BOGUS (Yelling, his face distorted): Would you fuck off, Ralph!
24
How Far Can You Get with an Arrow in Your Tit?
IT WARMED HIS heart to find Overturf still listed in the phone book at the same address, with the same number. But when he tried to call from the lobby of the Taschy, there was a strange whirring cry over the phone, some sort of signal. He asked Frau Taschy, who informed him that the noise meant that the number was no longer in service. Then he realized that the phone book was more than five years old, and that his own name was listed in it - at the same address, with the same number.
Trumper walked to Schwindgasse 15, apartment 2. A brass nameplate on the door said: A. PLOT.
Rather like Merrill, Bogus thought. Beating on the door, he heard scuffles, perhaps a growl. He pushed and the door opened, but only so far as the ball-and-chain device would let it. It was fortunate that it didn't open further, because the large German shepherd inside the apartment was only able to get the tip of his snarling muzzle in the crack of the door. Trumper jumped back unbitten, and a woman - blond, her hair in curlers, her eyes angry or frightened or both - asked him what in hell he meant by trying to sneak into her apartment.
'Merrill Overturf?' he said to her, standing well back on the landing in case she let her German shepherd out.
'You're not Merrill Overturf,' she told him.
'No, of course I'm not,' he said, but she closed the door. 'Wait!' he cried after her. 'I just wanted to know where he was ...' But he heard her voice speaking low, presumably on the phone, and left quickly.
Out on the Schwindgasse, he looked up at what had once been Overturf s famous window box. Merrill had grown pot in it. But now the window box contained only some purplish dead plants poking out through a dusting of snow.
A child wheeled her tricycle up to the lobby door and got off to open it. Bogus helped her.
'Does Merrill Overturf live in this building?' he asked her. She either caught his accent or had been told never to speak to strangers, because she looked at him as if she had no intention of answering.
'Where do you think Herr Overturf went?' he asked her gently, helping her get her trike inside. But the little girl just stared at him. 'Herr Overturf?' he said to her slowly. 'Do you remember? He had a funny car, he wore funny hats ...' The little girl didn't appear to know anything. Upstairs the big dog barked. 'What happened to Herr Overturf?' Bogus tried once more.
The little girl was edging her tricycle away from him. 'Dead?' she asked him; it was a guess, he felt sure. Then she ran away, streaking toward the stairs, leaving him with a chill equaled only by the one he felt when he heard a door open above, heard the woman with the hair curlers yelling at the child, heard the clatter of what had to be the big dog's toenails coming downstairs.
Trumper fled. The little girl didn't know anything anyway; that was clear. With some astonishment, he realized that the father of the child must be named A. Plot.
With a bag of sidewalk-roasted chestnuts, Bogus slouches in the general direction of the Michaelerplatz, where there's a grotesque statue he remembers. A Zeus-like giant of a man, or a god, is struggling with sea monsters, snakes, birds of prey, lions and young nymphets; they are dragging him down to the main spigot of a fountain that splashes his chest; his mouth gapes in strain - or perhaps he is thirsty. The whole work is so overwrought that it's hard to tell whether Zeus is in control, or whether the creatures draped around him are wrestling him down or trying to lift him up.
Bogus recalls weaving through the Michaelerplatz one night, drunk with Biggie. They had just swiped some huge white radishes as long as carrots off a horsecart. Passing by this monstrous eternal struggle in the fountain, Bogus boosted Biggie up and she placed a radish in the gaping god's mouth. For energy, she said.
Thinking he'll feed the wrestler a chestnut, Trumper is surprised to find the fountain shut off. Or the spigot has frozen; it spouts a thick, blunt phallus, a rigid, wax-gobbed candle, and the Zeus figure's chest is layered with ice. Somehow, though the pose is the same, the struggle appears to be over. He's dead, thinks Bogus, and there's no point in feeding chestnuts to the dead. He regrets the demise of the god, finally conquered by the snakes and sea monsters, lions and nymphets. Trumper knows: It was the nymphets who finally got to him.
Surely Biggie would be miserable to hear the news. Surely she is miserable.
Biggie, it may be hard for you to believe this, but ... when you go duck hunting, you wear a condom. It's an old sportsman's trick against the cold. You see, all the duck hunters slip on a condom before they go retrieving fallen birds from icy waters - when they don't have dogs, which we didn't. It works on the same principle as a wet-suit ...
Or - wandering now through the Habsburgs' courtyard, the Plaza of Heroes - the reason I was wearing that unmentionable rubber, which I neglected to remove, was because of my new part-time job as a demonstration model for the Student Health Service's class for freshmen in Sex Education. I was too embarrassed to tell you about it. They hadn't told me there would be a session on contraception. 0f course the class was surprised.
But Bogus feels the cold eyes of the stony cupids on him; passing under these Baroque cherubs and the pigeons perched on the formidable palace buildings, he knows that Biggie is no sucker. She is already too familiar with the improbability of me.
He watches the Strassenbahnen tilting along the Burg Ring, their sharp bells gonging at the intersections. Inside, the streetcar passengers steam and smear the windows, and the men look like overcoats hung on a clothes rack with people in them. They jostle and sway with every lurch of the tram; their hands on the overhead rails are above the windows, and Bogus can see only that their arms are raised, like children in school, like soldiers at a rally.
Wanting to kill the afternoon, Trumper reads his way around a tattered kiosk. The afternoon, he feels, would die most painlessly at some Sunday matinee for kids, and miraculously he finds one, up Stadiongasse and behind the Parliament building.
There are many short subjects and an American Western. Trumper travels to Ireland, sees the happy peasants. In Java the travel guide tells the audience about the national pastime: boxing with your feet. But Bogus and the children are restless; they want the Western. And here it comes at last! Jimmy Stewart, speaking German, almost in time with the dubbed-in German voice. The Indians did not want the railroad. That was the plot.
Jimmy Stewart pumped a carbine from his hip, and it might have been a pre-ravaged Shelley Winters with an arrow sunk in her ample bosom. Whoever she was, she rolled off the caboose, down a gully, into a creek where she was trampled by wild horses - just passing by - and lecherously mauled by an Indian who was too chicken to attack the train. She was forced to endure all these things until she could locate the derringer stuffed in her bleeding cleavage, with which she blew a large hole through the Indian's throat. Not until then did she stand upright and sodden, all the creek-and blood-soaked parts of her garments clinging to her, and yell, 'Hilfe!' - all this while wrenching away at the arrow stuck in her heaving tit.
Stopping for a greasy sausage and a glass of new wine, Trumper sat in the Augustiner Keller listening to an ancient string quartet and reflecting that Hollywood stunt women would be very interesting to meet, but that he hoped not all of them had hair in their cleavage.
As he walked back to the Taschy, the street lamps came on, but spastically, fading on and off, without a trace of the clockwork precision of Iowa City; as if Viennese electricity was a recent, unsure improvement over gas.
Outside a Kaffeehaus on Plankengasse, a man spoke to him. 'Grajak ok bretzet,' he seemed to say, and Trumper paused, trying to place this queer language. 'Bretzet, jak?' the man said, and Trumper thought, Czech? Hungarian? Serbo-Croatian? 'Gra! Nucemo paz!' the man shouted. He was angry about something and waved his fist at Trumper.
Bogus asked, 'Ut boethra rast, kelk?' Old Low Norse never hurt a soul.
'Gra?' the man said suspiciously. 'Grajak, ok,' he added with
more confidence. Then he shouted eagerly, 'Nucemo paz tzet!'
Bogus was sorry he didn't understand, and began to say in Old Low Norse: 'Ijs kik--'
'Kik?' the man interrupted, smiling at Bogus. 'Gra, gra, gra! Kik!' he cried, trying to shake Trumper's hand.
'Gra, gra, gra!' replied Bogus, and shook hands with the man who weaved and mumbled, 'Gra, gra,' nodding with greater conviction before he turned away and stumbled off the curb, veering across the street stooped over; like a blind man groping for the opposite sidewalk, he aimed his feet and protected his crotch with his hands.
Bogus thought that it had been like a conversation with Mr Fitch. Then he glumly noted a crumpled scrap of newspaper on the sidewalk; it was unreadable, printed in what looked like the Cyrillic alphabet, the letters looking more like music than parts of words. He looked around for the little man, but there wasn't a trace of him. The article, torn from some paper in the queer language, looked important - phrases underlined with a ballpoint pen, comments scribbled emphatically in the margins in the same script - so he pocketed the strange scrap.
Trumper felt his mind floating. Back at the Taschy, he tried to focus on something familiar enough to bring it back home. He attempted to write a review of the Western movie, but his typewriter's umlaut keys distracted him, and he found that he'd forgotten the film's title. How Far Can You Get with an Arrow in Your Tit? Just then, as if by association, the bidets downstairs began their nightly flushing.
Bogus caught his own reflection in the ornate French window reaching nearly to the ceiling; he and his typewriter occupied only the bottom-corner pane. In an effort to rescue his small and sinking soul, he tore the review out of his typewriter and, avoiding umlauts, tried to write to his wife.
Pension Taschy
Spiegelgasse 29
Vienna 1, Austria
Dear Biggie:
Thinking of you, Colm, and you too, Biggie - the night your navel distended in East Gunnery, Vermont. You were in your eighth month, Big, when your belly button turned inside out.
We rode three hours from Great Boar's Head in Couth's old airy Volkswagen, with the sunroof missing. In Portsmouth it was cloudy; and in Manchester, Peterborough and Keene, it was cloudy too. And in each place, Couth said, 'I hope it doesn't rain.'
Three times I traded seats with you, Big. You were not comfortable. Three times you said, 'Oh God, I'm so big!'
'Like a full moon,' Couth told you. 'You're lovely.'
But you bitched away, Biggie - still smarting, of course, over my father's crude manner of referring to our lewd and irresponsible mating.
'Think of it this way,' Couth told you. 'Think how happy the baby will be having parents so close to its own age.'
'And think of the genes, Big,' I told you. 'What a masterful bunch of genes!'
But you said, 'I'm tired of thinking about this baby.'
'Well, you two will be together this way,' Couth said. 'Think of all the decisions you don't have to make now.'
'There wouldn't have been any decisions,' you told poor Couth, who was only trying to cheer you up. 'Bogus would never be marrying me if I wasn't going to have this baby.'
But all I said was, 'Well, here we are in Vermont,' looking up through the hole in the roof at the rusty girders of the bridge over the Connecticut.
You wouldn't let it drop, though, Biggie, even though we'd had this conversation several times before, and I wasn't about to be drawn into it again.
You said to me, 'Bogus, you wouldn't have married me, ever. I know it.'
And Couth, bless him, said, 'Then I'd have married you, Biggie - at full moon, half moon or no moon at all. I'd have married you, and I still would, if Bogus wasn't going to. And think what that would have been like, now I ask you ...' Then, hunched over the wheel, he turned his fabulous smile to you - showing you how he could manipulate with his tongue his front-four false teeth.
Which at least put a small smile on your face, Biggie. You were a little less pale when we got to East Gunnery.
But in the Pension Taschy, Bogus was distracted when he thought of East Gunnery. Reading over what he'd written, he decided he didn't like it. The tone seemed wrong to him, so he tried again, beginning after the line, '... when your belly button turned inside out.'
We hid Couth and his Volkswagen in the lower field and walked up the long driveway to your father's farm. Here comes the child bride with a bundle in her belly! And I suspect I accused you of cowardice for not writing some word of this to your parents.
'I wrote them about you, Bogus,' you told me. 'Which is more than you ever warned your parents.'
'Only not about your condition, Big,' I remarked. 'You said nothing about that.'
'No, not about that,' you said, tugging your tight raincoat away from yourself, trying to create the illusion that your coat was swollen only because you had your hands in your pockets.
I looked back at Couth, who waved a little fearfully, looming out of his sunroof like some hairy, human periscope.
'Couth can come up to the house too,' you said. 'He doesn't have to hide in the field.' But I told you that Couth was shy and felt better hiding in the field. I didn't mention that I thought we might appear more forgivable if we walked in alone, or that it would be nice to know that Couth and his car were safe in the pasture, in case I had to leave.
The most anxious time, I think, was when, passing by your father's jeep, you said, 'Oh, my father's home too. God, Father, Mother, everybody!'
Then I reminded you that it was Sunday.
'Then Aunt Blackstone is here too,' you said. 'Aunt Blackstone is quite deaf.'
They were eating dinner, and you kept your hands in your raincoat pockets, twirling your coke-bottle shape around the dining-room table, saying, 'This is Bogus. You know, I told you! I wrote you!' Until your mother began to glide her eyes down your front. Biggie, and your deaf Aunt Blackstone said, 'Hasn't Sue put on the old weight, though?' to your mother. Who stared rather stonily. And you said, 'I'm pregnant.' Adding, 'But it's all right!'
'Yes! It's all right!' I cried out witlessly, watching your father's unmoving fork, dripping pot roast and an onion, poised an inch from his open mouth.
'It's all right,' you said again, smiling at everyone.
'Of course it is,' said Aunt Blackstone, who hadn't really heard.
'Yes, yes,' I mumbled, nodding.
And your deaf Aunt Blackstone, nodding back to me, said, 'Certainly yes! All that fat German food in her, putting the old weight on. Besides, the child hasn't skied all summer!' And looking at your dumbstruck mother, Aunt Blackstone said in her shrill, clear voice, 'Gracious, Hilda, is that any way to greet your daughter? I can remember you always put the old weight on and off, any time you pleased ...'
While at the Taschy, two bidets flushed simultaneously, and Bogus Trumper lost the memory part of his mind. And perhaps other, closely related parts of his mind, as well.
25
Getting Ready for Ralph
IN THE FISHY dark, the turtle murk of Tulpen's apartment, Trumper sat up in bed hopping mad and as rigid as a cigar-store Indian. Lately he'd developed a habit of furious fuming. He would concentrate fiercely on not moving at all, on simulating a brooding statue. It was a sort of isometric which eventually exhausted him. He was having trouble sleeping again.
'Oh, come on, Trumper,' Tulpen whispered to him. She touched his wooden thigh.
Trumper concentrated on the fish. There was a new one who especially irked him, a beige sort of blowfish whose gross practice was to smear its translucent lips against the aquarium wall and belch little trapped bubbles against the glass. Unable to escape, the gas would bounce back into the fish, which would then swell up. As it grew larger, its eyes got smaller, until suddenly the air pressure inside it would propel it away from the glass, rather like a balloon someone has blown up and then released. In reverse, the beige blowfish would careen about the tank like a rotary motor broken loose. The other fish were terrified of it. Trumper wanted to prick it wit
h a pin at the pinnacle of its swollen state. The fish always seemed to be facing Trumper when it began to bloat itself. It was a stupid way of antagonizing the enemy; the fish should have known better.
Actually, Trumper disliked all the fish, and his present irritation was enough to set him to imagining how he would dispose of them. Go out and buy a terrifying fish-eating fish, an omnivore which would scour the tank of every other swimming, crawling, gliding thing - and then eat all the shells, rocks, algae, and even the air hose. Then it would gnaw its way through the glass, let the water out and die for lack of oxygen. Even better: flopping about on the dry aquarium floor, it would have the good sense to eat itself. What an admirable omnivore! Immediately he wanted one.
The phone rang again. Trumper didn't move, and the sidewise glance darted in Tulpen's direction convinced her that she'd better not answer it, either. A few minutes before, he had answered the phone, and that call had been partially responsible for his destructive impulses toward helpless fish and for his cigar-store-Indian imitation.
It had been Ralph Packer who had called. Though Bogus and Tulpen had just gone to bed, Ralph wanted to come over right away with Kent and several thousand dollars' worth of movie equipment. He wanted some footage of Tulpen and Bogus going to bed.
'Jesus, Ralph,' Trumper said.
'No, no!' Ralph said. 'Just going to bed, Thump-Thump. You know, domestic stuff - bathroom routine, teeth brushing, taking off clothes, little familiar affections, shit like that ...'
'Good night, Ralph.'
'Thump-Thump, it won't take half an hour!'
Trumper hung up and turned to Tulpen. 'I don't understand,' he shouted, 'how you ever could have slept with him.'
That set a lot of things off.
'He was interesting,' Tulpen said. 'I was interested in what he did.'
'In bed?'
'Shove it, Trumper.'
'No, really!' he yelled at her. 'I want to know! Did you like sleeping with him?'
'I like sleeping with you much better,' she said. 'I did not sustain an interest in Ralph in that way.'