Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me Read online

  Sucking the barrel of a double twelve. Slugs or birdshot? “Thirty below when I got lost, man, can you imagine?”

  “No. By fire perhaps, but never by ice. I don’t need references for that one.” Blacknesse smiling the smile he had learned in India, setting a saucepan on his mauve hotplate for tea. Mauve, of course. No object so totally defined that it should elude decoration. One day, no doubt, the hotplate would shudder, shake off its stasis, stand up, stumble out the door, and flop into Maeander with a violent, sputtering sizzle.

  “I’ve got some cinnamon sticks, if you want.” Feeling around through the hodgepodge of contents in his rucksack, coming against the jar of pot seeds, “Oh hey, you don’t have a greenhouse, Calvin? I’ve got something to plant.”

  “David Grün has one, I think. Some kind of cactus?”

  “Just Mexican grass. How’s old David doing, anyway?”

  “Coming out with more disturbing music than you’ll remember. But potent and red-faced.”

  “He was always a pretty lyrical cat.” Pamela calling me that. Not altogether correct.

  “More atonal now.” Pouring the tea over the cinnamon sticks. “You’ll have to hear for yourself. He had his fortieth birthday last week, you know; a sixth daughter born when you were looking for Motherball.”

  “Sixth?”

  “Robin, they call her. A bird’s name like the other five.”

  And me a spiritual virgin. How many unborn children flushed in rubber balloons. Name them after insects, even if I had them: how do you do, like you to meet the twins, Locust and Centipede.

  Jesus, that eye in the hand. Wink at it. No don’t, it might wink back.

  They drove into the country, along frozen Harpy Creek. A faint gurgling under metallic ice. The painter’s black Saab, its two-cycle engine puttering with a hypnotic whine, Pappadopoulis slouched down in the seat, his eyes on the padded lining of the roof, remembering his quest in Taos, looking for the Connection who might tie all the loose ends of vicarious experience into a woven sign or pattern, some familiar rebus. A triangle, perhaps. A fish. The symbol for infinity.

  But now he sat with Blacknesse, whose slender dye-stained fingers were closed gently around the wheel. Their vision was focused arbitrarily on the rippling white hyphens that danced back under the car whenever they passed a melting stretch of road; both of them taking pleasure in this sensation of shifting surface, having to deal with different mediums, different textures in the same plane.

  “You were starting to tell me something. In the studio.”

  Gnossos collecting various thoughts, his attention having drifted to the sound of the tires. “New Mexico, man, I finally found him, right where every hophead in the country figured he’d be. But no sun god or anything, just tacos and shakes. It’s enough to bring you down.”

  “We figured.”

  “We?”

  “Beth and myself.”

  A lazy sigh, a sound of marrow-bone weariness, hoarded, stored for precisely this moment. “If I’d been into the Middle Ages, man, you know I would’ve gone looking for the grail or whatever it was got them hung up. And so would you, so don’t come on cocky. Everybody’s got his little search and yours happens to be internal, but I’m just not cut out for meditation, right? Don’t have the time, for one thing; this is a nervous little decade we’re playing with.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Exactly nothing. And come to think of it, you were among the first people to mention the cat, apart from Aquavitus.”

  “My error, and I apologize. I’d heard he was a mushroom-warlock from Mexico, not part of some narcotics syndicate. You were looking for visionary enlightenment, if I recall, not just a chance to get high.”

  “Well, you take what comes along. Maybe next time I’ll cross the border and avoid hangups. Let me tell you, man, you can’t move in this country without catching your heel in a hangup. Mousetails in your root beer, grubs in your Hershey bar, always some kind of worm in the image, munching away.” Shifting his glance to a drop of water that had worked its way through the sealed glass and begun breaking apart from the vibration of the frame. “Even the desert. Maybe I’m naïve or something, but I did expect a little dune here and there, something besides the Arapaho Motor Inn, ninety-two units, all Polar Bear Cool. And the lights! Pink, chartreuse, Congo ruby, magenta, baby blue, you’ve got to pack a mule to get away from the glare, man, believe me. Even the sand is full of hump-trash. The only thing you get to know about is hot wind and dry, see, you really get involved with dry.” The broken drops on the windshield lurched together, formed a single stream, and ran back up into a shivering ball. “Old Pluto’s got his dirty claws in the landscape, all right. Try to groove behind the daytime cosmos and you get a faceful of whipped cream and Betty Crocker pastry. They could hit you with a lightning bolt but that wouldn’t be comic enough. I mean, somebody’d have to send the little pile of ash and hair back to your mother and who’d get the joke?” He crossed his fingers to guard against any possible hex.

  “I was ready to throw in the towel when I tried taos, let me tell you. It just didn’t seem the likely place to find him, little town full of getups, serapes, silver talismans, jade rings, all like that. But sure enough, this Indian comes out of the shadows, wrapped up in a flannel blanket, everything hidden, even his face, nothing showing but the eyes. And stitched across the back of the blanket, Calvin, one word. One word, right?”

  “Motherball.”

  “What else? That’s how he reaches people. Sends out his boys with these blankets, you follow one and there you are. If you’re fuzz they probably nail you, they all look like assassins out of Four Feathers, thuggees with piano wire; but they’ve got some way of knowing how to pick out the junkie types. He took me to a bar with a rainspout over the door, kind of adobe place, in an alley. I remember the spout because there was never any rain. And Louie Motherball, sure enough, waiting inside, just like that.” Gnossos drawing an M on the moisture of the windshield. “Just standing there behind the bar, wiping glasses. Sydney Greenstreet. Fat, hairless, fuchsia suspenders, no shirt, sweat lines all over his belly—like a hogshead, no fooling—and chewing sen-sen. Some starving Pueblo chic sitting next to him, his wife I think, wearing a maroon dress, drinking out of a gallon bowl through a surgical tube. You should have seen them, man, the whole thing was very gross. You know what he said? I wasn’t in the door a full minute and he said, ‘You’re of course familiar with the works of Edward Arlington Robinson.’ Talk about the Mushroom Man, baby, I really thought I’d found him. Lord Buckley out doing the Gauguin or something, ready to straighten my head once and for all, right? But what he was doing the whole time was mixing up this juice he calls Summer Snow. White Bacardi from Cuba, shredded coconut, crushed ice, milk, orange sherbet, the whole thing whipped up in a Waring blender. Then he serves it in chilled bowls, and wipes the rims with cactus heart. He chops peyote buds into the froth with chocolate jimmies.” Gnossos erased the M. “So I stuck it out, you know what I mean, two, maybe three weeks, just lying around digging these recitations he gives, talking to lightbulbs, and like that. Man, he had it all down, line after line of that Mickey Mouse verse, coming on like the March of Time, and all the time his old lady so wiped out of her skull she couldn’t hobble as far as the head without getting hung up by the candles on the way and forgetting what she wanted. And no food, either. Just Summer Snow and Motherball’s voice day and night, whenever he wasn’t busy whipping up new juice. ‘Bout every four hours or so, these shifts of Indians fell by in flannel blankets and lushed it around a little. It really got euphoric, man. A couple of them would start out by giggling when the session was halfway through and finally the whole place would go to pieces, everybody rolling into weak-fits. Edward Arlington Robinson, man, you’d have to hear it to believe it. And every year he picks someone else. Year before, it was John Greenleaf Whittier or James Whitcomb Riley. His plan, the way he laid it out, was to do a cyclical rendering, starting around the Wife of Bath and ending u
p at Pooh Corner. What I didn’t know until the end, of course, was how he was taking the Indians. Lock, stock and barrel, man, life savings, government checks, silver mines, jade stashes, everything for a suck at the surgical tube-thing.”

  “But he never showed you the sun god.”

  “He got busted. I went back one evening with supplies, and everything was gone. Windows boarded up, no trace of them. Just some old cactus hearts, fertilized egg shells. Some kind of rumor that he did in his old lady too, torture chamber in the cellar or something, pliers and acid, fishhooks. Oh yeah, and the rainspout, it was spilling out a regular torrent of water. Eerie.”

  Blacknesse relaxing the weight of his accelerator foot, giving the pause its proper measure, both of them again momentarily listening to the sound of the tires on the road.

  “Any connection with the pachucos? Your epistle was unclear.”

  “No connection with Motherball, really, it’s just that I hung out in this boy scout camp after the bust. Seemed like the last place they’d look for cohorts. And actually it was the only part of the desert without old Kleenex and beercans. There was also the chance the scouts might have been into something, merit badges for enlightening the troops and so on, but mainly it was just groovy cover. Or until the pachucos moved in, anyway.” This time he drew a P on the windshield. “They came in Packards, two of them, they dig big white cars; twelve, maybe thirteen chucs in all. Hybrid physiognomy, weird little pig-eyes, colliding bloods, none over five-three, top-heavy with hair, tattooed rebus behind their thumbs, three little dots. A feeling of evil, you know, sublimated.”

  Gnossos pausing, shifting his weight, looking now at nothing in particular, his senses afflicted only by the lower whine of the engine as it droned behind his tale.

  “Who can say where they’re really at, Calvin? They came into the camp lushed, but nasty lush: ethyl alcohol cut with Gallo sauterne and tequila, some shit like that, coming on like the sleeping bags weren’t there, you know? Just paring fingernails with stilettos. Oh yeah, and moving in time to the music, keeping rhythm while they walked. The radios in the Packards were turned up all the way, both on the same station, a Buddy Holly side. Peggy Sue, I think. Then all of them standing around this one particular boy scout, blond, the one with the most garbage on him, merit badges, patrol-leader bars. They didn’t look at him, they just stood there all the way through the song. And three of them, no two maybe, came over to my roll and said something like ‘You stay put, mother, or we cut an ear.”’

  “Just you.”

  “Just me, all alone, individual, right there. They said it and went back to the circle around this scout. Who was of course building a fire with sticks. And when the music was right, they stripped him down, the patrol-leader one, right down to the pubes, man, they peeled him. Oh, and was he shitless with fright, whimpering, making little sounds. They staked him to the ground, see, with tent pegs, then burned him all over with butts. Even his thing.”

  Blacknesse closing his eyes briefly but not shifting his expression. Gnossos failing to notice: “And all that Peggy Sue heat on the radios. The one who did most of the actual burning, he kept on saying soothing things. The way chics speak to puppies, you know? Telling him how everything was all right, how he was a sweet kid, even stroking his forehead while he put out the last butt in his ear.”

  “Jesus, Gnossos.”

  “He threw up finally. Almost choked on it.” Pappadopoulis lying, adding a little relish. Keep the story straight and you’ll get involved. Blacknesse grunting, about to say something, looking around to check Gnossos’ expression, then easing off the main road in the direction of his house. The rain was clattering heavily on the hood of the car, and in the rapidly falling darkness the green blinker light on the dashboard changed the color of their complexions. It seemed to flash them in and out of a bonus, middle-frequency dimension.

  Gnossos turned to watch the familiar rises and shapes of the countryside through the side window, then pulled a strand of hair down to touch his nose, staring at it crosseyed for a moment before glancing back out the window. “I blew it after that. I mean, I really packed it up. You go looking for something simple and the whole cancer of your country gets in and infects it. You know, I couldn’t even manage a goddamned sunset without a little competiton from the Firebird Motel sign. Which, relatively speaking, was bigger to begin with and stayed lit one hell of a lot longer.”

  “You tried at least.”

  “Bet your sweet ass I tried, but I got busted anyway. For vagrancy, of all the idiot raps. Fuzz, man, they want to bust you, they bust you, doesn’t matter what the charge, that’s the whole fuzz syndrome right there. Smug, repressive bastards, they followed me out of town, just creeping along behind me, keeping their cruiser in first, trying to get me to look around. What did it, naturally, was my smiling at the goddamned sign. If you smile or laugh, you’re automatically laughing at the cop in question, supposedly putting down his baggy pants or his missing buttons. So right before I get to the town-limit sign they pull around in front of me and say, ‘How much money you got, boy?’ I looked at him, you know what I mean? I put down my roll and leaned on the sign and looked him right in the nose.” Gnossos making a sound as if he were vomiting, “Bloooouaughh!”

  “Go on.”

  “Shit, man, I didn’t dig them playing with me. I just climbed in the cruiser and told them to hang me. It killed them. They hated me. If I were darker they would have ruptured one of my kidneys or something. If I were Heffalump they would have broken ribs. As it was, one of the pachucos pulled him in about three in the morning and they wiped him around with belt buckles out of sheer frustration. But he kept his cool, let me tell you, in some bitter, insidious way. Even though he cried a little, he never lost that cool they have. So I just crept right back into my Immunity thing, no valence, no nothing. Old inertness is where it’s at. You’re not about to join that kind of shit.”

  “And fighting it?”

  Gnossos became conscious of toying with his hair and shoved it back. “Not Greek enough, man. Too Coptic.” The leak in the window had begun again and the drops were beading up heavily, falling regularly onto his pants. “They just put me out of town in the morning; the sheriff doing a John Wayne, thumbs looped in his belt, telling me to move west. Anyway, I came back in across the desert in the afternoon, when the sun was good and hot, I mean, all the fuzz asleep, and figured I’d check out the pueblo, see what the Indians were into, now that Motherball had gone. But no pueblo, man. Nothing but this ridiculous Victorian mansion perched right up there with the sage. Painted vermilion. Dead magpies hung from wire loops in all the rooms, red velour furniture, Kerman rugs, stuffed Algerian ottomans, portraits of Boer War types. And an odor, let me tell you, couldn’t have been anything but death. I dug it all through the windows, by the way; I really wasn’t about to wander in. I’d expected something a little more celestial.”

  “Not demonic?”

  Perceptive bastard. “I don’t know, maybe. There was a name washed over on the mailbox, something like Mo-go, but I couldn’t make it out. I had a dream that night too, after some chic from Radcliffe, kind of a muse, picked me up on her way to Vegas. The pachuco I was telling you about, his tears were turning into feathers, sticking to his cheeks. Something to do with his mother tearing him away from breast feeding ’cause there were too many others on line. Then the nipple turned into a piece of surgical tubing and she hung the kid on a hook in the Victorian house.”

  “Were you in the dream?”

  “On the line, man, last one. Where else?”

  They turned into the leafy drive of Calvin’s somber clapboard house. Each heavy, hedgelike shape on either side of the entrance surrendering a vestige of anonymity as the rain weakened the great bulks of snow. Here and there, huge lacquered masks leered out of the trees, dangling from the branches where they’d been hung. After the first thaw, the decorated stumps in his swamp would appear, their hollows stained mauve and violet. On the porch in back, above t
he path of flagstones that were arranged and painted in the fractured image of a tiger, were Calvin’s wife and daughter, waiting in saris. Half a dozen cats with bangles twisting and purring around their legs.

  Just before opening the car door to greet them, Gnossos felt a restraining touch on his arm. Blacknesse’s lips fixed in the suspicion of a smile again, his dark features blended in an expression of intensity and affection.

  “Listen, Gnossos, you needn’t try this tonight.” A pause. “You understand me?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “I mean, there might be better times, yes?”

  “Come on, man.”

  “If you want to talk instead”—hesitating—“to tell some more . . . ”

  “Hey really, you know my manic thing with boo. If I start seeing spiders, you can always slip me a little niacin.” This last word, with its easy intimation of goodness and health, spoken as he was stepping free of the Saab, already preoccupied with the people on the porch. Old friends, look a little changed.

  Beth came forward, Middle Atlantic States heritage all but vanished in the Eastern bearing of her grace. She plucked a fold of the sari away from her thigh and said:

  “Gnossos,” extending a jeweled hand from the yellow silk, her eyes flashing. “How grand to have you back.”

  “’Lo, Beth . . . Kim.”

  The young girl blushing, her color changing through a softer echo of her father’s darkness, brooding hands locked behind. Eleven now, perhaps twelve. See the excitement in her.

  “We have curry for supper,” she whispered quickly, “an’ Mommy’s rice cakes.”

  “Hey, no kidding,” touching the tip of her nose with a finger.

  “Go on in, Gnossos,” from Calvin, behind him, his feet banging off loose snow on the porch. “It’s in the living room, if you’re rushed.”

  Who me? Talk to the ladies. “Come on, you guys, you’ll catch cold in those nightshirts.”