“You did a deal with the UC child abusers. You bought a franchise. UC’s going to make as much money from this as you are . . . maybe more.”
“Settle down. If the line sells, everyone will do okay. What’s wrong with that?”
“Gak.”
“Gak yourself. In fact, I wish you would. You’ve no right to be jealous of Howie or scornful of our work. There’s real avant-garde creativity on display here, and the fact that it’s also colorful fun is not an excuse to turn blue and badmouth us.”
Xavier settled down. He took off his coat, hung it over a torso frame already sporting an outfit inspired by Saint Torque’s sexy getup, and wandered aimlessly about the studio looking at the clothes patterned on the costumes of other UC stalwarts. He felt as he had in the clothing bay of SatyrFernalia, like a character in an animated cartoon. A light fixture could have fallen from the ceiling, compressing his body to the size of a Campbell’s soup can, and he would have waddled about the room, balancing on first one side of his bottom rim and then the other, coldly sizing up the work of the woman with whom his uncompacted, real-life self was in major-league love.
What a drag. What a kick. What a testament to the multi-faceted weirdness of life.
*
“A pox on Howie.” Xavier sat down cross-legged on the mound of cushions strewn over the floor of Bari’s entertainment nook. “A pestilential pox.”
Bari, her hands inside her vest, did not sit. “It was our visit to SatyrFernalia that inspired all this. Plus Mikhail’s hots for UC-oriented designs. You might be interested to know, Thaxton, that—”
“Call me Xave. Or”—plaintively—“lover.”
“—it was Howard Littleton, the gentleman you’re poxing, who designed the Count Geiger costume saving your ass from, well, whatever.”
“It may not be saving it from anything.” He filled Bari in on recent events, including his bad time at the Parataj, a carnival of pus, upchuck, and embarrassment.
“Oh, Xave, I’m sorry.”
Better. Better. He argued that he was doomed, that he’d missed her the way the castrated Abelard had pined for Heloise, that his life was almost meaningless. His syndrome and her refusal to marry him had deprived it of all joy. She brought up
his duty to The Mick, tweaked him for surrendering so easily, pointed out that the Suit had given him a magical reprieve. Its potency might still not be exhausted, and, even if it were, some as-yet-undiscovered talisman might give him permanent immunity.
“Like what?” Xavier wondered.
Bari sat on the cushion beside him, hooked a finger over his collar, and rubbed his stalwartly BVDs. “Who knows? A medicinal nape patch, maybe. A daily cup of Postum. A weekly handjob from a lady using a first baseman’s mitt.”
“I’m doomed.”
“Then I’d be an idiot to marry you.”
“I have insurance, bought before my syndrome ever developed. Bari, you’re my primary beneficiary.”
“What about The Mick?”
“A contingency recipient. Lydia and Phil will take care of him.”
“I don’t covet or need your insurance. And I’m not about to marry a man in chain-mail skivvies who whines about being doomed. Tell me something good about having this weird-ass ailment.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not. Give me upbeat. Give me positive.”
“Well, I may not be the only man around with this weird-ass ailment.” He told Bari about Wilbon T. Stickney, who couldn’t listen to Jerry Clower albums anymore, or look at his favorite truckstop artwork, without getting a bellyache or a thumb wart. Stickney, to ease the symptoms of his lower-case philistine syndrome, read restroom graffiti and watched boxing matches on TV. That didn’t strike Xavier as an upbeat gloss on his ailment, but at least it proved he wasn’t the oddest duck on the planet.
“Was Stickney exposed to radioactivity too? He must’ve been.” Bari thought. “I guess knowing you’re not alone could help you come to terms with your problem.”
“I don’t want to ‘come to terms with my problem.’ I want to be cured of it.”
“Join a support group,” Bari said. “‘All PS sufferers: Enlist in group-therapy sessions designed to calm fears and bolster self-image.’ ” She framed this announcement with her hands, pantomimed rolling it onto a billboard.
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