The Snake Oil Wars

by Parke Godwin

  Yay! Crazy! Do it!

  Amid the raucous welcome of his audience, Ricky Remsleep stepped out of the studio wings, denimed and leathered, guitar slung at the ready. The studio was packed as usual with his tireless following, lower children who had overdosed no later than 1970, anachronistic as a reunion of Confederate veterans. Ricky knew his people and his time. The guitar was an old twelve-string. We came first with the truth, his alienated defiance told the camera. Dig it or fuck off. Ricky banged out a chord on the twelve string. “Whatta you got, Brown Shoes?”

  “WHATTA YOU GOT?” his groupies bellowed back.

  “BROWN SHOES!”

  Their ragged chorus behind him, Ricky hit another chord and belted his trademark tagline. “WHATEVER YOU GOT, WE’LL FIGHT IT WHILE WE CAN!”

  He moved to a tall stool, fingering the guitar as the applause subsided.

  “Okay, outa sight. I’m with my own people.” He picked out a seventh and diminish. “You’ve all had your minds bent with this Candor jazz. Just want to mention my famous collaborator, a cat by the name of Kaufman, George S. Case you children don’t remember, he’s from the time when we all did corn flakes in the morning. Real B.C. Well, we’re getting our show on, but there’s a language problem, and I’ve been giving old George some hands-on training in relevance.”

  He rippled out a few soft chords.

  “Got a real down girl coming out now. Maybe some of you heads remember her from our own time of peace and love. Let’s lay a welcome and good vibes on – Scheherazade Ginsberg!”

  The polite applause surged to enthusiasm as his guest bounced out of the wings to her camera marks. Scheherazade’s sense of costume was equal to the occasion: hair a startling burnt umber, braided and held with Apache beads, full buckskins decorated with Thunderbird motifs. She wore soft calf-length boots and an elaborate belt of Mexican silver around her thin waist, both hands aloft in the V-sign of peace and love, smiling with that half-innocent, half-sardonic manner perfected by Joan Baez that said to a whole generation: We are refugees from our own culture.

  “Let’s do our thing!” she sang out.

  “Right on,” said Ricky.

  “And if nothing else is beautiful or real, we are.”

  “Tell it like it is” Ricky motioned her to the guest stool. “You people, maybe some of you got straight enough to catch the Candor trial on the tube. Don’t put it down too far because Scheherazade has something to say.”

  Perched on her stool, one booted foot hiked on a rung, Scheherazade pointed to the studio audience, collaring them verbally from the start. “Listen. I know Lance Candor. I was there demonstrating when they took him in. He’s a man with a soul and a mission. Let’s do it, then, Let’s get out and be counted for Lance.”

  Watching the program with a concentrated Joshua Speed, Coyul had to laugh in spite of himself. “I’ve always thought of Ms, Ginsberg as an unguided missile.”

  Speed kept his eyes on the screen. “Candor’s been bundling her.”

  “Bundling?”

  “She’s been coming to dinner and staying for breakfast.”

  “Been snooping, Josh?”

  “Oh... courtesy of the night desk clerk at the Hilton Hereafter. Fellow named Bixby. I got him off a death sentence once. He’s always been grateful.”

  “Useful.”

  “Not half as useful as she might be.”

  “I wouldn’t trust her to be a coherent witness.”

  “Maybe not,” Speed mused over folded hands. “But the very hell of a hole card. You saw what Helm did yesterday with the audience. He’s beginning to control them.” His deepset eyes flicked up to Coyul. “Ever see a lynch mob work themselves up into a real Christian mood?”

  “Hey, man.” A bearded and bellied youth in a dirty T-shirt and denim vest rose to rebut Scheherazade. “Don’t put us on. This Candor dude is white bread from the Bible Belt. We ain’t a bunch of fuckin’ Fundys.”

  “Get straight, man,” Scheherazade went back at him. “Ricky remembers the Movement better than you do. There was peace and love, yeah, and down with Dow Chemical and all that, but some of you got into Jesus, too. Remember? Fuckin-A you do. Lance is a fighter for a cause. You gonna turn off on him because he ain’t Abby Holman? Fuck you, man.”

  She bounded of the stool and spiked on her camera marks again,

  “Look,” Scheherazade gave it to them straight. “Lance is a Fundy, sure. A Christian Reconstructionist. But he’s counter-culture like us. Don’t let the squares cop all the tube time. Stand up and be counted for a revolutionary. Gonna be some changes. Yeah!”

  She jabbed a finger at a soulful young girl in a flowing red moo-moo who had risen, weaving a little. “What’s your story, girl?”

  The girl spoke in a foggy lisp. She seemed to have trouble focusing her eyes. “I just wondered, like I’m very heavily into astrology —”

  “No shit?” Scheherazade forgot all else at mention of the sacred. “Me too. I live by it.”

  “Too much,” the girl enthused in a sibilant rush. “What’s your sign?”

  “Triple Scorpio.”

  “Oh, what a conjunction! Like 2001.”

  “Speaking of that.” Ricky made a bid to get his audience back, “I was rapping with George Gershwin the other day —”

  “Talk about history,” Scheherazade jeered. “He was back before the Stones even.”

  Another girl bobbed up from the front row, spaced out and all of sixteen. “Let’s do the I Ching!”

  “Crazy!” For Scheherazade, Ricky, the show and causes were forgotten. “Uranus is in my sign and I got a feeling the changes are gonna be like awesome.”

  Sharing diet cola and doughnuts in bed (she had warned him often on the dangers of coffee), Lance and Scheherazade turned on the TV the moment they woke up, the way a smoker would reach for his first cigarette as a matter of course. They reran her guest segment three times before idly switching channels, coming in on a florid commercial.

  “Sherry? Look at this.”

  An illustrated book cover zoomed out of the distance straight at Lance.

  THE HERO’S LADY

  by Letti Candor

  The commercial had nothing if not production values – urgent, breathless, overshot and scored for several massed symphony orchestras. They might have been advertising perfume. Lance felt sick.

  “Sherry, look.”

  She did. “Jesus shit.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “No wonder she never had time to visit you.”

  “Sherry, I swear to God I didn’t know anything about this.” She found his crotch under the covers and patted it. “I know, lover.”

  On Earth the commercial would have cost millions: an idyllic scene of a boy and girl running in slow motion through a green field.

  MALE VOICE-OVER: They came from the American Heartland with a dream, a faith... and a date with destiny.

  QUICK CUT TO —

  A man aiming a pistol at the President. ACTOR LANCE diving between them. ACTRESS LETTI SCREAMING PHOTOGENICALLY, CUT TO —

  ACTRESS LETTI (with an accent never farther south than Staten Island) in tearful close-up, tortured but defiant: “My husband died a hero! If the state of Kansas won’t admit that because of his faith, God will.”

  — as the shot cut in a triumphant welter of strings to a simple but dignified funeral, then ACTOR LANCE running toward ACTRESS LETTI over a field of pink clouds.

  VOICE-OVER: A love story that has lasted beyond death, (DISSOLVE TO BOOK JACKET) The Hero’s Lady by Letti Candor. Her own story, available now from Burning Bush Books.

  FEMALE VOICE-OVER: Reading it is an act of love.

  “So’s a vibrator,” Scheherazade razzberried through a mouthful of doughnut. “And it’s more fun.”

  Lance stared at the screen, confused and hurt. “So that’s where she’s been.”

  “Come on, who cares? I went on the tube for you too, didn’t I?”

  “Writing a book” Something l
ike informed disgust adulterated Lance’s innocent mien. “Letti couldn’t write a check.”

  “It’s cool, okay?”

  “This makes me feel —”

  “I’m here.” Scheherazade slid her hand under the covers again to stroke his thigh and adjacent attractions. “I’m here, baby.”

  Lance moaned and buried his face in her breasts. He felt lost in a quicksand swamp of Helm, Speed and duplicity that now included Letti. The world was sinking under him. “Running across pink clouds...”

  “That part was kind of nice,” Scheherazade remembered wistfully, slithering out of her pajama top. “I mean, if we could do that sometime without being square, you know?”

  “Reaffirm me,” he gasped, clutching at her. “Validate me, Right now.”

  Through an endless series of commercials, Scheherazade validated the bejeezus out of him.

  “It’s the ‘Georgia Grieves Show’!”

  Applause, The cameras panned over the studio audience full of older women in hats and a sprinkling of captive husbands. Timing herself expertly into the ovation, Georgia Grieves, soignée and tailored, strode out to face the studio audience, lifted her arms in greeting, then took a seat on the small podium as the camera cut to —

  “Georgia’s special guest – Letti Candor!”

  In the guest chair, Letti smiled directly into the camera.

  “And Mrs, Candor is here today to tell us about her new book.”

  Letti held The Hero’s Lady upside down as Grieves named the title.

  “Which will be on the stands in about five minutes; isn’t that right, Letti?”

  Letti giggled. Her makeup wrinkled slightly, “That’s right, Georgia.”

  Grieves removed her glasses, habitual when she wanted to get down to it just between girls. “You’ve written an absolutely riveting book, Letti. I absolutely couldn’t put it down.”

  To be accurate, she couldn’t pick it up. A production assistant skimmed the volume and wrote a short synopsis which Grieves studied for five minutes before air time. “Did you write it with anyone?”

  “Well, I did have a li’l help on things like English and spelling and how to put down mah ideas,” Letti allowed demurely. “It was all just comin’ out so fast.”

  “Ye gods and small fishes.” Dottie Parker turned off her TV in disgust and swore with a facility undimmed by death. She poured her first scotch of the afternoon, her eighth for the day. “Jus’ comin’ out so fay-ast. Horseshit. Which is spelled with an e, madam.”

  Dottie finished most of the scotch in one practiced pull. “Oh dear, that does soften the pain. How are the mighty fallen,” she mourned to her poodles, “and how the appalling become mighty.”

  She was sorry she had agreed to ghost the miserable book, except she had to cure her writer’s block some way. Beyond that she had always been, dead or alive, a world-class masochist.

  Back at celebrity, Letti was telling Georgia Grieves and the cosmos at large of her husband’s ordeal. Joshua Speed, she asserted, must have been a carpetbagger while he lived; she knew the look and the breed. Letti became noticeably more “Southrun” as she progressed. She spoke of her idyllic life with Lance, the joy they found in life and the Hereafter, of their faith. She struggled with and then surrendered to copious tears, blotting deftly with tissues, then went under again in a fresh convulsion. Disinterested watchers like Coyul were amazed at her flow of tears and how little damage such monsoons had on Letti’s mascara. Her diction might falter but her makeup was from the Alamo.

  “When... when ah think of what that awful Speed will try to do to mah husband on the stand. Why he don’t even go to church, I hear. Just a trashy, awful man in the employ of the Devil.”

  Passing fresh tissue, Georgia observed with left-handed admiration, “It’s wonderful how your makeup doesn’t even run.”

  Letti gulped, gasped and blotted. “Ah use Ever After.” She showed most of her upper plate in a plucky smile broadened by her confidential agreement with Ever After to do their next produced commercial – which, she was assured, would be as major as the one for her book. Her nice Reverend Strutley had an interest in her and also Ever After.

  “We’ll be right back – after this.”

  CUT TO SPOT COMMERCIAL: Ever After, the post-life pancake that keeps you looking almost alive in his eyes.

  “That woman is connected to Great Salt Lake,” Coyul marveled over his sushi. “I haven’t seen that many tears since the Republicans lost to Roosevelt.”

  “For all her agony, she made sure the book stayed on camera.” Purji’s normal expression, that of a slightly erotic angel, was now rather curdled. “Lord, Someday my wonderful Keljians will come to this and call it civilization. Don’t you get discouraged?”

  “Tell me about it.” Coyul pointed with his chopsticks, “More hamachi, dear?”

  12

  — And a nice girl from out of town

  Cathy Cataton considered death a distinct improvement over life in relation to news gathering. There was no practical reason to bar TV crews from any Topside trial. The bad news; she and her board man, Benny, had to share the press box with Nancy Noncommit from Below Stairs. She wondered if the dyed-blond bitch had been born with that surname or had won it through her deadpan delivery on camera. Cataton had other appelations for her BSTV counterpart, all descriptive. She disliked Nancy from her questionable red shoes to her sprayed hair. Cataton’s hair clung to her scalp in short black curls, an ingrained habit from the long wearing of a wimple. She wore a headset now, giving muttered directions to Benny and her cameramen on the floor.

  “Everybody stay sharp. Superbitch is here. We don’t want to look bad. Camera one, stay on the witness box. Two, on the lawyers. Three, you hang loose to go anywhere on my signal, but punch up a good shot of Candor on my cue.”

  Benny’s nasal voice whined in her headset. “What about Coyul?”

  “Only if there’s nothing else.” Cataton put a tiny lighter to a Virginia Slim. “Who needs him?”

  “You think he’s the Devil?”

  “Get serious. He’s a wimp.”

  “So who is, do you think?”

  “I’m a convent girl.” Cataton winked at him. “I cannot tell a lie, it was me all along. Heads up, guys, they’re starting. Camera three, get the judge. Everybody ready? Benny... go...”

  “Ladies and gentleman,” Speed commenced with the jury, “I’ve demonstrated through direct testimony that Coyul is a still-living member of an alien race and therefore could not be the entity Lance Candor intended to and did attack, inflicting needless distress, if you feel this contention well proven, my case is won on the spot. However, I won’t ask for a premature verdict. As corroboration, I will present a witness of Coyul’s own race and long acquaintance. I call Purji to the stand.”

  As he spoke her name, Purji appeared like sunrise in the nearest arena entrance.

  The rustling audience went silent, not with their usual hostile tension but an emotion less easily defined. They saw a slender young woman of about twenty-seven in a simple white garment that suggested the Age of Fable, lustrous golden hair falling over her shoulders halfway to her perfect waist. She walked from the entrance to the witness box. She did not slither, swing her hips or exaggerate the progress at all, but every male in the audience felt something of a coronary flutter. The natural motion of that body was ineffably feminine, a definition of the gender. For those mysogynists who died at ninety and would rather burn eternally than be young again, there was something achingly familiar in that fluid movement. They had loved her once or dreamed of it. Their ideal of Woman, near-forgotten in atrophied libido, walked new as spring, possible, attainable.

  Viewing from his bed, one octogenarian nudged the white-haired mate of an unromantic lifetime and gummed lasciviously, “Gimme m’teeth, Martha. I want t’bite you.”

  In the arena audience, distaff reaction was distinctly biased. “Goin’ round in something I’d be ashamed to wear for a nighty,” Letti disapproved t
o her friend, Bernice. “I declare I can jus’bout see through that tacky thing.”

  Males were not so detached. Romans and modern Italians yearned to pinch her sculpted bottom, Greeks pondered a new lexicon for desire. English Puritans damned her on the spot, Jews felt pleasurably guilty, Fundamentalists knew she was something to be given up on principle. Lance Candor regretted she hadn’t gone to his high school. Athletic and educational nights with Scheherazade had widened his appreciation of life as an enjoyment. The arena seemed faintly perfumed with fragrances associated with spring and poignant memory.

  Coyul winked into Purji’s mind as she stepped into the witness box. Lovely, dear, but don’t overdo.

  Joshua Speed was careful not to block the appreciative view of the Italian juror. “Your full name is Purji?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where were you born?”

  Her response duplicated Coyul’s for the question. “But it’s not there anymore. Nothing lasts, you know.”

  And how old was she?

  “Oh. I’m terrible at birthdays.” A hand guttered to her brow. “Three or four hundred million of your years. I’m a little younger than Coyul. We went to school together. Coyul, Barion and I.”

  Uninterested in Coyul, the cameras missed his smile hidden behind one hand. He remembered Purji being somewhat older – and distinctly felt her frown into his recollection now. Don’t be ungallant, darling.

  “Have you ever gone by any other name than Purji?”

  “Not among my own people.”

  “I see.”

  “Of course, the Keljians —”

  Purji, shut up.

  She caught herself. “I did visit for some time among the Keljians. They called me Lua-lat”

  Coyul glanced over at Helm; the lawyer was jotting a note.

  “You were not sent there by your own people?”

  “Those stuffy old academics?” Purji’s laughter tinkled through the arena like lightly tapped crystal. “Catch them wasting time on humans.” Anthropoids were fashionable with her own generation for a time and a passion with Barion, unfortunate since he apparently bit off more than he and Coyul could chew between them. “Of your knowledge, then, neither Barion nor Coyul ever considered or represented themselves as deities?”