The Water-Method Man

  Bogus thought, A routine. Colm has a routine. How kids love a good routine. Did I ever establish a routine with Colm?

  But all he said was, 'I could watch him from the pool room, couldn't I?'

  'I've got some binoculars,' Couth said.

  'Jesus, Cuthbert,' Biggie said. Couth looked embarrassed; she did, too. Bogus thought, Cuthbert? When was it anyone called you Cuthbert, Couth?

  In a corner of the kitchen, wary of the spice-rack debris, Dante Calicchio wolfed his sandwich, quaffed his beer and wondered if the limousine service was worried, and if his wife had called the police. Or would it be the other way around?

  'We'll be going pretty soon,' Bogus said to Dante. 'Why don't you take a walk, get some air ...'

  Dante's mouth was stuffed so he couldn't talk, but what he was thinking was, Oh, sweet shit, you mean I got to take you back with me? But he didn't say a word, and he pretended not to see Bogus slip a big wad of money - maybe as much as a thousand dollars - into the breadbox.

  Dante sat below the high-water mark on the cool wet steps leading from the dock to the boat ramp and marveled at the miniature life he saw swarming in the tide pools on the mudflats, and in the teeming crevices of the bared rocks. It was the only mud he had ever seen that he wanted to stick his bare feet in, and he sat with his trousers rolled up to his knees and his blue-white city toes asquirm in the cleanest muck he'd ever felt. On the dock above him, his dusty black city shoes and thin black city socks looked so ominous and foreign that even the gulls were wary of them. The braver terns swooped low, then shrieked off in alarm at this strange deposit left by the tide.

  Out at the mouth of the bay, a lobsterman was pulling in his traps, and Dante wondered what it would be like to work with his arms and his back again, and whether he'd get seasick.

  He got up and walked gingerly out on the flats, feeling a shell prick his foot now and then, wary of the squiggling life all around him. An old lobster pot lay washed up against the far mooring post of the dock; Dante made his cautious way toward it, wondering what beasts would be inside. But it was staved in and its only contents were the bait, a fish head, picked clean. Then a clamworm scuttled across his foot and he yelped and ran painfully up the shoreline. When he looked up to see if anyone had observed his cowardice, he saw a dark handsome little boy watching him. The boy was in his pajamas and he was eating a banana. 'It was just a clamworm,' Colm said.

  'Do they bite?' Dante asked.

  'They pinch,' said Colm, hopping off the low side of the dock and climbing barefoot over the sharp rocks as if his feet were soled with rope. 'I'll catch one for you,' he said. He handed Dante his banana and walked through the shells which, Dante was sure, had ribboned his own feet. Feeling sheepish, he resisted the temptation to examine himself for cuts and watched the boy prowl the mudflats, prodding with his fingers at terrible live-looking things Dante would have poked with a pole.

  'They're kind of hard to catch sometimes,' said Colm, squatting down and digging up a great glob of mud. His tiny hand shot into the hole and came up with a long greenish-reddish worm which wrapped itself around his hand. Colm had it pinched just behind the head and Dante could see the thing's black pincers groping blindly in the air.

  Wise-ass kid, Dante Calicchio thought. You come near me with that thing and I'll drop your banana in the mud. But Dante held his ground and let Colm walk right up to him.

  'See the pinchers?' Colm asked.

  'Yeah,' said Dante. He thought of giving Colm back his banana, but he feared the boy might think he was making an exchange. Also, Colm was covered with mud. 'Now you're too dirty to eat your breakfast,' Dante said.

  'No,' said Colm. 'I can wash, you know.' He led Dante to a tide pool trapped higher up in the rocks and they washed the mud away together.

  'You want to see my animals?' Colm asked. Dante wasn't sure; he was wondering what Colm had done with that worm. 'What's a chauffeur?' Colm asked him. 'Like a taxi?'

  'Uh-huh,' Dante said. As alert as a rabbit, on the lookout for the animals lurking in there, he followed Colm to the boathouse.

  There was a turtle with what looked like rocks growing all over its back, and a gull Colm told Dante not to get close to - it had a busted wing and liked to peck. There was a fiercely active little animal that looked like an elongated rat, which was a ferret, Colm said. There was a zinc washtub full of herring, half of which were dead and floating on the surface; Colm scooped these up with a net, as if these deaths were commonplace.

  'Cat food?' Dante asked, meaning the dead herring.

  'We don't have a cat,' said Colm. 'They kill more than they can eat.'

  When they came out of the boathouse, the sun was warm enough to flush Dante's face, and a sweet, salt-smelling wind had picked up off the bay.

  'You know what, kid?' said Dante. 'You're pretty lucky to live here.'

  'I know,' Colm said.

  Then Dante glanced up at the house and saw Bogus Trumper at the pool-room window watching them through a big pair of binoculars. Dante knew that the boy wasn't supposed to know he was being watched, so Dante moved his bulky body between the boy and the house.

  'Are you sometimes a soldier?' Colm asked, and Dante shook his head. He let Colm try on his fancy driver's cap; the kid grinned and marched a few steps up the dock. Funny, Dante thought. Kids love uniforms, and most men hate them.

  Trumper watched Colm attempt a military salute. How tanned he was! And his legs seemed much longer than he remembered.

  'He's going to have your length. Big,' he mumbled. Biggie was exhausted; she lay sleeping on the couch in the pool room. Bogus was all alone at the binoculars, but Couth heard him. When he saw Couth looking at him, Bogus moved away from the binoculars.

  'He looks fine, doesn't he?' said Couth.

  'Yup, yup,' said Trumper. He looked at Biggie. 'I won't wake her up,' he said. 'You say goodbye for me.' But he tiptoed up to where she lay; he seemed to be waiting for something.

  Couth tried to be casual about looking out at the sea, but Trumper still didn't seem comfortable, so Couth ambled out of the pool room. Then Bogus bent over Biggie and kissed her fast and light on the forehead, but before he could straighten up, she reached a groggy hand into his hair, giving him a soft stroke and a sleepy groan.

  'Couth?' she said. 'Is he gone?'

  He was gone, all right. He had Dante stop at an Esso station in Bath and pack the tiny ice box in the back of the limousine full of ice. In Brunswick, he bought a fifth of Jack Daniel's, and in a Woolworth's across the street, one glass.

  So he was gone by the time they crossed the Massachusetts line. He sat in the plush back seat with the glass divider shut tight, and drank until the tinted windows seemed a darker green, even though the day was getting brighter. In the soundless, air-conditioned Mercedes, he slumped like a dead king riding in his cushioned coffin back to New York.

  Why New York? he thought. Then he remembered that it was because Dante was going there. He took out his envelope of money and counted up to a fuzzy fifteen hundred or eighteen hundred, give or take a hundred or so. It never came out the same twice, so after he counted it four times he put it back in his pocket and forgot about it.

  But Dante noticed, and it was the first notion he had that the nut in the back might not be so rich. If you took the time to count it, you didn't have enough.

  By the time they got to New Haven, Trumper was so crocked that Dante didn't even have to ask if they could stop for a moment. Dante phoned New York and got a bawling out from the limousine service and a lot of tearful shouting from his wife.

  When he returned to the car, Trumper was simply too stewed to understand what Dante wanted to tell him. Dante wanted to warn Trumper that 'they' were waiting for him in New York. 'You mean the cops?' Dante had asked the limousine service. 'What do they want with him?'

  'Bigger than ordinary cops,' the limousine service told Dante.

  'Oh, yeah? What'd he do?'

  'They think he's nuts,' the limousine service said. r />
  'No shit,' said Dante. 'Is that a crime?'

  Dante tapped on the glass divider and finally roused Bogus Trumper into some form of recognizable stare. Then Dante decided to let it go; he just waved to Trumper through the glass. Trumper smiled and he waved back.

  But Dante was warming up to this nut now; he was moved by him. Even before they'd left Maine, he'd changed his mind about the guy. He'd asked Trumper if he could stop at a gift shop along the road; he wanted to get some souvenirs for his wife and kids.

  Trumper had let him stop, and when Dante went inside to browse through plastic lobsters and seacoast watercolors painted on driftwood logs, Trumper looked at the photographs Couth had given him as he was leaving. There was a whole stack of pictures of Colm, big eight-by-tens: Colm on the mudflats, Colm in a boat, Colm on the beach in a snowstorm (so they had already moved in with Couth during the winter!), Colm formally posed in Biggie's lap. They were all lovely.

  But the last photograph shocked Trumper. Perhaps Couth had put the photographs together too quickly and hadn't meant to include it, for it was obviously from a rather different series. It was a close-up of a nude, distorted by a wide-angle lens. The shot was focused on the woman's crotch, and she was lying in a field in such a position that the texture of the grass between her spread legs nearly matched the texture of her pubic hair; in fact, that was clearly the idea of the photograph. The wide-angle rounded the world above her, and her face was small and faraway and not in focus. But her twat was in focus, all right.

  Mother Earth? Trumper thought. He didn't like the photograph, but he realized that if Couth had not included it by mistake - if Couth had meant to give it to him - that the gesture was generous and well-meaning, like Couth. And also like Couth, in surprisingly bad taste. The nude was Biggie.

  Trumper looked up and saw Dante coming. He opened the door of the back seat because he wanted to show Trumper what he'd bought for his children: three inflatable beach balls and three sweatshirts with MAINE! across the chest; under the letters a large lobster cocked his claws.

  'That's nice,' Trumper said. 'Very nice.'

  Then Dante saw the pictures of Colm, and before Trumper could stop him, Dante picked the stack up and started leafing through them. 'I want to tell you, sir,' he said, 'that's a fine-looking boy you got.'

  Trumper looked away, and Dante, embarrassed, said, 'I knew he was yours. He looks just like you.'

  Then Dante came to the crotch shot of Biggie, and though he tried to look away, he couldn't. Finally he forced himself to slip the photograph to the bottom of the stack and handed them all back to Trumper.

  Trumper was trying to smile. 'Very nice,' Dante Calicchio said, his mouth a hard line, fighting a leer.

  Then it was New York all around me, I could tell. And Jack Daniel's Old Time No. 7 Brand Quality Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey, 90 proof, wallowing there in my brain, its good burnt taste so thick on my tongue that I could have chewed it.

  I could see them out there, wanting to get at me. They rapped the window and fucked around with the door latch, and they shouted at my big brutish good-hearted driver, 'Calicchio! Open up, Calicchio!'

  Then they had my door open and I caught the first one smack on his forehead with that lovely squarish bottle Jack Daniel puts his whiskey in. Some others helped the man off the floor, and then they came at me again.

  I was all right when they kept their distance, but when they moved in close, I'd lose the focus. I could make out Dante, though; that good man was begging them to go easy on me. He had a persuasive way of doing it; he would put his thick-fingered hands on their throats until they gargled a queer tune and danced gently away from me. 'Here, here,' he kept saying. 'Just don't anybody hurt him, he hasn't done anything. I just want to give him something, a little present. Now you let me do that, please.' Then he'd add something in a slightly lower key, like, 'You want to keep your teeth, or should I transplant them up your ass, faggot?'

  They were tugging me one way and Dante was tugging me another. Then there was an awesome heave in one direction for a considerable distance, during which an unidentified man yelled out that he was being killed, and another stranger began bleating like a goat, and I was all alone and free for a minute. Then my guardian angel, Dante Calicchio, was reaching into his underwear - in his crotch, of all things - and from out of his crotch, of all places, he pulled a crinkled-up thing and stuffed it down my shirt front, saying breathlessly, 'Here, here, here, for God's sake ... I think you're going to need every bit of this you can hold on to ... Now take off, if you're smart at all: Run!'

  Then we were in rapid motion once more, and faraway from me I saw Dante Calicchio playing with two toy men. They must have weighed no more than ten pounds each, because Dante tossed one of them through the windshield of a parked car and shook the other one upside down like a rag-doll puppet until I could no longer see, because all the other people swarming around seemed to be trying to get into the game Dante was playing.

  Then they had me again. They drove me around in a car with the window open, and they made me keep my head hanging out; I guess they thought I needed air. But I was not so far gone that I couldn't recall the crinkled-up thing under my shirt front, and when they were riding me up in this elevator, I slipped it out and sneaked a peek at it. It was some kind of money - I couldn't read how much - and one of the men in the elevator took it away from me.

  I think I was in an elevator; we were in a hotel, I think. But all I thought at the time was, what a funny thing to carry in your crotch!

  33

  Welcome to the Order of the Golden Prick

  THROUGHOUT TULPEN'S HOSPITAL visit, I alternately dozed and stared, opening my eyes suddenly as if I'd been startled, gawking unfocused over my shoulder, acting a lolling stupor to perfection, though I had to pee something fierce.

  Ralph came to visit later in the afternoon, pronounced me dead and asked Tulpen what my prick looked like. But she seemed genuinely worried and snapped at him. 'I haven't seen it,' she said. 'He's all doped up. He doesn't know where he is.'

  Ralph circled the bed; he'd brought the mail, and under the pretence of looking for a place to put it, he peeked behind the drawn curtain at my roommate - the sloshing old gentleman with the erector set of intake and output tubes.

  'Let's ask a nurse,' Ralph said.

  'Ask her what?' Tulpen said.

  'To let us see it,' Ralph said. 'Maybe we could just lift his sheet?'

  I rolled my eyes and mumbled a little German to impress them.

  'He's in his Nazi period,' Ralph announced, and I lay there as if lobotomized, waiting for them to say intimate things to each other or exchange touches. But they never did; in fact, they didn't appear to be getting along well at all, and I wondered if they'd seen through my pretense and were playing it cool.

  When they finally left, I heard Tulpen ask the floor nurse when Vigneron would be coming around, and whether they planned to release me that night. But I didn't hear the nurse's answer; my roommate chose that moment to leak or ingest something loudly, and when he'd ceased his awful, liquid tremors, they had gone.

  I had to get up and pee, but when I moved I caught one of my wiry stitches on the top sheet and let out such a piercing shriek that a covey of nurses burst into the room and the old gentleman gurgled in his dreams and hoses.

  Two nurses walked me to the bathroom, and I held my hospital gown out in front like a jib so that it wouldn't brush against my wounded piece.

  I made the foolish error of looking at myself before trying to pee. I could not see a hole; it was scabbed shut and a black tangle of stitches made me resemble the tied-off end of a blood sausage. I stalled by asking a nurse to bring me my mail.

  There was a letter from my old thesis chairman, Dr Wolfram Holster. He had enclosed an article from The North Germanic Languages Bulletin, written by that old comparative literature wizard from Princeton, Dr Hagen von Troneg, which bemoaned the lack of studies in the ancestor tongues of the North Germanic chain. From von
Troneg's point of view '... any in-depth understanding of the religious pessimism in works from the Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic and Faroese is impossible unless the task is undertaken to update the few translations we already have, and we undertake further to translate previously untranslated works from the Old West Norse, Old East Norse and Old Low Norse.' Dr Wolfram Holster's comment was that the time was certainly 'ripe' for Akthelt and Gunnel.

  In a PS, Holster added his sympathies for what he'd learned of my 'situation'. He elaborated: 'A thesis chairman rarely has the time to involve himself in the emotional problems of the doctoral candidate; however, in the light of such a timely and needed project, I feel a chairman must, to a more personal degree, be as constructively forgiving as he must be constructively critical.' His conclusion: 'Do let me know, Fred, how Akthelt and Gunnel is coming.'

  Which, in the toilet cubicle of the hospital, reduced me to laughter, then to tears. I put Holster's letter in the toilet, and this gave me the courage to piss on it.

  In my wandering stupor in Europe, I had written to Holster twice. One was a long, lying letter wherein I described my research on the tragic Icelandic queen Brunnhilde and her possible relationship to the Queen of the Dark Sea in Akthelt and Gunnel. Of course there is no Queen of the Dark Sea in Akthelt and Gunnel.

  My other communication with Holster was a postcard. It was a tiny detail from Breughel's great painting, 'The Slaughter of the Holy Innocents'. Children and babies are being ripped out of their mothers' arms; their fathers' arms, trying to grip them fast, are being hacked off. 'Hi!' I'd written on the back of the postcard. 'Wish you were here!'

  After a while, one of the nurses came to the bathroom door to ask if I was all right. She walked me back to my bed, where I had to wait for Vigneron to come release me.

  I looked at the rest of my mail. There was a large envelope from Couth full of documents about the divorce; I was supposed to sign them. A note from Couth advised me not to actually read them; they were worded in a 'tasteless fashion', he warned me, so that the divorce would be taken seriously. I didn't know who had to take it this seriously, so I went against his advice and read a little. There was something about my 'gross and depraved adulterous activity'. Also mentioned was my 'cruel and inhuman departure from all responsibility', and my 'heartless abandonment, which bordered on the degenerate'.