by John Sladek
Some years earlier, Merri’s twin sister had been abducted by the outlaw Jess Hurch, and forcibly married. Before the marriage could be consummated, Jess was accidently killed. I don’t know the details, but somehow Monita received both a handsome reward for his capture and a medal for his bravery! Even so, she does not seem to have been that lucky. Perhaps she loved the scoundrel, and perhaps he’s have made her a good husband, who knows?
Whitney and Merrimac received as a wedding present a few shares of then worthless stock. They were to honeymoon aboard the Titanic, but food poisoning, a late train and a quarrel with a drunken taxi driver combined to delay them; they missed the boat. Instead they went West, to visit Monita. An incident there proved that Merri was, like her sister, immune to rattlesnake venom.
My father was Singer Hines, Fulton and Jenny’s only son. At the age often, he fell from a cliff and broke his collar-bone, which kept him home from school the day a new boy brought in cholera. As a memento of that day, my father carried with him the rest of his life the five-leaf clover he’d snatched in his fall. The collarbone set badly, and he was consequently not drafted for World War One. He enlisted in the Ambulance Corps, but peace came the following day. ‘The infernal luck!’ he said. I was to remember those words…
To continue, my mother was given by her aunt Monita eighteen silver dollars on her eighteenth birthday. Sixteen went for a dog, one for a collar and license. The other was to have purchased a leash, but the store was out of stock.
On the way home, her dog broke loose and was trampled to death by a racehorse. Its owner, a young man named Raines, apologized and offered her half-ownership in the horse, Skitsy Darlin’. Bell’s peculiar talent lay, as we shall see, in not having time to get too attached to things before she lost them, and in always gaining by compensation. In this case young Raines became her beau, and next day took her to their horse’s first race at Duda, Kansas.
Meanwhile another man named Baynes, of nearby Lardhole, Missouri, set out for another race. Having lost his way, he was misdirected by local farmers to the Duda racetrack (where Bell and Raines sat holding hands in the center of the grandstand).
The starting bugle blew. Skitsy Darlin’ got off to a bad start, but moved from sixth to fourth place rapidly. The crowd grew excited as the horses bunched up in the far turn (Baynes was looking for a parking place, Raines was squeezing Bell’s hand). Skitsy Darlin’ entered the home stretch; so did Baynes’s yellow roadster; they collided.
The panic on the racecourse was exceeded by that a second later in the stands, half of which collapsed. Raines was killed instantly; Bell was left holding his ring (it bore the seal of the Crown Prince of Luftenberg, and many years later it saved her life in a tight spot).
For Skitsy Darlin’s broken leg, Baynes offered compensation. He proposed to mend the leg, set the animal to stud or similar work, and turn over all its earnings to Bell, and gave her the roadster as a token of good faith. Skitsy Darlin’ became famous under Baynes’s training—perhaps you have heard of Mathematical Hank, the circus wonder horse?
Bell met my father at a rest: home where both were recuperating from nervous exhaustion (he had fallen from a Zeppelin). They married. My triplet brothers and I were born a year later.
Times were hard. My dentist father, out of work, was forced to actually beg on the streets of New York. One day my mother came across the eighteenth and last silver dollar. It was not enough to hold off starvation for long, so she generously gave it to a hunchbacked beggar. It looked ‘funny’ to him, so he fobbed it off on another beggar, my father. He took it to a coin dealer.
It was a rare 1897 Medicine Dumps Bank Dollar (Obverse: a frontiersman shaking hands with Liberty. Reverse: a wreath, a cornucopia of buffalo, and the words ONE DOLLER) in mint condition, and worth thousands. The dealer offered him five hundred for it and my father sold. The following week, all over the country, immense caches of these dollars were turned up; its value dropped to ‘face’.
Some of the five hundred went to pay for a trip West for Bell, to visit her dying mother. She arrived hours too late, and there were the funeral expenses to meet. Merrimac had died in poverty, leaving only her old, tumble-down house (which had, though, survived an earthquake).
Bell called in a realtor to appraise the place. Seeing how desperate she was to sell, he began depreciating the house, knocking on walls to show their flimsiness. One entire room caved in, killing the realtor and revealing the hiding place for Merrimac’s valuables. Here were all the old ‘worthless’ stocks, now priceless. My father sold them to buy his practice, a mansion, and a large hoard of gold bullion for inlay work.
Next day the market crashed, and Singer was able to buy back all his sold stocks for pennies (which he did, out of sentiment). And so, though he spent his entire fortune trying to trace the origin of the Luftenberg ring, he did leave me those stocks.
Every investment I made paid off, or very nearly every one. In time, I could afford to buy the time of bright young investment counsellors like yourself. In time…
Mac blew out the match and dropped it in his clean platinum ashtray.
‘You were about to tell me,’ said the young man, ‘the secret of your success.’
‘Was I? I thought I just had.’
‘You didn’t say a word!’
‘Indeed. It’s just as well. I was thinking of a story—something I saw the other day on television. Well, never mind. Back to work. Time, my young friend, is money.’
Twelve
The art critics of a dozen newspapers and magazines came to the opening at the Moody Gallery. They shuffled in like a soup line, snatched what was free (catalogues and drinks) and ignored the paintings as much as possible while they talked to each other.
Ank had been through it all many times, when he’d worked for the Sun. They called this ‘the game’.
The game was to conceal your own opinion of the show while sounding the opinions of your colleagues. When you had polled enough of them to decide whether it was worthwhile or not, you went back to the paper and set down a few epigrams. If the show was worthwhile, you tried to have at least one ‘insight’ no one else would manage. This might involve talking about the arrangement of the works, the name cards attached to the walls near them, how many steps to the gallery door, or anything else you were sure no one but you had noticed.
Ank knew the game, but now it was his show, and he really wanted to know what they thought of it. He walked a crooked route through the gallery, avoiding the clusters of wealthy guests, and trying to eavesdrop on the critics’ conversations.
‘Vasari…’ said a woman, in triangular glasses. ‘…Berenson…’
A man with the blurry, distorted features of a Francis Bacon executive stood with his back to one of Ank’s favorite paintings, a blue-eyed Giotto copy. ‘That’s it, all right. Tensions lacking. The quintessence of lif i framställning’.
Next to him a woman jerked her sneer toward the Turneresque storm at sea (including a coke bottle floating on a nearby wave). ‘Insulting as a tit, ain’t it?’
‘Dada, yes,’ said a man outfitted as a lumberjack. ‘But this decadent sentiment…’
Ank came to a stop before a ‘Mondriaan’ which featured in one panel a sign: WATCH THIS SPACE. Nearby, someone was talking about the real works of Mondriaan. ‘…sacramental splendor. Inverted baroque, you see, the liturgy of the line.’
The tall art critic with the ax-blade nose saw Ank and came over. ‘You covering this, too? I thought the Sun fired you.’
Ank stammered. ‘I’m…here all right. God knows why, it’s a waste of time.’ The familiar phrases came easy.
‘So I thought. What did you think of that Aphrodite thing, by by the way?’ He referred to the chief piece of the exhibition, a travesty of Botticelli’s famous work, here entitled Bertha Venus. In this version, blood coursed down the goddess’s leg, and great bloody patches appeared in the sky.
‘I don’t know,’ said Ank. ‘The painter’s probably a cl
ever young guy with no ideas. There’s a certain lack of tension, of fiber…’
‘I know just what you mean. Like a queer without taste.’
At the far end of the room, Glen sipped his drink and talked to a bearded young man he took to be the painter. The works were unsigned, and the catalogue called the painter ‘A.B.’
‘That Botticelli, it says it all, you know? I’ve been working on an article about the same thing myself—the corruption of the individual, the reduction of sex to a mechanism in modern life.’
The young man made a restless shift, so Glen raised his voice. ‘It’s like those Bette Cooke commercials. Supermarket sex, canned, frozen, sterilized. Love as meaningless as shopping. Art is the only way to reveal her for what she is, the great bitch-goddess of the built-in kitchen…’
‘Yeah, well, I’d better get going.’ The young man went off to fetch another tray of drinks.
Glen saw Ank at the other end of the room, standing alone by a curious pseudo-Cezanne. As he walked towards him, he heard someone saying, ‘Well I don’t know, Wilma. That’s what I thought, too, Cheap, derivative. But notice that kid from the Sun really likes them. Can’t take his eyes off’ em.’
Glen asked Ank if he saw the artist anywhere.
‘I thought you knew, Glen. These are…mine.’
‘Yours? Terrific!’ Glen was secretly flattered at having known the artist long before the show. ‘I really like it, Ank. In fact, I’m thinking of buying that big Botticelli.’
After Glen left, Drew waved his check at Ank. ‘We’ve made it, kid! Eight grand right off the bat! Everybody said I was crazy putting prices like these on an unknown, but…What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing. I just want to make a confession.’
‘You’re depressed. Nerves from all the commotion out there, that’s all. Those pig-ignorant bastards, they don’t appreciate…’
‘I want to get away for awhile. Go to Europe, maybe, and just…’
‘Study the old masters? Good idea.’
‘No, I want to do something different, I don’t know, I want to hole up by myself somewhere and maybe make up for what I’m doing here. I’ve committed a crime, Drew.’
The dealer patted his arm. ‘Don’t worry, Ank. Giotto will forgive you.’
The reviews were good. Ank’s show sold out in a week. The news that he would paint no more in this ‘period’ drove prices upward, until the last sale (to the architect Arch Ögivaal) reached ten times the first.
Ank left for Alsace-Lorraine at once. He bought an old factory near Assholtz, moved in quantities of supplies, and cloistered himself there for several months.
Marge drank to the flag, the Veterans’ Administration one, which she had draped over the sofa in lieu of a coffin. The drink wasn’t liquor, either. That had stopped working weeks ago.
And now this stuff wasn’t having much effect. She felt her head leave her cold, crawly body, but that was all. Cold and crawly, the way she felt when Bradd got too close. As he always did.
Dr Fellstus, MacCormick Hines, Mr Bradd—already her life was filling with new names. Like dust sifting in after you sweep. There was, there is, no more feeling left for him than for that nylon flag over there, fifty or sixty miles across the room. He was someone else.
So was she: Betsy Ross, Martha Wash, Molly Pitch and Bette Bitch, another standardized receptacle for the feelings of old motherless boys. Boys from Boise. You can take the Boise out of the country, but try and take…
She walked over and lay down naked on the flag. Country kitchen dinners, hot dinners…hot fudge sex star giveaway showdown tragedy delight it’s all right din-din chowdown chowder shoulder choux sho’tnin’ bread…three layer parfait banana coconut saffron mango yam molasses ripple mint apple betty nutmeg cinnamon bare clove rosemary thyme it’s dinner time, its
She spread out on the stairs and stripes, made a megaphone of her hands, and screamed:
‘COME…AND…GET IT!’
The study hall was arranged with all desks facing the walls around a large rectangle. Col Fouts stood in the center, where he could make sure that every cadet was writing his letter home properly.
The proper form was written on the blackboard:
Dear Mother and Father:
1. Cadet N.N. is well and happy.
2. Cadet N.N. will/will not be home for the weekend/Christmas/Easter/the occasion of X, as planned, because his academic record does/does not permit this.
3. Cadet N.N. sends both of you and his whole family his devoted love.
Signed, Cadet N.N.
Like the other cadets, Spot had learned to tell, just from the sound of Fouts’s footsteps, which way he was facing. While he faced Spot, Spot worked diligently on the form letter. At all other times, Spot continued his secret letter to Billy:
Dear Billy Koch:
1. Cadet Sturgemoore Shairp wants to kill himself…
At the next desk a cadet slipped a book from under his letter home and read:
We ruined them for their own simple savage kind of life, and we didn’t succeed in making them fit to live like white men. If we really felt sorry for the nigras, like we say we do, then we’d just ‘put them to sleep’…
The cadet at the next desk was asleep. Just beyond him two ten-year-old corporals were exchanging rumors about Fouts. Some mysterious ‘woman in red’ had been visiting his quarters. Fouts had a locked drawer in his office that probably was jammed full of contraceptive pills and all like that. Someone had seen a woman go into Fouts’s quarters at midnight—using her own key!
Then came the squeaky floorboard that meant he was about to turn around. That side of the room went back to work. The cadets on the far side of the room began talking about the new Army outfit, a super-tough unit mentioned in the National Military School Enquisitor. A unit called the Pink Barrettes.
Thirteen
‘All right you guys, let’s try it again. Brassieres line up at the south end of the field, skins at the north, ON THE DOUBLE! Here comes Rocky, so make it look good!’
General Rockstone strode briskly by, a coup stick jammed in his oxter. ‘Sergeant, I didn’t hear very much goddamned noise in that last charge.’
‘No sir. We’ll do better this time, sir. READY, MEN!’
‘Just a minute, Sergeant. At ease, men. Who’s that man with the haircut?’
The sergeant whirled. ‘Manning! Attention! One step to the rear—HRARRGH!’ Since the men were all standing with their backs to the general, the rearward step brought Manning closer. Rocky looked him over.
‘Soldier, who told you to get a haircut?’
‘No one, sir.’
‘Then why in hell did you do it?’
‘Sir, the regulations say…’
‘Not our regulations, by God! I want every man in this outfit to grow shoulder length hair, or by God, I want to know why! Sergeant, give the men an extra hour of backwards drill this afternoon, and put this man on punishment detail until he looks fit to be a Pink Barrette.’
‘Yes sir!’
‘And, Sergeant…more noise!’
‘Yes sir! All right, you bastards! You heard the general. Next time you come across that field I want you to squeal and gigglel So if I can’t hear you, you’ll do it ten more times before we take five. Is that clear?’
‘Yes sir!’ shrilled the company in unpracticed falsetto.
A moment later, those wearing brassieres charged down the field to engage those without. The ‘skins’ were fixing rubber bayonets or firing blanks.
‘Take some evasive frigging action!’ the sergeant bellowed. The ‘brassieres’ began to pirouette and skip. All the way they squealed and giggled lustily, until they reached the enemy lines.
The ‘skins’ line broke, and they became a few clusters of panicky individuals, firing wildly, thrusting half-heartedly, but cursing with real style and fervor. The light, curved coup sticks of the attackers never stopped moving, flicking here and there with uncanny accuracy. Within a few minutes, the
y had tagged everyone.
‘All right, Sergeant,’ said Rocky. ‘Keep it up. I’ve got a conference at the Pentagon this afternoon. Be back tomorrow.’
The battle of Dresden was getting off to a slow start. There seemed some question as to whether Napoleon would really engage the defending forces at all…
‘General Rockstone’s here, sir.’
‘Mm?’ Weimarauner returned with difficulty to the full-scale world. It was hard at times to realize that Napoleon’s whole army would fit into the summer house, along with Blücher’s forces; that a single musket of either side would make a toothpick…‘Send him out.’
Weimarauner stood in his modified back yard and watched his Pink Barrette general emerge from the house. Rockstone wore a green fatigue uniform sprouting lace at collar and cuffs. His long gray hair was pulled back over one ear by a plastic pink barrette. The little stick he carried was, because of his rank, tipped with one gold star.
As he reached the edge of the flagstone patio, Rocky was instructed by an orderly to remove his shoes.
‘That’s right,’ Weimarauner called. ‘Most of the yard is built up with plastic, and the surface is pretty delicate.’
Rocky slipped off the regulation shoes, to which pink pompoms had been attached, and padded carefully across the brittle lawn.
‘How are things in Florida?’
‘Good, sir. The men are in the pink—in peak condition, General, rarin’ to go. I hoped you’d be giving us embarkation orders.’
Weimarauner picked up a French lancer and examined its painted uniform with a pocket magnifier. ‘No rush, Rocky, no rush. Right now we’re in the process of changing our logistics system—Blunden here can tell you all about it—and we’re trying to cut back on troop movements until we have everything straightened around.’