The Broom of the System

  /g/

  There was simply no getting around the fact that Stonecipher LaVache Beadsman looked satanic. His skin was a dark, glossy red, his hair an oily black and swept back without care over a deep widow’s peak, his eyebrows Brezhnevian in thickness and starting up high off to the side to slant down evilly over his eyes, his head small and smooth and oval and not too securely attached to his neck and tending to flop, like the head of a shoe tree. An OBERLIN sweatshirt and corduroy shorts and a hurricane of hair on his foot, beside his black hightops. A clipboard with a pen hanging by a string was attached to his leg as he sat in an easy chair, watching television, his profile to Lenore, at the door. On television was “The Bob Newhart Show.” In the big social room with LaVache were three boys who all seemed to look precisely alike, although Lenore wasn’t completely sure about this, because the heavy window curtains were drawn against the afternoon sun and the room was dim. The room smelled of, in descending order, pot, Mennen Speed Stick, hot alcohol, feet. The three identical guys all sat sockless beside tumbled empty pairs of those shoes.

  “Lenore, this is Cat, this is Heat, this is the Breather,” LaVache said from his chair in front of the television. “My sister Lenore, guys.”

  “Hi,” said Cat.

  “Hello,” said Heat.

  “Hi,” said the Breather.

  Heat and the Breather were on a spring-sprung sofa, sharing what was obviously a joint. Cat was on the floor, sitting, a bottle of vodka before him, and he clutched it with his bare toes, staring anxiously at the television screen.

  “Hi Bob,” Suzanne Pleshette said to Bob Newhart on the screen.

  “Merde du temps,” Cat said. He took a swig from the bottle.

  LaVache looked up from his clipboard at Lenore. “We’re playing Hi Bob. You want to play Hi Bob with us?” He spoke sort of slowly.

  Lenore made a place to sit on the luggage. “What’s Hi Bob?”

  The Breather grinned at her from the sofa, where he now held the bottle of vodka. “Hi Bob is where, when somebody on ‘The Bob Newhart Show’ says ’Hi Bob,‘ you have to take a drink.”

  “And but if Bill Dailey says, ‘Hi Bob,” said Cat, tending to the joint with a wet finger, “that is to say, if the character Howard Borden on the show says ’Hi Bob,‘ it’s death, you have to chug the whole bottle.”

  “Hi Bob,” said Bill Dailey, on the screen.

  “Death!” yelled Cat.

  The Breather drained the bottle of vodka without hesitation. “Lucky it was almost empty,” he said.

  “Guess I’ll probably pass,” said Lenore. “You’re out of vodka, anyway.”

  “The duration of a game of Hi Bob is according to the rules determined by the show, not the vodka,” the Breather said, getting another bottle of vodka from a rack behind the sofa and breaking the seal. The liquor-rack was a glitter of glass and labels in the sun through a gap in the curtains. “The serious Hi Bob player makes it his business never to run out of vodka.”

  LaVache drummed idly on his leg with his pen. “Vodka gives Lenore lung-troubles, anyway, as I recall.” He looked at Lenore. “Lenore, baby, sweetheart, how are you? What are you doing here?”

  The Breather leaned close to Lenore and told her in a hot sweet whisper, “It’s a Quaalude day, so we all have to be accommodating.”

  Lenore looked at LaVache’s lolling head. “Didn’t you get my message? I left this detailed message about how I was coming today. I left it with one of your neighbors, next door, a guy from New Jersey. The college operator connected me to him.”

  “Wood, yes,” LaVache said. “He’s actually coming by real soon. He and the leg have an appointment. Yes, I got the message, but why didn’t you just call me?”

  “You told Dad you didn’t have a phone, Dad told me.”

  “I don’t have a phone. This isn’t a phone, this is a lymph node,” LaVache said, gesturing at a phone next to the television. “I call this a lymph node, not a phone. So when Dad asks me do I have a phone, I can in all good conscience say no. I do, however, have a lymph node.”

  “You’re horrible,” said Lenore.

  “Hi Bob,” said someone on the screen.

  “Zango,” said LaVache, and took a big drink.

  “Dead bird, here, A.C.,” Heat said to LaVache.

  LaVache detached the clipboard and slid out a drawer in the plastic of his artificial leg and tossed a white new joint to Heat.

  “You have a drawer?” said Lenore.

  “I’ve had a drawer since high school,” said LaVache. “ I just wear long pants, at home, as a rule. Come on, you knew I had a drawer all the time.”

  “No I didn‘t,” said Lenore.

  “Crafty girl.”

  There was a knock at the outside door.

  “Entrez!” Cat yelled.

  In came a tall thin guy with glasses and an adam’s apple and a notebook and a baggie.

  “Clint Wood,” Heat said from over the bottle, which he was blowing into like a jug, sounding a deep note.

  “Guys,” said Clint Wood. “Antichrist.”

  “What can we do for you, big guy?” LaVache said, slapping the leg affectionately.

  “Introductory Economics. Second quiz. Bonds.”

  “Feed the leg,” said LaVache.

  LaVache opened the drawer in his leg and Clint Wood put the baggie inside. LaVache slapped the drawer shut and patted it. “Professor?”

  “Fursich.”

  “All you need to remember for Fursich is, when the interest rate goes up, the price of any bond already issued goes down.”

  “Interest rate ... up, price ... bond ... down.” Clint Wood wrote it down.

  “And when the rate goes down, the price goes up.”

  “Down ... up.” Clint Wood looked up. “That’s it?”

  “Trust me,” said LaVache.

  “What a guy,” said the Breather. “A little Hi Bob, Wood?”

  Clint Wood shook his head regretfully. “Can’t. I got class in like ten minutes. I gotta go memorize what the Antichrist told me.” He looked over at Lenore and smiled.

  “Well, hey, good luck,” Cat said.

  “Thank you very much for taking my message, if you were the person who took my message,” said Lenore.

  “Oh, OK, you’re the Antichrist’s sister,” said Clint Wood, sizing Lenore up. “Can’t do enough for the Antichrist, no problem. Thanks again, guys.” He left.

  “Hi Bob.”

  “Oomph. ”

  “This is a deadly one. There’ve been like twenty ‘Hi Bobs’ in this one.”

  “What’s the leg got there?”

  “Looks to be three j-birds. Poorly rolled.”

  “None of you guys have classes?” Lenore asked. Ed McMahon came on the television.

  “I have classes,” LaVache said. “I know I do, because it says on my schedule I do.” He cleaned under his fingernail with the corner of his clipboard clasp.

  “He’s going to go to a class this semester, he told me,” Heat said to Lenore, doing a handstand in the middle of the floor, so that his shirt fell over his face. “He’s determined to go to at least one class.”

  “Well I’m disabled,” LaVache said. “They can’t expect a disabled person to hobble to every faraway, top-of-the-hill class of the semester.”

  Lenore looked at LaVache. “You don’t work, here, do you?”

  LaVache smiled at her. “That was just work, what I did. I do lots of work.”

  “He literally does the work of like forty or fifty guys, and even more girls,” said Heat. “He does all our work, the big lug.”

  “What about your own work?” Lenore said to LaVache.

  “What can I tell you? I’ve got a leg to support, after all.”

  “Dad thinks you work.”

  “Surely you of all people didn’t come all the way out here after seeing me only a few weeks ago to tell me what Dad thinks. Or to find out what I think and do and then scuttle back to Dad.”

  “Not exactly,” Len
ore said, shifting because her suitcase handle was digging into her bottom. “There’s stuff we need to talk about, that’s sort of come up.” She looked around at Cat, Heat, and the Breather.

  “Well goody. Stuff.” LaVache looked back at the television. “We have a game of Hi Bob to finish, and then there’s an episode of ‘The Munsters’ on Channel 22 I particularly want to see, and then we can go conversationally wild.”

  “He’ll be asleep by then, though, I predict,” the Breather whispered into Lenore’s ear as his elbow brushed her chest.

  “Hi Bob,” said Bill Dailey, the character Howard Borden, on the screen.

  “Death, big time,” said LaVache, looking at Cat and the nearly full bottle of vodka on the floor in front of him. “See you tomorrow, Cat.”

  “A l‘enfer, ” Cat muttered. He began sucking on the bottle. He had to stop almost immediately.

  “You’ve got five minutes to finish that,” LaVache said to Cat.

  “He’s going to be really sick,” said Lenore.

  “We don’t get sick here anymore,” said LaVache. “This Amherst guy, this legendary guy a few years back started this tradition where, instead of getting sick, we pound our heads against the wall.”

  “You pound your heads?”

  “Really hard.”

  “I see.”

  The phone rang. “Breather, you want to get the lymph node?” LaVache said, returning to writing on his clipboard. The Breather stepped over Cat, who was crawling on the gray carpet, and got the phone. The Antichrist was writing something.

  “Antichrist, it’s Snadgener,” the Breather said after a bit, putting his hand over the phone. “Evolution as Cultural Phenomenon Paper Number One. Were Darwin’s critics right about the theory of natural selection being deeply dangerous to Christianity.”

  “Tell Snadge the leg is wondering what he has for it,” said LaVache.

  “Mushrooms, he says.”

  “Professor?”

  “Summerville.”

  “Tell Snadge the interesting answer for Summerville is yes,” LaVache said. The Breather whispered into the phone. LaVache continued, “After the Origin, the Bible has to retreat, he thinks. The Bible ceases to be a historical record of actual events and instead becomes a piece of moral fiction, useful only as a guide for making decisions about how to live. No longer purporting to tell what was and is, but only what ought to be.” LaVache opened his eyes. “Summerville’ll lap it up.”

  The Breather talked into the phone. Cat had a third of the bottle to go and was green and moist. Heat sat cross-legged with the joint on the sofa.

  “Snadge says it sounds kick-ass,” the Breather said. “Snadge says thanks, Antichrist.”

  “Tell Snadge the leg and I look forward to seeing him and his fungal fee sometime tonight,” said LaVache.

  Lenore leaned as far as she could over toward LaVache. “Antichrist?” she said.

  “What can I tell you?” said the Antichrist. “We can’t deny I look satanic. Heat, you want to clear a space on the wall for Cat?”

  Heat got up slowly and began to move posters.

  “Mother,” moaned Cat.

  “The really sadistic aspect of this game,” the Breather whispered to Lenore, leaning over her so she had to lean way back and almost fell off her suitcase, “is that if someone else on the show says ‘Hi Bob’ before Cat has discharged his vodka-responsibility, Cat has to drink a whole ’nother bottle in another five minutes.”

  “Does Cat know that?” Lenore asked, looking at Cat. Cat sat slumped on the floor, the back of his head resting and intermittently pounding weakly on the wall behind him, the bottle of vodka in his lap and a thin rope of spittle joining his lip and the lip of the bottle.

  “I think at this point Cat knows what’s up in a sort of ganglial sense,” the Antichrist said, “although he’d have a hard time actually articulating the rule if you asked him to.”

  “Mommy,” Cat squeaked faintly.

  “You can do it, you great big enormous guy,” the Breather said, massaging Cat’s shoulders.

  Ed McMahon came on the television screen. “Sell it, Ed!” yelled the Antichrist.

  Heat put aside the corpse of the joint and sipped thoughtfully at a beer. He turned dense red eyes and looked at Lenore for so long that Lenore felt uncomfortable. Heat then looked at LaVache, who ignored him. Then back at Lenore. “Hey Antichrist,” he said. “You care if I ask your sister a question?”

  “Be my guest,” the Antichrist said, alternately watching the screen and Cat’s attempts to finish the bottle, attempts that were at this point pretty pathetic, because there was just a little bit of vodka left, and Cat kept trying to get it in his mouth, but it kept somehow bouncing off, or at any rate not staying in, and sliding back inside the bottle and down the outside and onto the rug and his shirt.

  Heat looked at Lenore as the Breather massaged his shoulders, now, from behind. “Lenore, how did the Antichrist lose his leg?”

  “Well, now, hey, that’s not fair, because it’s not a question, because I’ve already answered it,” the Antichrist said. Lenore looked at him. His head rested on his shoulder. “I’ve already told you it was a dancing accident. I had such an unreasonably happy childhood that I simply danced, all the time, for joy, and one day the dancing just got to be too much, and I had an accident. Quod est demon stratum.”

  Lenore laughed.

  “Is that true?” Heat said to Lenore. “Are you going to back him up?”

  “By all means,” Lenore said, not looking at LaVache, who was not looking at her.

  LaVache turned to Heat. “And don’t you know disability etiquette? You don’t discuss a disability in the presence of a disabled person unless the disabled person brings up the disability. For all you know I could be reeling, from hurt, on the inside. How’d you like to do your own Calculus homework for a while?”

  “Antichrist,” Heat said with an easy grin, “I hereby tender a sincere apology for my gaucheness, and also take the opportunity to point out that another joint seems to have expired, here.”

  “Harumph,” the Antichrist said, sliding open his drawer. “Clint Wood and bonds to the rescue.”

  “Five minutes is up, Antichrist,” said the Breather.

  Cat’s chin was resting on his chest. One of his arms was incongruously outstretched, with a finger pointing at the stairs leading up to the social room’s bathroom.

  “Has he done it?” asked LaVache.

  The Breather held up the bottle. “The merest smidgeon left.”

  “More than a smidgeon on his shirt, though, I see,” Heat said, lifting up Cat’s head to have a look at the dark field of vodka-soaked shirt on his chest.

  The Antichrist rubbed the leg thoughtfully. “I say if Cat consents to suck on his shirt for the rest of the show, which is about five more minutes, he’ll have acquitted himself in his usual thoroughly admirable way.”

  “Congratulations, big kitty,” the Breather said softly, tucking part of Cat’s shirt in Cat’s mouth, caressing a cheek under fluttering eyelids. “Still the undisputed prince of Hi Bob.”

  “Did you come alone?” LaVache asked Lenore. “Did you come by plane, or by toy?”

  “I came via the Company jet,” said Lenore.

  The Antichrist’s eyebrows went up, so it looked like he had more hair.

  Lenore continued, “I came with a friend, who’s also sort of my boss at Frequent and Vigorous.”

  “Mr. Vigorous.” The Antichrist nodded his head. “The one Candy told me about.”

  “What did Candy tell you, when?” asked Lenore.

  The Antichrist looked away, drew a smile-face on the plastic of his leg with his pen, wiped it away with a moist finger. “That your boss was also your friend, so you were lucky. In July. Please don’t have a spasm; I sense Cat really not feeling well at all.”

  “Is Candy the Mandible babe you blasted?” Heat asked the Antichrist with a grin.

  Lenore looked at her brother with wide eyes. “Yo
u and Candy? Blasting?”

  LaVache turned slowly and rested absolutely icy eyes on Heat. Heat’s clothes seemed suddenly to get roomier, as if he’d developed a slow leak. “Sorry,” he muttered. He closed his eyes.

  The Antichrist looked at Lenore. “Heat knows not whereof he speaks, as I will no doubt be explaining at considerable length later. Heat, don’t you have some math you better do?”

  “Shit,” Heat whispered. He sucked on the Antichrist’s joint.

  Lenore stood up. “May I please ask a favor?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sure it’s an imposition, but Rick and I don’t get to check in at the motel till five, and it’s been a really long day, and also sort of a dirty one, what with travel....”

  “I understand entirely,” the Antichrist said soothingly. The “Bob Newhart Show” credits came on. The Breather went to the television and changed the channel. LaVache beamed at Lenore. “There is a clean, neatly folded towel for you in the bathroom, a bathroom which you’ll be happy to know you can secure for a brief period with the hanger on the door, although in a crisis Cat may find himself forced to impose, and there is on the towel, for your personal use, a crisp new bar of soap.”

  “What, is she going to take a shower?” the Breather asked from the television, where he was twidgeling the vertical-hold controls.

  “If it’s OK,” said Lenore.

  “Hubba-hubba,” said the Breather.

  “Steady, big guy,” said the Antichrist. “Lenore’s traveling companion is, I understand, fanatically jealous.”

  Lenore looked at her brother.

  “Where is this Mr. Vigorous, anyway,” LaVache asked quietly, looking back down at the leg.

  The phone rang. The Breather reached over and picked it up. “It’s Nervous Roy Keller for you, A.C.,” he said to LaVache.