Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me Page 10

  Still, he may be into something.

  Gnossos shifted weight uncomfortably, one aspect of his mind quietly furious at the constipation which continued unrelieved despite cautious doses of mineral water, lemon juice, olive oil, and Carter’s Little Liver Pills. Good for little livers; mine as big as a strawberry shortcake, reconstitutes its spongy self, adding volume each time around the bilious cycle. Me like Prometheus, no bird needed. My spiritual old man, kicking determinism in the head. He turned the page, ignoring “Pogo” (something insipid in political possums) then went carefully through the frames of “Peanuts.” He studied each line of Snoopy’s self-indulgent countenance as the dog lay on top of his little white house, nose up, ears down, gazing fondly at the universe.

  He was saying the word “sigh” along with the balloon in the last picture, when the front door opened without a knock and two peculiar-looking men wandered in.

  They were making sniffing sounds.

  The police?

  From recent experience with Pamela, and light in the room, Gnossos realized they could see neither Fitzgore nor him through the bamboo-reed curtain that isolated the beds from the rest of the apartment. But he had no difficulty seeing them. He crouched down into the eiderdown and watched their curious, halting gestures as they nosed about. Something subtly familiar in their manner. He moved his hand under the sheets, searching silently for the hammer he had taken from Blacknesse’s car and kept in bed ever since. Who? Proctor Slug’s men? Impossible, man, they move like potheads. Nudge Fitzgore with toe.

  The two strangers paused, one on either side of the table, the rice-paper globe with the Chinese character at thigh height between them. Mutt and Jeff. The little one pudgy with an inch-thick tweed jacket, patches on the sleeves, blue shirt, white bowtie. Carrying a yellow briefcase. His hair like Hitler’s, patch combed forward, plastered on his brow, heavy Kitchener mustache, ends waxed, pointing straight out; little eyes glancing about, mole-nose twitching, the palm of one hand going up and down on his belly. Beside him was a bald man in black from head to toe, a turtleneck jersey covering only a sixteenth of his windowpole throat. Mary, no, not a man, a kid! Gnossos watched him stroke his head, then dangle his fingers in the air, snapping at dust. Seventeen, maybe. Why grinning? Up, Fitzgore, up up, there’s a zombi in the room.

  “Eminently casual,” said the mustached man, kissing the end of a Robt. Burns cigarillo and looking at the Blacknesse painting. His hand hesitating on his belly as he realized simultaneously what was occurring on the canvas and that other people were in the room.

  Gnossos gripped the handle of the hammer and tested it for balance. Find the temple first, tap swiftly. Wait, though. Maybe seraphim sent to test.

  “Pappadopoulis, assuredly,” said the stranger, inching his head around the curtain, his gourami lips parting in a smile that was shy one tooth. The teenager oozed across the distance between him and the shorter man, his feet never seeming to leave the floor, and said, “Wha’s happening, baby?”

  Jesus. “Nothing much, man. Who are you?”

  A pause.

  “You don’t know?” asked the fat man. He turned to the teenager with a resigned gesture: “I knew he wouldn’t mail the letter. What did I tell you before leaving the city, Heap? He wouldn’t mail the letter.”

  Nudge Fitzgore with big toe. Wake up, mother, stop snoring. Talk to them. “Was I supposed to get a letter?”

  “Aquavitus. You didn’t hear from him? No letter?”

  All a morning dream, no correlation between events.

  “What letter, man?”

  The teenager with the shaved skull shook his head sadly, in slow motion, his left eye opening and closing. Not a wink but a lazy, muscleless drooping of the lid. His fingers kept snapping casually at the air.

  “I couldn’t call him an especially close friend,” continued the pudgy one, lighting his cigarillo and offering another to Gnossos, who neither refused nor accepted, “but I visit with him when I’m in the city, have a little sweet-and-sour pork at Hong Fat. You’ve been there, you’re familiar with the place?” The cigarillo going back into his outside pocket.

  “How do you know Aquavitus?”

  “The Buddha, of course.”

  “Check,” said the bald one. “We’re all of a family.”

  “From Havana?”

  “We have a business deal, an arrangement,” smiling, touching one of the lumpy forefingers to the tip of his waxed mustache, as if testing for a lethal point.

  The Cuban connection with an opal in his forehead. Seven-foot spade in silk robes, Motherball once said. No one had ever seen him. These guys, who? The eyes on the kid, like a runt water spaniel, stoned, flying.

  Leave Fitzgore alone. “And who are you?”

  The two creatures looking at each other as if to find out, the pudgy one turning back slowly and saying, “Mojo,” setting his briefcase down on the floor and unraveling the long swiveled leash that attached it to his wrist. Extending his left hand backward, Gnossos shaking it carefully, his stomach shrinking at the soft, boneless feel. Like a rubber glove stuffed with putty. “Oswald Mojo. This is my assistant, Heap. So old Giacomo didn’t send you the letter? We predicted that, of course. He’s such an intense kind of Sicilian, all work, all, how shall we say, intrigue. But you know that, you realize how he is.”

  “I haven’t seen him in two years, I thought he was in Alcatraz.” Heff talking about him recently. Cloak-and-stiletto shit, take this zircon to Foppa. Mo-go. The Victorian house?

  “Ha ha,” said Oswald Mojo. “Ha ha ha. No. No, not old Giacomo. That’s why he’s so beautiful, so, how shall we say, obscure. He volunteered for a gout experiment at the Mayo Clinic, got paroled.”

  “He’s beautiful, baby,” agreed Heap, his eye drooping. Mojo said: “But you know me anyway, you’ve heard of me? It would have helped for you to realize I was coming, of course, it’s always pleasant to be expected, not to cause surprises.”

  “Oh, I like surprises.”

  “Mojo,” repeated the man, going into his briefcase, his face flushing, swelling as he leaned over to fish something out. “Oswald Mojo.”

  Gnossos shaking his head, not recognizing the name, turning his back to the wall, always cover your flanks. Leave the flanks exposed, they’ll tear right up the middle, nail you with a howitzer or something. What’s he getting, Luger? Stay loose. Aquavitus, man, of all people. Sicily oxshit. Ersatz Mafia Capo coming from South Brooklyn, has eyes for the heavyweight heroin crown, still district distributor for Cuban grass.

  “Here,” said Mojo, “some of my work,” tossing a number of political periodicals on the eiderdown. “Foreign Affairs Quarterly, Partisan Review, back numbers of The Reporter, The New Leader. You probably didn’t know I completed the treatise in F.A.Q. when I was twelve. The irony there, you see, the aesthetic injustice, as it were, was that Madame Pandit’s translation achieved so much more fame than my original. But that’s, well, how shall we say . . . ”

  “Show business,” supplied Gnossos, flipping through the pages and actually finding a number of essays by Oswald Mojo, the paragraphs laced with Italian and Latin expletives.

  “The monographs, baby,” said Heap, smiling, also showing a missing front tooth, the same one in fact, “that’s where it’s all happening.”

  “Form, the significant variable. Contains the elocutionary passions.”

  “Double-crostics, myself,” said Gnossos, looking one to the other, not getting response, “little haiku now and then, ha ha.” Laying the magazines aside, figuring the geometry of the room, Heap an easy target, too stoned to move quickly. Feel them along: “I’ll read the stuff later, if you don’t mind, classes to go to and all, lecture in twenty minutes. So if you’ll maybe tell me what it is you’d like?”

  A pause while Mojo sucked at his cigarillo, nervously twisted the swivel of the leash on his wrist. Looking at Heap. “Your, how shall we call it, reputation, Pappadopoulis, being the kind of thing one can’t help noticing, being attracted
to—” The man broke off, not satisfied with his start, twisting the leash in the opposite direction. It was then that Gnossos noticed the braiding of the leather leash, thick at one end, tapering away at the other, exactly like, oh wow, a bullwhip.

  “Events of an exciting nature get communicated,” he went on, “wouldn’t you say? All this elusive talk about communication being lost in our—how shall we put it—era of abeyance. Boring circumstances, of course, are forgotten, but significant bits of information, pregnant facts, people of a dynamic bent, these things get talked about, one might even say, praised.”

  “Yes,” said Gnossos, knowing no more, picking up the uneasiness in the room, “but this important lecture; my roommate—”

  “Beautiful, baby,” from Heap, his eye drooping in the direction of the slumbering Fitzgore, approving.

  “Given individuals being more adventurous than the, oh, call them peasant stock, come to be thought of as, ha ha, sources of energy. Even more so if they travel a great deal, function in large urban, well, communities, such as, well, Las Vegas. People take notice, want to partake—”

  “He’ll be late, old roomie, hates being tardy—”

  “Yes,” continued Mojo, seeming to ignore, still twisting the leather, “partake. Come to enjoy the same little things. As a kind of example—were we looking for one—and I could phrase this more eloquently, were you not so seemingly pressed in your studies; I say, as a kind of example of this person there is the, well, example of yourself. Yes. Could you, all things considered, for instance, have failed to attract the attention of Werner Lingam in St. Louis or Alexander Jelly in Venice West, both connoisseurs in their own right? Even Giacomo, with his quaint Sicilian manner, has heard much in a different way about you; quite apart from the little jobs you’ve done for his, well, company. So of course, knowing as we did last week, Heap and myself, that we’d be coming in this direction, even stopping over, as it were, for the week, and looking around, our mutual friend Giacomo said to me—you know how he likes to keep track of his former clients and employees—he said, ‘Atheené, Atheené, shoo I got a fren’dere.”’ (Heap chuckling at the imitation, murmuring just under his breath, “What a gas.”) “‘You look ’im up, you look up Agnossos, I write ’im an introduction, he fix you up fine, ha ha,’ and I remembered your name in particular from Richard Pussy, another very dear friend from Vegas, who never stops talking about that very tall, long-legged girl from Radcliffe you were making it with, the one who used to go around, ha ha, barefoot, if you recall. And of course, Louie Motherball . . . ”

  The pudgy fingers were going up and down on his belly again, and the momentarily forgotten cigarillo had grown a heavy ash, which inclined toward the floor. For a moment, in the pale reflection of the light through the sealed window glass, Gnossos saw a trickle of saliva at the corner of Mojo’s mouth, a curling, needle-thin bead of tiny, adhesive bubbles half an inch in length. The glimmering thread existed barely a fraction of a second before it was dissolved by the tip of a fat, pink tongue. His eyes blinking in twitches.

  “Barefoot, you see, if you’ll understand my intent,” he continued, fixing his gaze on a piece of polarized dust suspended in one of the light shafts, “and that Negro girl in North Beach, she used to wear white silk stockings all over her legs, which were, ha ha, black so to speak, very long. She was nearly six feet tall, from what we heard, communication being what it is and my knowing such an extraordinary number of people, a very great many, most of whom I meet after my readings. Although I do try to confine them to the women’s schools, it’s not always easy and you often take what you can get, don’t you? Depending on your particular frame of reference, the species of habit you cultivate, a certain amount of bravado, which you, for example, Pappadopoulis, don’t seem to be wanting, even in matters of taste, ha ha, that chic for example, wearing silk stockings, and those shoes with the extra long heels, even if the skirt wasn’t, wasn’t—”

  “Leather,” provided Heap, snapping his fingers for punctuation.

  “Or a given grade of suede,” said Mojo, the concept of the word stopping him suddenly, triggering some other degree of thought, causing him to come aware of the cigarillo, flick the ash on the Navajo rug, and take a noisy, sucking puff.

  Gnossos stared at him.

  “Your good friend Heffalump being another case in point, apart from his exceedingly quaint name and mulatto blood. That girl on the tabletop at Duke, that cheerleader, booster, whatever she was, wearing her boots.”

  “Quadroon,” corrected Heap, snapping.

  “Assuredly. And there was someone else too—who was that, Heap, the Côte d’Azur, at Pablo’s place, somebody knew Gnossos here, his scene?”

  “Pablo?” asked Gnossos, suspicious.

  “Yeah, Picasso.”

  “The Buddha?” from Heap, not certain.

  “No no, someone else. No matter, really.”

  Gnossos looked at both of them again, the palms of his hands perspiring, the hammer forgotten. Heap was nodding curiously, his left eyelid drooping, his hair barely beginning to grow back, a gray shadow of prickly fuzz. Mojo said: “Make some coffee, Heap—no, you stay where you are, Mr. Pappadopoulis, don’t go to any trouble on our account, that’s all right, that’s perfectly fine, Heap makes an excellent cup of coffee, nice to have in bed, such a long time it’s been too, since Las Vegas probably, that, ha ha, barefoot, long-legged girl, if I’m correct.”

  The morning after the atom bomb, the Radcliffe muse bringing him coffee at their motel.

  “You sure you don’t want a cigarillo, Robbie Burns, I’m sorry, they didn’t have anything else at the campus store. Prefer Between-the-Acts generally, an Aquavitus recommendation. You need any shit?”

  Oh ho.

  So there it is. At ten-thirty in the morning. Into his briefcase again? Holy cow, look at the thickness. It couldn’t be—

  “Grass,” said Mojo. “Mexican Brown. Very clean quality, I can assure you. Numbs the extremities. Certain percentage hash, about two to seven, you dig. Tangier hash. The kind they put in those chocolate bars.”

  Gnossos unfolded the wrapping paper carefully, looking up at Mojo’s contented expression, the cigarillo pressed delicately between the kiss of puckered lips. He sniffed first, then looked down and examined.

  It certainly was interesting-looking shit.

  “My own mixture,” said Oswald Mojo, “I have it prepared by a musician acquaintance in Nashville, chap who blows electric oud, calls it Mixture Sixty-nine, very popular in certain circles, if you follow me.”

  “What a beautiful kitchen, baby,” called Heap, “garbage and vine leaves all over the place. Where’s the coffee?”

  Lie. “Don’t use it. Caffeine bad for the head.”

  “Uuuunmphhf,” said Fitzgore, stirring as the word coffee filtered into his subconsciousness.

  “Consider that a gift,” said Mojo.

  “It’s nearly two ounces.”

  “Yeah, baby,” said Heap, gliding back across the rug, “it’s beautiful.”

  “Wha’timesit?” asked Fitzgore, looking up with his swollen redhead’s eyes. “I gotn’eleven o’clock.”

  “Cool it,” said Heap.

  “You’ll be late,” said Gnossos. “Up up up, time for school.”

  “Uuuunmphhf. Who’re these guys? Wha’timesit?”

  “Perhaps,” said Mojo, wrapping the bullwhip leash around his wrist and snapping the briefcase closed, then pausing with a thumb-flick, which meant Gnossos should follow him to the door and which he very nearly felt the physical force of, “perhaps we could get together later. You’ll be at the party tomorrow night, that goes without saying?”

  “Party?” he whispered. Heap’s snapping fingers had abruptly stopped, one of them going to his lips in a hushing gesture. All three of them paused by the dangling rice-paper globe, looking at each other around the suspended white wire. The rucksack is not for sale.

  “I’ve arranged a loft in Dryad, that very quaint village near here, you
know the place well of course, the farm adjacent to the Dairy, ha ha, Queen.” Mojo leaned forward, an expression of intimate confidence in his pig-eyes: “I try to keep these spaces available for little get-togethers in university towns. Space, after all, is such a significant concept, so highly—we might call it—aesthetic.”

  “Space is beautiful, baby,” said Heap, whispering, his fingers snapping again, but with less force. At this closer distance Gnossos quite suddenly became aware that the eye under the drooping lid was made of glass and looked always through your head.

  “There is a great deal of space in this loft, Pappadopoulis, but you must understand my position clearly when I say that this is my first, well, how shall we say, soirée in Athené, that I can’t be relied upon to produce all the people I’d like to have there. While of course I will provide refreshments and a certain amount of my Mixture, ha ha, Sixty-nine, if you follow me. Ummm.”

  “He follows you, baby,” said Heap.

  “Wha’TIMEsit, anyway?” called Fitzgore from behind the curtain, everyone ignoring him.

  “I don’t know anybody,” said Gnossos.

  Both of the men stared.

  “I beg your pardon?” from Mojo.

  “You want to get laid, go get a pimp.”

  Heap ceased snapping his fingers again.

  “A pimp?” asked Mojo after a moment of silence, pronouncing the word as if he’d never been aware of its existence, or if he had, that it lay at the outer reaches of some other untouchable experience. “A pimp? Oh no. No no nonono, Mr. Pappadopoulis, you must be careful not to misunderstand me; very careful not to misconstrue my purpose. A pimp, really.”

  “Anybody can get laid, baby,” said Heap, the glass eye suddenly as rigid as a moonstone in the head of an idol.

  “The theme, dear boy, is, how shall we say, open to the public. It is the variation, you see, the addition of given decorations, as it were, which my friends and I—”

  “Friends?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course. Have I failed to mention our traveling companions? Outside. Waiting in the microbus.”