The Water-Method Man

  Before they were even out of New York State, Colm found a joint-roller in Kent's filthy glove compartment and four old marijuana cigarettes. In a panic about being busted - in front of his boy! - Bogus asked Colm to empty the contents of the glove compartment into a litter bag, and the first moment they were alone on the road, Trumper threw the whole mess out of the window.

  Somewhere in Massachusetts Bogus realized that he'd thrown out all the registration papers for the car, and probably Kent's driver's license as well; all of the pot apparatus would be found with Kent's name and address. He decided to tell Kent that the glove compartment had been robbed.

  Trumper relaxed driving through New Hampshire. He took the longer shore road along the Maine coast to stretch out his last moments with Colm. He had some thoughts about Biggie, and about Couth, and about what Biggie might have told Colm about his father, or even about his father's girl. But they were not dark thoughts; they were sometimes sad thoughts, but they were kind. Biggie was not poisonous.

  'Do you like Maine?' he asked Colm.

  'Oh, sure.'

  'Even in the winter?' asked Trumper. 'What can you do near the ocean in the wintertime?'

  'Walk on the beach in the snow,' said Colm. 'And watch the storms. But we're going to put the boat back in the water when I get home ...'

  'Oh?' said Trumper. 'You and Mommy?' He was asking for it, he was leading purposefully.

  'No,' said Colm. 'Me and Couth. It's Couth's boat.'

  'You like Couth, don't you?'

  'I sure do.'

  'Did you have a nice time in New York?' Trumper begged.

  'I sure did.'

  'I like Couth and Mommy, too,' said Bogus.

  'So do I,' Colm said. 'And I like you,' he said, 'and ... what's the girl's name?'

  'Tulpen.'

  'Yup, Tulpen. I like her,' said Colm, 'and you, and Mommy and Couth.'

  Well, that wraps it up, Trumper thought. He didn't know what he felt.

  'Do you know Daniel Arbuthnot?' Colm asked.

  'No, I don't.'

  'Well, I don't like him so much.'

  'Who is he?'

  'He's a kid in my school,' Colm said. 'He's just a stupid kid.'

  At the Portland Airport, Biggie asked Trumper if he wanted to come to Georgetown; it was only another hour's drive and he could stay the night; Couth would like to see him. But Trumper felt that Biggie would really rather he didn't come, and he would rather not either.

  'Tell Couth I'm sorry, but I have to get back to New York,' he said. 'Ralph's all hot to trot with a new film.'

  Biggie looked at the ground. 'Who's the main character?' she asked, and when Bogus stared at her - a How Did You Know? stare - she said, 'Ralph's been up. He flew up one weekend and talked to me and Couth.' She shrugged. 'I don't mind, Bogus,' she said. 'But I can't understand why you would have anything to do with a film about ... about what?' she said angrily. 'That's what I'd like to know.'

  'You know Ralph, Big. I don't think he knows what the movie's about.'

  'Do you know he tried to sleep with me?' she asked. 'Again and again,' she said, working herself into a rage. 'Jesus, even when he came for the weekend, he even tried then, with Couth around and all.'

  Trumper just shuffled. 'That girl,' said Biggie, and Trumper looked up. 'Tulpen?' Biggie asked.

  'Right,' said Colm. 'Tulpen ...'

  They moved around to the other side of the car. Colm was absorbed in unwrapping the fishbowl, which was covered with tinfoil and tied with a ribbon.

  'What about her?' Trumper asked.

  'Well, Ralph says she's nice,' Biggie said. 'I mean, really nice.'

  'Yes, she really is.'

  'Well, he wants to sleep with her too,' Biggie said. 'You should know ...'

  Trumper wanted to tell Biggie that Ralph had already slept with Tulpen, and that he might still be sore that he couldn't any more, but that there really wasn't anything else to it, but he didn't say anything; he just looked as if he was going to try.

  'Bogus,' Biggie said. 'Please don't say you're sorry. Just this once, don't say something like that. You always say it.'

  'But I am sorry, Big.'

  'Don't be,' she told him. 'I'm very happy, and so is Colm.'

  He believed her, but why did it make him so angry?

  'Are you?' she asked.

  'What?'

  'Are you happy?'

  He guessed he was, sort of, but he evaded an answer. 'We had a nice time, Colm and I,' he told her. 'We went to the zoo and a puppet show ...'

  'And a museum!' said Colm. By now he had the fishbowl unwrapped and was holding it up to show Biggie. But the fish was floating on top of the water.

  'Oh, it's lovely,' Biggie said.

  'It's dead,' said Colm, but he didn't seem very surprised.

  'We'll get you another one,' Trumper said. 'You can come down again,' he added, not looking at Biggie. 'Would you like that?'

  'Sure.'

  'Or your father can come and see us,' Biggie said.

  'Sure, and I could bring a fish with me,' Bogus said.

  'There was a yellow one and a red one, too,' Colm told Biggie. 'And all kinds of turtles. Maybe a turtle wouldn't have died so easy.'

  A small plane took off nearby, and Colm watched it. 'I wish I could have taken the plane back,' he complained. 'It doesn't take so long on the plane, and maybe the fish wouldn't have died.'

  Fish-killer Trumper felt like saying, Maybe the great Couth can revive it. But he didn't really feel like saying that at all; in fact, he felt like a shit for even thinking it.

  20

  His Move

  He left his wife and kid in Iowa,

  and he bought a one-way ticket.

  --Ralph Packer, from the narration of Fucking Up

  HE STANDS ON the dark sidewalk, shielded from the streetlight by a shrub, and pays his respects to Biggie's lighted window, and to Mr Fitch, night watchman for his own and neighboring lawns. Fitch waves to him, and Bogus starts his tender-footed limp toward town, slow steps along the grassy strip between the sidewalk and the street; in the shadows between the lampposts he blunders into someone's pile of leaves.

  'Got to get up early to get those ducks!' shouts Mr Fitch, who is capable of believing anything.

  'Right!' calls Bogus, and bleeds downtown to Benny's where he finds Ralph Packer in a wallow of beer. Ralph, however, is sobered by Trumper's pained and spectacular appearance.

  Packer is sensible enough to intervene when Bogus starts an assault on a harmless fat student in a white Gandhi robe who wears the sign of the Tao and electrocuted hair. Bogus is telling him, 'If you say you love everyone, I'm going to disembowel you with a glass ashtray ...' He picks one up and adds, 'This glass ashtray.'

  Packer beerily ushers Bogus out onto Clinton Street and hobbles him along the curb to his racing bicycle. With the unfeeling stamina of the indestructibly drunk, Ralph pedals the two of them down to the river, across the bridge, and up the long, lung-killing hill to the university hospital. There Trumper is treated for festering foot wounds, chiefly punctures and lacerations, and is released.

  All day Sunday Trumper kept prone, reclining on Ralph's couch, his throbbing feet stacked on a pile of pillows. Feverish visions in Ralph's nasty two-room apartment: smelling Ralph's mongrel, whom Trumper called Retch, and the odor of hair oil which seeped upward through the floorboards from a Jefferson Street barber-shop below Ralph's rooms.

  Once the phone rang, on a table behind his head. After some groping Bogus managed to answer it, and a strange angry lady informed him that he could go fuck himself. He didn't recognize the voice, but whether it was his fever or a clear-headed conviction, he didn't for a moment believe that the call was intended for Ralph.

  By nightfall, Bogus had shaped several emotional impulses into what could vaguely be called a plan. Overturf, indulging his sense of drama, would have called it a scheme.

  Trumper struggled to remember the brief letter from his father which had been torn up and
hurled in tiny pieces to Risky Mouse:

  Son:

  I have had to think very seriously about everything, and I should at first say that I am most disapproving of the various ways you have conducted yourself, both in your personal life and in your career goals.

  It is strongly against my better judgment that I have concluded to make you a loan. Understand: this is not a gift. The enclosed check for $5,000 should be ample to put you on your feet again. I will not be so inhuman as to set a specific interest rate on this figure, or to set a specific due date for its return. Suffice it to say that I hope you will consider yourself responsible to me for this money, and that you will accept this responsibility with a gravity quite lacking in your past behavior.

  Dad

  Bogus was capable of remembering that he had not torn up the check and hurled it into the basement too.

  The next morning Trumper took slow, swollen steps to the bank. A day's transaction included the following: a deposit of five thousand dollars, which prompted the personal congratulations of Bank President Shumway; a twenty-minute wait in President Shumway's now-cordial office while the bank processed a new numbered checkbook for him (the old one was home with Biggie); a withdrawal of three hundred dollars in cash; and the theft of fourteen courtesy matchbooks from the little basket on the counter by the teller's window ('I intend to rob you,' he whispered to the startled teller, then grabbed the matches).

  Trumper limped to the post office and wrote out checks to the following:

  Humble Oil & Refining Co.

  Sinclair Refining Co.

  Iowa-Illinois Gas & Electric

  Krotz Plumbing

  Northwestern Bell Telephone Co.

  Milo Kubik (Peoples Market)

  Sears, Roebuck & Co.

  Office of Financial Aid, State University Of Iowa

  Lone Tree Co-operative Credit Union

  Shive & Hupp

  Addison & Halsey

  Cuthbert Bennett

  The Jefferson International Travel Agency

  Lacking was a check for the several thousand dollars owed National Defense Loans - government money for education, which he assumed must emanate from the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Instead, he sent HEW a note in which he declared himself 'unwilling and unable to pay this debt, on grounds of receiving an incomplete education'. Then he went to Benny's, drank fourteen draughts and played a lot of violent pinball until Benny called Packer to come take him away.

  At Ralph's, Bogus phoned a cable he wanted sent:

  Herr Merrill Overturf

  Schwindgasse 15/2 Vienna 4, Austria

  Merrill

  I am coming

  Boggle.

  'Who's Merrill?' said Ralph Packer. 'Who's Boggle?' Trumper hadn't heard a word from Overturf since the last time he'd been in Europe, with Biggie, more than four years before. If Ralph had known this, or known anything, for that matter, he might have tried to stop Trumper. Conversely, it later occurred to Bogus that Ralph might have some thoughts about Biggie being left alone.

  The next morning, Trumper had a phone call at Ralph's apartment from Lufthansa Airlines. They had botched his reservation to Vienna and had him booked on a flight from Chicago, to New York, to Frankfurt. For some unexplained reason, this would cost him less, even if he took a businessman's flight from Frankfurt to Vienna. Especially if I hitchhike from Frankfurt, Trumper thought.

  'Frankfurt?' said Ralph Packer. 'Jesus, what's in Frankfurt?'

  He told Ralph his 'plan', sort of.

  At four in the afternoon, Ralph phones Biggie and informs her that Bogus is 'besotted at Benny's and about to get into a losing fight'. Biggie hangs up.

  Ralph calls back. He suggests Biggie bring Colm and the car right away, and that together they can safely stow Bogus in the trunk.

  After Biggie hangs up again, Ralph encourages the three silent customers in Benny's to make a lot of background rumpus for the next attempt. That call rings unanswered for almost five minutes while Bogus, near to giving up hope, crouches behind a shrub on Mr Fitch's well-kept lawn. Finally he sees Biggie and Colm leave.

  Ralph stalls Biggie at Benny's door with grim tales of blood, beer, teeth, ambulances and policemen before Biggie suspects the hoax and walks boldly past Ralph into the bar. There is a drunk girl, all alone, playing pinball; there are two men in a booth by the door talking cheerfully. Biggie asks Benny if there's been a fight here.

  'Yes, about two months ago ...' Benny begins.

  When Biggie darts outside, she finds that Ralph Packer has moved the car somewhere, and is strolling down the sidewalk with Colm. Packer won't reveal where he's parked the car until she threatens to call the police.

  When she gets home Bogus has been and gone.

  He took his tape recorder and all the tapes; his passport; not his typewriter but all his thesis work on the translation of Akthelt and Gunnel. God knows why.

  He cleaned out the refrigerator, putting all the food in the basement for Risky Mouse. He destroyed the trap.

  By Colm's pillow he left a toy duck, with real feathers, made by Amish farmers. It cost $15.95, the most Trumper had ever spent for a toy.

  By Biggie's pillow he left the new checkbook, with a remaining balance of $1,612.47, and a large, French-uplift mauve bra. It was the right size too. In one of the big cups, he crumpled a handwritten note: Big, there was truly none finer.

  This is all Biggie discovers of his trip home. She can't know, of course, about his other accomplishment. If Mr Fitch ever cared to be nosy, he could describe for Biggie the sight of Bogus groping through the garbage cans outside his house and rescuing the abandoned duck, by now in an advanced state of decomposition. Fitch registered no surprise when Trumper wrapped up the duck in a plastic bag. Nor would Fitch ever describe Trumper's search for a sturdy box into which the bag containing the duck was crammed, along with a note reading, 'Dear Sir: Please count your change.'

  The package was mailed to Bogus's father.

  Watching Biggie's stormy return from behind Fitch's shrub, Bogus hung around just long enough to make sure that she didn't jump out any windows. At his see-through curtain with Mrs Fitch, watching Bogus behind the shrub, Fitch had enough good sense to recognize secrecy when he saw it and didn't come out on his porch to make any inappropriate remarks. Once Bogus turned and saw the old couple observing him. He waved; they waved back. Good old Fitch: he must have fussed for years with the Bureau of Statistics, but now he lets things ride. Excepting his lawn, the man knows how to retire.

  Later Bogus went to the library, to mull over his little-used alcove, not really expecting to find anything he'd want to take with him. Predictably, he didn't. His cubby-neighbor, M.E. Zanther, discovered him 'doodling on an otherwise blank page', he later reported. Zanther remembered this well, because when Trumper left the library, Zanther slunk into Trumper's alcove to read the doodles. Actually Bogus was hiding around the end of the row of cubbies. What Zanther saw was the crude beginnings of a poem about Harry Petz, a badly drawn obscene drawing, and, broadly printed with a Magic Marker across the surface of the desk blotter, HI, ZANTHER! ARE YOU RUNNING OUT OF THINGS TO READ?

  'One thing I've noticed,' said Dr Wolfram Holster, Trumper's thesis chairman, 'is that witless behavior can be a very calculated thing.' But that was much later; at the time, he was thoroughly bamboozled.

  Trumper called Dr Holster and begged for a ride to the nearest Iowa airport with the quickest connection to Chicago. This would have been Cedar Rapids, about three-quarters of an hour from Iowa City, and Dr Wolfram Holster was not in the habit of cultivating familiar relationships with his students. 'Is this an emergency?' he asked.

  'There's been a death in the family,' Trumper told him.

  They were almost at the airport, Trumper not speaking a word, when Holster asked, 'Your father?'

  'What?'

  'Your father,' Holster repeated. 'The death in the family ...'

  'My own,' said Trumper. 'I'm the death in the family ...
'

  Holster drove on, maintaining a polite pause. 'Where are you going?' he asked after a while.

  'I prefer to fall to pieces abroad,' Trumper answered. Holster remembered that line; it was from Trumper's translation of Akthelt and Gunnel. On the battlefield at Plock word comes to Akthelt that his wife, Gunnel, and his son, Axelrulf, have been foully molested and dismembered back home at the castle. Thak, Akthelt's father, suggests that they postpone their planned invasion of Finlandia. 'I prefer to fall to pieces abroad,' Akthelt tells his father.

  So Dr Holster suspected some melodramatics on the part of Trumper.

  Actually, what Holster didn't suspect was more interesting. The whole passage - the battlefield at Plock, the business about Gunnel and Axelrulf being foully molested and dismembered, and Akthelt's comment - was bunk. Trumper had lost track of the plot, needed more work to show Holster, and had invented all of it. Later, he had thought of a way to revive Axelrulf and Gunnel: it was a case of mistaken identity.

  So actually Trumper's line was original, after all.

  'I prefer to fall to pieces abroad.'

  Holster's reaction must have shaken Trumper up a bit.

  'Have a good time,' Dr Wolfram Holster told him.

  The Lufthansa flight for Frankfurt was less than half full at the take-off from Chicago. It picked up a few more passengers in New York, but it was still pretty empty. Even with all the seats available, a Lufthansa stewardess sat down beside Trumper. Perhaps I look like I'm going to throw up, he thought, and promptly felt sick.

  The stewardess's English wasn't very good, but Bogus didn't feel up to speaking German yet. He'd be speaking it soon enough.

  'Dis your furzt flighct?' the stewardess asked him in a sensuous guttural. Most people don't know what a lovely language German is, Trumper reflected.

  'I haven't flown in a long time,' he told the stewardess, wishing that his stomach wouldn't bank and circle with the plane.

  Over the Atlantic they leveled off, climbed, then leveled off again. When the lighted sign saying PLEASE FASTEN SEAT BELTS went off, the nice stewardess unfastened hers. 'Veil, here ve go,' she said.

  But before she could get up, Trumper tried to lunge past her into the aisle, forgetting that his own seat belt was still attached. He was jerked back against her, knocking her back to her seat. He vomited in her lap.