Tulpen lay still under Trumper, watching the water level fall. 'Trumper?' she said softly, but he wouldn't look at her. He held her still until the tank had emptied over the bookcase and the killer-fish lay flopping on the dry aquarium floor.
'Trumper, for God's sake,' she said, but she didn't struggle. 'Let me move them to another tank, please.'
He let her up and watched her gently scoop them into another aquarium. In the turtle tank, a bright blue-headed turtle ate the thin yellow fish immediately, but left the evil-red round one alone.
'Shit,' said Tulpen. 'I never know who's going to eat whom.'
'Please tell me why you want a baby,' Trumper asked her quietly, but when she turned to face him, she was calm, her arms folded over her breasts. She coolly blew a lock of her hair out of her eyes and sat down beside him on the bed; she casually crossed her legs; she watched the survivor-fish.
'I guess I don't want a baby,' she said.
13
Remember Merrill Overturf?
LEARNING TO SKI, I quickly realized Merrill Overturf's failure as a coach. Merrill is not a deft skier, though he has mastered the stop. At the children's slope in Saarbrucken, I assaulted the backbreaking rope tow. Aside from the children, it was fortunately unpopulated; most adults were at the races in Zell am See to see the women's downhill and giant slalom.
I mastered the bindings with only three cut knuckles. Merrill flayed a path through the children, leading me to the awesome rope tow, the rope slithered uphill a mere foot above the ground, the proper, comfortable height for five-year-olds and other three-foot dwarfs skiing there. But my knickers did not bend well at the knees, and I could barely stoop to reach the tow, then scoot uphill in the painful position of a coolie bearing a trunk. Holding the rope behind me, Merrill shouted encouragements during the endless journey. If it's this hard going up, I thought, what will it be like going down?
I liked the mountains, all right, and I thrilled to the giant cable-cars carrying you way up where the big skiers go; also, I liked the cable-cars going down - empty, with all the window space to yourself, excepting the leering lift operator who always remarked on the absence of your skis.
'We're almost there, Boggle!' Merrill lied. 'Bend your knees!' I watched the bouncy children dancing on the rope in front of me while I carried the mountain on my back - the rope bunching my frozen mittens, my chin hitting my knees as my skis skated uncontrollably in and out of the ruts. I knew I had to straighten up or never use my spine again.
'Bend, Boggle!' Merrill hollered, but I straightened up. All that grief off my back for one lovely moment; I lifted the rope chest-high and leaned back. Above me I saw the little children, their skis completely off the ground, hanging from the rope, swinging like little puppets. Some dropped off, littering the path in front of me; it was clear that they wouldn't struggle out of my way in time.
At the top of the hill, a befurred lift attendant shouted unkindly at me. Below us, the gentle thud of mothers stamping their boots. 'Let go of the rope, Boggle!' Merrill shouted. I watched the approaching tangle of children in the path, skis and poles clashing; stuck to the ascending rope were several of their tiny bright and frozen mittens. The lift attendant suddenly dashed for the control house, perhaps thinking the mittens were hands.
I was surprised at how cleverly I kept my balance as I skied over my first child. 'Let go, Boggle!' said Merrill; I shot a quick look over my shoulder at the child I'd just trampled and watched him groggily rise up and catch Merrill in the solar plexus with his junior crash helmet. Merrill let go of the rope. Then I was surrounded by the tiny creatures, jabbing with their poles and yelping German for God and their mothers. In the midst of them, I felt the rope jerk to a stop in my hands, and I sprawled into a milling nest of them.
'Es tut mir leid.'
'Gott! Hilfe! Mutti, Mutti ...'
Merrill steered me out of the rope-tow ruts and on to the slope which had looked so slight and gentle from below.
'Please, Merrill, I want to walk.'
'Boggle, you'd make holes for the other skiers ...'
'I'd like to make one big hole for all the other skiers, Merrill.'
But I left Merrill Overturf guide me to center slope and aid me in the general direction of the bottom, where the children appeared to be further dwarfed and the cars way below in the parking lot looked like the children's toys. Overturf demonstrated the snowplow stop, then showed off a wobbly stem-turn. Larkish little children flew by us, poling and zigzagging and falling as lightly and safely as little wads of wool.
My skis felt like long, heavy ladders on my feet: my poles were stilts.
'I'll follow you,' said Merrill, 'in case you fall.'
I began slowly enough; children passed by me with obvious scorn. Then I noted I was picking up speed. 'Lean forward,' called Merrill, and I went a little faster, my skis clicking together, swaying apart. What if one ski crosses the other? I thought.
Then I passed the first wave of surprised children as if they were standing still. That'll show the little bastards. 'Bend your knees, Boggle!' came Merrill's voice from miles behind me. But my knees seemed locked, ramrod stiff. I came up on a bright-capped little blonde girl and hipped her neatly out of the way, like sideswiping a squirrel with a train. 'Es tut mir leid,' I said, but the words were blown down my throat; my eyes watered. 'Snowplow, Boggle!' Merrill was screaming. Oh yes, that stopping device. But I didn't dare move my skis. I attempted to will them apart; they resisted me; my hat flew off. Ahead of me, a gaggle of children poled and veered and terror-scampered; an avalanche was after them! Not wanting to gore anyone, I dropped my poles and bludgeoned through them. By the tow shelter at the bottom, an attendant came caterwauling out with a shovel; he had been packing down the tow ruts, but I suspected he would not hesitate to swat me. The lift line broke up; spectators and skiers burst for cover. I imagined an air raid, from the point of view of the bomb.
There was a flat shelf at the base of the slope; surely, I thought, this would slow me down. If not, there was an enormous bulldozed mound of snow piled up to prevent skiers from zipping down into the parking lot. I tried to think of the mound as soft.
'Use your edges!' Merrill screamed. Edges? 'Bend your fucking knees!' Knees? 'Boggle, for God's sake, fall down!' In front of the children? Never.
I remembered the man at the rent-a-ski place, telling me about the safety bindings. If they were so safe, why didn't they do anything?
I hit the flattened shelf off balance and felt my weight fling me back on my heels; the tips of my skis were raised like the bow of a boat. The looming snowbank which protected the parking lot from the likes of me came up awfully suddenly. I saw myself drilled into it like a rifle grenade; they would dig for hours, then decide to blast me out.
The surprise has rarely been equaled: to discover that skis can climb. I vaulted the bank. I was launched into the parking lot. Below me, during my descent, I saw a family of sturdy Germans getting out of their Mercedes. Father Round in stout lederhosen knickers and a feathered Tyrolean hat; Mother Heft in hiking boots and swinging a walking stick with an ice-ax point; children: Dumpling, Dumpier and Dollop, with a baffling armload of rucksacks, snowshoes and ski poles. The opened trunk of their Mercedes waited for me to come down. A great whale's maw waiting for the flying fish to fall. Into the jaws of Death.
But sturdy Father Round, the German, precisely closed his trunk.
... after which I'm forced to rely on Merrill Overturf's description. I remember only a surprisingly soft landing, the result of my warm, fleshy collision with Mother Heft, wedged between my chest and the tail-lights of the Mercedes. Her sweet words were hot in my ear: 'Aaarp!' and 'Hee-urmff!' And the mixed reactions of the children; Child Dumpling's wordless gape, Child Dumpier's sudden avalanche of his belongings on Child Dollop, whose earsplitting wail was shrilly clear from under the rucksacks, snowshoes and ski poles where he lay cringing.
Father Round, said Merrill, quickly scanned the skies, no doubt looking for
the Luftwaffe. Merrill came clambering down the snowbank to where I lay dazed. Mother Heft's great wind had returned and she prodded me with the ice-ax tip of her walking stick.
'Boggle! Boggle! Boggle!' Merrill ran shouting. While on the lips of the bank above the parking lot, a crowd of those who'd survived me came to see if I'd survived. They are reported to have cheered when Merrill held up one of my broken skis and failed to find the other. My safety bindings had released. From the bank the lift attendant savagely hurled my ski poles into the parking lot, across which Merrill gingerly supported me. Insane applause and jeering from the snowbank, to see that I was somewhat marred.
It was then, Merrill claims, that the American couple drove up in their new Porsche. They were apparently lost; they thought they had come to the races in Zell. The man, a frightened one, rolled down his window and stared with considerable insecurity at the yelling crowd on the bank. With pity he smiled at Merrill helping the injured skier away. But the man's wife, big and fortyish, with a jutting chin, slammed her door and strode around to her husband's side of the car.
'Well, dammit,' she said to him, forcing him to roll down his window. 'You and your rotten German and your lousy sense of direction. We're late. We've missed the first event.'
'Madam,' Merrill said to her as he dragged me past them. 'Be glad that the first event missed you.'
*
But I have to take Merrill's word for this, and Merrill is suspect. By the time we were back at the Gasthaus Tauernhof in Kaprun, Merrill was in worse shape than I was. He was having an insulin reaction; his blood sugar was down to zilch. I had to help him to the bar and explain his exploring eyes to Herr Halling, the bartender.
'He's a diabetic, Herr Halling. Give him an orange juice, or something else with lots of sugar.'
'No, no,' Halling said. 'Diabetics aren't supposed to have any sugar.'
'But he's had too much insulin,' I told Halling. 'He's used up too much sugar.' And as if to demonstrate my point, Merrill fumbled a cigarette in front of us, lit the filter end, disliked the taste and ground it out on the back of his own hand. I knocked it away from him and Merrill stared with some puzzlement at what might have been a dull pain coming from the burn. Do you suppose that's my hand? With his other hand, he picked it up and waved it to Herr Halling and me as if it were a flag.
'Ja, orange juice, immediately,' Herr Halling said.
I propped Merrill up against me, but he skidded dizzily off his bar stool.
When he recovered, we watched a rerun of the women's races at Zell on television. The Austrian, Heidi Schatzl, won the downhill as expected, but there was an upset in the giant slalom. The first American girl to win an international race beat out Heidi Schatzl and the French star, Marguerite Delacroix. The video tapes were beautiful. Delacroix missed a gate in her second run and was disqualified, and Heidi Schatzl caught an edge and fell. The Austrians in the Gasthaus Tauernhof were glum, but Merrill and I cheered loudly, in the interests of international hostility.
Then they showed the tape of the American girl who'd won. She was nineteen, blonde and very strong. She came through the upper gates smoothly, but a little slow. When she hit the mid-mark, her time was a bit long and she knew it; she bore down on those lower gates like a skidding bus, skating off one ski and then the other, dropping her shoulder and cutting so close to the flags that she left every one flapping. At the last gate, she performed a ballet on that ice-hard, overpacked snow: she lost her balance and managed to hold her cut with one ski off the ground, like a wing out beside her at her waist. Then she righted herself, touched that wild ski down as soft as a kiss, threw her great ass back over her heels and sat on the backs of her skis down the straightaway across the finishing line, snapping herself out of that deep squat as soon as she crossed the line. She cut a wide, soft, snow-throwing turn just in front of the safety rope and the crowd. It was very clear that she knew she'd won it.
They had an interview with her on television. She had a smooth, handsome face with a mouth as wide as her cheekbones. No make-up, just the white stickum of Chap Stick on her lips; she kept licking them, laughing all out of breath and bold-faced, clowning into the camera. She wore a one-piece stretch-suit as sleek and tight on her as skin; it had a big gold zipper running from her chin to her crotch, and she'd let it open down to her cleavage, where her big high, round breasts pushed out her soft velour pullover. She shared the winner's circle with the second-place finisher Dubois of France - a petite, darting, ratlike lady with snap-out eyes; and third place finisher Thalhammer of Austria, a dark, glowering, shapeless, hulking wonder-woman whose chromosomes, you can bet, were half male. The American was a head taller than either of them and an inch above the interviewer, who was as impressed with her bosom as he was with her skiing.
His English was awful. 'You haf a Cherman name,' he said to her. 'Vy?'
'My grandfather was Austrian,' the girl said, and the locals in the Gasthaus Tauernhof cheered up a little.
'Then you speak Cherman?' the interviewer asked her, hopefully.'
'Only with my father,' the girl said.
'Not just a little wit me?' the interviewer teased.
'Nein,' said the girl, whose face now betrayed a certain tough irritability; she must have been thinking, Why don't you ask me about my skiing, twerp? A bouncy American teammate popped up over her shoulder and held out an unwrapped stick of gum. The big girl stuck it in her mouth and started to soften it up.
'Vy do all Americans jew cum?' the interviewer asked her.
'All Americans don't "jew cum",' the girl said. Merrill and I cheered. The interviewer knew he wasn't getting anywhere with her, so he tried to get snotty.
'Itz too bat,' he said, 'dis is the last race uf dis season, dough it mus be an honor to be the erst American to vin vun.'
'We'll "vin" lots more,' the girl told him, chewing with little savage snaps.
'Nex year, maybe,' the interviewer said. 'Vill you ski nex year?'
'I'll see,' the girl said. Then the video tape was cut and jumped out of sequence, causing Merrill and me to boo loudly. When the picture was clear again the interviewer was trying to keep up with the girl, who was striding away from him, carrying her skis lightly on her shoulder. The camera was hand-held and unsteady, the sound track crunched with snow.
'Did it take anyting avay from you fictory,' he was asking her, 'to vin because Heidi Schatzl fell town?'
The girl turned to him, almost clipping his head with her skis. She didn't say a word, and he added a little nervously: '... or to vin because Marguerite Delacroix mist a gate?'
'I'd have won anyway,' the girl said. 'I was just better than they were today,' and she started off again. He had to duck under the backswing of her long skis and jog to catch up to her, his legs getting tangled in the microphone cord.
'Zu "Biggie" Kunft,' the interviewer mumbled after her, stumbling along. 'Die Amerikanerin aus Fermont, USA,' he said. He caught up with her, and this time remembered to crouch low under her skis when she turned to him. 'Wit the conditions today,' he said, 'wit the snow zo iczy and fast, do you tink your veight helpt you?' He waited smugly for her reply.
'What about my weight?' she asked him; she was embarrassed.
'Does it help you?'
'It doesn't hurt me,' she said defensively, and Merrill and I felt angry. 'You got great weight!' Merrill shouted. 'Every pound of it!' I said.
'Vy do they call you "Biggie"?' the interviewer asked her. She was upset, you could tell, but she moved right up close to him, heaving out her breasts and cracking her broad mouth into a smile. She looked down on him; she seemed to be trying to push him backward with her tits.
'"Vy" do you "tink" so?' she asked.
The bastard interviewer looked away from her and beckoned the camera closer, beaming into the lens and rolling out his sly German, 'Mit mir hier ist die junge Amerikanerin, Zu "Biggie" Kunft ...' he was announcing as she turned away from him suddenly and caught him beautifully in the back of his head with her swingi
ng skis. He dropped out of frame and the camera attempted to trot after her, putting her in and out of focus and finally losing her in the crowd. But her voice, offstage, came back to us, angry and hurt: 'Please leave me the fuck alone,' she said, 'Please ...' The announcer didn't bother to translate this.
Then did Overturf and I proudly praise the virtues of this skier, Sue 'Biggie' Kunft, fending off the strongly nationalist arguments of several Austrians drinking with us in the Tauernhof.
'A rare girl, Merrill.'
'An athletic lay, Boggle.'
'No, Merrill. She's clearly a virgin.'
'Or a man, Boggle.'
'Oh, never, Merrill. Her glands are quite unmistakable.'
'I'll drink to that,' said Merrill, who was under great pressure from the limitations of his diabetic diet; not a well-disciplined person, he frequently substituted booze for food. 'Did I eat my dinner tonight, Boggle?'
'No,' I told him. 'You missed dinner because you were in a trance.'
'Good,' he said, and ordered another slivowitz.
With TV-skiing over, the local Tauernhof clientele returned to their usual peasant savagery. The regular Hungarian group from Eisenstadt performed: an accordion, a tortured zither and a violin to make the mighty cringe.
With the great privacy afforded us by speaking English in a German-speaking tavern, Merrill and I discussed international sports; Hieronymus Bosch; the function of the American embassy in Vienna; the neutrality of Austria; Tito's remarkable success; the shocking rise of the bourgeoisie; the boredom of televised golf; the source of Herr Halling's halitosis; why the waitress wore a bra, were her armpits shaved or shaggy, and who would ask her; the advisability of chasing slivowitz with beer; the price of Semperit radial tires in Boston, of bourbon in Europe in general, of hashish in Vienna in particular; possible causes of the scar on the face of the man who sat by the door; what a worthless instrument a zither was; whether the Czechs were more creative than the Hungarians; what a stupid, backward language Old Low Norse was; the inadequacies of the two-party system in the United States; the challenge of inventing a new religion; the small differences between clerical fascism and Nazism; the incurability of cancer; the inevitableness of war; the general and overall stupidity of man; the pain in the ass of diabetes. And the best way to introduce yourself to girls. One way, Merrill claimed, was the 'boob loop.' 'You hold the ski pole thus,' said Merrill, holding it upside down, his fingers meshed in the basket weave, the point against the heel of his hand. He raised the end with the wrist-thong and waved it like a wand; the wrist-thong made a loop. 'That's where the boob goes,' Merrill said. He was watching the waitress clear the table next to ours.