“Radiation,” howled the cleaning lady, backing toward the doorway, “is good for you!”
“Grab that nigger!” commanded the older man, pointing, the senior vice-president. “Kill her!” Looking down, aghast, at the stinking smoldering splotches on his thousand-dollar suit, he fumbled for the bank of telephones on the shelf at his rear.
Three of the bigger, bolder, huskier vice-presidents made threatening advances toward the cleaning lady. She grabbed her mop and brandished its sloppy hank of radioactive yarn in their faces. The men hesitated. The woman backed through the open door, into the subdued lighting of the wood-paneled hallway, turned suddenly and dashed for the executive elevator, its door wedged open with another mop bucket. Forgetting to lift her lengthy skirts, she nearly stumbled, but recovered and plunged into the elevator two paces in front of her pursuers. There she turned again, thrusting out her loathsome mop, held them at bay as the elevator doors slid shut. A gagged and trussed-up body wriggled on the floor behind her.
The men gaped at one another, then at the blinking lights above the sealed door, Otis Descending.
“There was a body in there. …”
“Him?”
“Yeah — looked like him. Same old blue suit.”
“My God, he’s being kidnapped.”
“Terrorists!”
Security was alerted — basement parking, utility floor, lobby, main floor, first floor, all ground floor exits. The entire body of vice-presidents rushed for the hallway exit, ran clattering and falling down the bleak emergency stairs in a mad race against the sinking elevator. All but the senior vice-president, still barking into the telephone inside the boardroom, and the woman called Mary, junior vice-president for Marketing Research, who was leaning on the button that would summon up the alternate elevator. As she waited she noticed that the cleaning lady’s elevator had paused for some reason on the second floor. When Mary stepped into her own elevator the cleaning lady was still at the second floor. Shrugging, smiling, lighting a fresh new gold-tipped slimline cigarette, she touched her little button and sank sedately, like an executive goddess in an air-conditioned space module, down down and down to the grandeur and hysteria of the main floor. But she’d had enough blustering male foolishness for the day. Without inquiring into the fate of Big Blue Behind, she slipped out through revolving doors to the crowded five o’clock sidewalk, strode through the mob on elegant heels in swishing nylon to that dark sleek little bar round the corner where her lover waited, her darling, her sweetheart, her little mate, her ingénue, her petite treat, her trim trig tasty little trollop for the night, for the week, for the year, Trixie by name and Trixie by nature. Toward love and life. True love, real life. So long for another sixteen hours, you foul-breathed oversized blue-suited forever-yammering arseholes.
The V.P.s and the uniformed guards arrived together at the stalled elevator on floor 2. Again they found it with door jammed open by a bucket. On the floor was the wet mop, the blond wig, the blue granny glasses, and a heap of rags — the cleaning lady’s Mother Hubbard. And the body, the fat Suit, writhing in its bonds, furious, bellowing at them before they even fully removed the gag:
“He went down the hall, you idiots, down the hall! Some kind of ape-man in blackface. Has a gun. Has a big coil of purple rope over his shoulder. That way, yes, after him, run, you blundering fools, run!”
But all they found, at the terminus of an adjoining corridor, was a neatly tapped-out window panel and a heavy-duty zinc-alloy carabiner, like mountain climbers use, snapped securely to the window washer’s spring-bar safety hook. No sign of the purple rope. In the dark alleyway thirty feet below, running behind the building, they saw nothing but a wino sprawled on the greasy pavement, grinning, blinking, shouting up at them:
“Jump. Jump. You can do it. He could do it, you can do it. Jump, you bastards, jump.”
6
Working on #12
Night:
Zap! Zip!
In the blue glow of the electronic bug killer mounted to the wall outside the window, two bodies on the inside, on the bed under covers, struggled for a fruitful union. Both were “obese,” as we say these days, to an extent inconvenient (though not impossible) for a functioning carnal connection. Especially the woman, a victim of that condition physicians term “grand multi-parity” — too many pregnancies. So great was her excess of fat that her husband, probing in the dark, always had difficulty in finding the proper opening, or sometimes any orifice at all. Or found too many pseudo-vaginae, chose one, only to discover upon the climax of his sweating labors that he’d been making love to some incidental, temporary crease between his wife’s lower belly and her upper thighs. From modesty, indifference and aversion to another pregnancy, she never helped him, never guided. Let him do the work; it was his manly role.
Snap! Crackle! Pop!
“Did you take your digitalis, today, Dudley?”
Panting a bit, he replied, “Yes, dear, I took … my digitalis … huh! huh! … today. Phew! … Hah … Huh … Can you … can’t you give me some … a little help here … Mother? Huh?”
“Oh, Dudley. Please, Dudley. Do we have to do this again? Every month? Dudley?”
“It’s the right time, ain’t it? Right time of month? Right? Ain’t you … like you say … oval … hating? Huh! Ain’t it, Mother …? Got to preserve … that nucular family … that nuke …”
The blankets heaved on the groaning bed, tangled and tumbled by the struggling couple, seen as by strobe in the bluish lightning of electric sparks. Each jet of light — zap! — announcing, as it performed, the execution and death of another flying beetle, another June bug, another kissing bug, another mosquito, another moth, another miller, another praying mantis, another innocent little mayfly with its lacy, gossamer wings. They came from miles around, converging multitudes of small nocturnal creatures, drawn by the blue seductive glimmer, to die — zip! zit! zing! fried alive! — under the bedroom window of the house of Love.
“I know, Dudley, but it’s such an awful … please … such a messy … oh …”
“Well doggone, Mother, how we gonna make … heh? huh? … that lil ole Number Twelve if … if we don’t … don’t keep … keep on a … huh! huh! … keep on a try in’, hah? This it?”
“But, Dud — can’t we settle for eleven? Ain’t eleven kids enough? Dudley?”
On the dressertop near the jangling bed, propped in a long curving row, were the framed and matted photographs of eleven smiling children ranging in age from two years to thirteen. Genetically tidy, each and every child had the same thin lips, the identical snub pugnacious nose, the imitative little blue eyes, the selfsame fine and flaxen hair, as the father. All were girls.
“God He said be fruitful, honey … He said be fruitful and multiply and we … we shall make … shall make the desert blossom … blossom as … the … ho! … the rose? Replenish the …”
“But why us? Why do we have to do it all?”
“ ‘Cause if we don’t … who will? The Gentile? Them … those … hmmm … oh jeez … they won’t do it, Mother, cause they’re steeped …”
“What?”
“Steeped. Steeped in sin. Abortion. Contra … contracep … ceptives when the Lord says … He said … replenish the earth.”
Zip! Zap! Crackle! Die!
“Well I wish we could get it over with and be done with it. Seems to me like there’s too many replenishers already. You should see the lines I got to stand in at the supermarket.” She stared at the ceiling as he worked. “Utes. Paiutes. Navajos. Meskins. Even some Nigras showin’ up now, God knows where they come from. Didn’t think we had none of them in Landfill County. And ever’ single one of them colored women, I mean Indians and all, ever’ single one of them buys their food with food stamps. You should see it, Dudley, carts full of nothin’ but Pepsi-Cola and Wonder Bread and Hostess Twinkies and white tortillas and potato chips and cases of refried pinto beans, that’s what they eat, no wonder they are all so fat. And lots and lots
of Pampers. Just as bad at the bank, lines of ‘em, all waitin’ to cash their welfare checks. And then layin’ around the bars all afternoon, right smack dab in the middle of the sidewalk, men and women both. And the schools, Dudley, the schools, all that fightin’ in the halls now, kids gettin’ stabbed in the restrooms, things stole all the time, and thirty-five forty kids in ever’ class, it’s bad, Dudley, bad. Somethin’s wrong somewheres. …”
Snip! Snap! Dead bugs falling from the light, falling, failing, electrocuted by automated cybernetic process, death on the industrial mass-production plan. Little bugs, big bugs, piling in a heap on the ground beneath the spastic sparking blue electrodes.
“Yeah, I know, Mother, I seen … seen it too, what … what’d you think we ever talk about … talk about, the school board … school board … school? … heh? huh? hmmm? … but right now I got to … got to … concen … concen …”
“Gettin’ sleepy, Dud. …”
“I know, Mother, I know. One more. One more time, Mother. Just one … more and then … then by God … then by God we … by God we … Am I …? Is that …? Hold on, one more min … minute and I … This won’t hurt.”
Zoot!
“Did it?”
The mercury vapor yardlights glared beyond the house. The Lombardy poplar and the Chinese elm shook their little leaves in a sudden sighing release of air. Relief of wind. Then heard the braying blat, as from a Wagnerian tuba, of one clam barking through a window. (“Sorry, honey. …”) One desert clam, alone in the night. Files of parked automobiles, pickup trucks, cattle trucks, enameled steel gleaming by streetlight, waited under the dancing shadows of swaying tree limbs. Down the asphalt street, past more suburban ranch-style tract houses, the last of the winter leaves skittered before the breeze, past the offices of Love Realty: “Get Your Piece of the Future Today!,” past the franchised Ford agency: “Love Ford — Dudley Deals in Honest Wheels!,” past the headquarters of the Love Trucking & Construction Co.: “Building a Bigger Utah for a Better Tomorrow!,” past the stately red brick structure of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, past the whitewashed plasterboard warehouse of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the little white box, with token aluminum steeple, where the local Baptists met to meet their Maker, its illuminated marquee announcing the title for the coming Sunday’s sermon: “No Job Is Too Big Or Too Hard For God,” Dr. Harry Palms, Pastor. …
And out of town and down the narrow highway into the dark of the desert night, past the goodbye billboard at the last cattleguard on the other side of rancher Love’s bob-wire fence: “Leaving Hardrock, Utah, Pop. 3,500 Today 35,000 Tomorrow! Have A Happy And —Come Again When You Can!”
“Well, honey …”
“It’s all right, Dudley, don’t fret.”
“I tried, honey. …”
“Sure you did.”
“Maybe in the morning …?”
“Sure, Dudley.”
7
Bonnie Abbzug-Sarvis
Reviews Her Life
She bent over the crib, contemplating her sleeping child, and thought.
He is so beautiful. So perfectly beautiful. Those rosebud lips, that eatable little bit of a bite of a nose, those black eyelashes so long and fine they look fake, those rosy cheeks, that curly dark-brown Yiddisher hair, I could eat him, eat him, gobble him down like an apple turnover, my little boy, my Reuben sandwich, that sweet bellybutton in the center of the cute round belly, his little dingdong all complete (no 20 percent rabbi’s discount there, no sir!), his tight soft little scrotum, oh my but the girls will love him!, and his chubby legs, his chubby knees, his fat little feet with the ten pink toes you want to nibble on like corn niblets, I could eat him, I could I could, my darling my pet my sweet my doll my baby my bundle of joy my little bungle from Heaven. …
Suppose. Suppose they ever tried to take him away from me. Who? Never mind who, just suppose. Don’t even think of such a thing. It couldn’t ever happen. But suppose. No, no, no, think of something else, anything else, such things could never happen. But they do. Kidnappers. But we’re not rich anymore, old Doc works more hours and makes less money than any doctor in the whole city, should’ve stayed in heart surgery, everybody knows that. Hardly anybody knows that. Sick people everywhere. Child molesters. Every week a child disappears, turns up later in a … No. No! But they do. Those scum, we ought to dump them on an empty island in the middle of the ocean, for life, those murderers and rapists and child molesters, dump them on a desert island in the far Pacific, let them eat breadfruit, let them rot, let them kill and rape and molest each other. Never let them off. Put them all there. But we watch him, watch him, never let him out of our sight, never for a single second, but those other women out there, old hags that never had a baby, those weirdos from the rubyfruit jungle with their dry hard tits and withered wombs that get the idea all of a sudden when they’re forty years old that they … Not mine. They try even touching mine, those hagfish, and I’ll bust them in the mouth, a knuckle sandwich for lunch, a mouthful of bloody chiclets if they so much as lay a hand on even look at my little Rube.
Bonnie. Such talk. You sound like a crazy girl. A certifiable loony from the bottom bin. Hate. I could feel the blood boiling in my head, anyone, anyone at all try anything, anything at all, with my baby, my boy, my Reuben. Men, women, bears, lions, alligators, scorpions, any animal comes near my baby with malice aforethought and I’ll fight to kill. Simple. Absolutely fundamental. Axiom Number One, as Doc would say. Fuckin’ A-right, as George would say. The bottom line.
Look at him. He smells so sweet. I love to watch him sleep, his little chest goes up and down, that’s the heart beating, of course, the little round belly goes up and down, his diaphragm breathing, like a little bellows, pumping air into those pure pink untarnished lungs.
Untarnished? We hope so. That air’s not so good around here anymore. Damned garbage from the freeways, the smelter, all those projects, half a million too many cars and trucks, we’re breathing dirt. Pure filth. Maybe we should go back to Green River, live on the houseboat full time again. But Doc couldn’t do it, keep that job at the U. And then he’d fall off the boat when I wasn’t looking and drown. Takes only three minutes, Doc said. Three minutes, no more, no more life. Gone. Absolutely gone, man. Forever.
Child molesters. There’s danger everywhere. Look at him, not a care in the world. But he does have bad dreams sometimes. How could a little boy only three years old have bad dreams? I don’t know but he does. Danger. Danger. Rattlesnakes in the grass, alas, and zero at the bone.
There’s somebody out there in the dark, watching me, watching us, close that blind, draw those curtains, can’t be, nobody there, stop scaring yourself, wish we had a dog, a big fierce killer watchdog. I hate that kind of dog. A pooch, that’s what I want, a little yellow-haired mongrel mutt with big brown eyes and a stubby tail he keeps wagging all the time. Would bark though when strangers came sneaking around. We’re getting paranoid as pigeons, Abbzug, what the hell’s the matter with you, woman? Wasn’t like this before. Didn’t have a baby before. And now the second on the way, poor Doc he didn’t really want a second, I know, he would never admit it but I know I can tell I can read his mind like an open book, he’s about as subtle as a monkey in a cage, poor old guy.
Men.
They all think they’re so smart and they’re all so dumb. Crude. Crude people, men. Dense as rocks. They think like rocks, in a straight line, nothing but gravity, straight down the hill, that’s how they think. No feelings. They think they feel but they only feel with their skin, that’s how they feel. Skin deep. Nothing makes sense to them unless you can explain it. Have to draw them pictures, diagrams, charts, formulas, equations, simple propositions with a subject and a verb and an object, that’s it, that’s all they, only way they, no sensitivity, no inner understanding, no empathy. Sympathy, sure, that’s on the surface, only skin, they understand sympathy and can do a pretty good act with sympathy but empathy —? Wouldn’t know what you were talking ab
out.
I feel sorry for men.
All horn and push, they don’t even understand sex, the one thing they think they’re really good at, the idiots. I’m a man, he said, and I insist on my right to act like a child all my fucking life. Hayduke? Seldom? Jack Kerouac? Who said that?
Wish Doc would come home. He’s late. So quiet here. Should play some music. Get back to that piano, Abbzug, you used to be pretty good on the old 88s. Long time gone, honeybee. Look at my fingers. The diaper expert. Shopping carts. Laundry. Good for cooking. You’re a good cooker, Mummy, Reuben says, bless his sweet little heart. Hell of a lot nicer than what that bastard George Hayduke used to say. Called me a good fuck like he was handing me a bunch of fresh long-stemmed roses, the pig. The swine. Most men are swine. You can take that for granted.
Feel sorry for men.
Too quiet here. Wish Doc would come.
So crude. Sawing down that awful billboard, he kept snarling at me, growling don’t bend the saw don’t bend the saw just ease it in, your job is just to guide it, keep it in the old groove, he said he’d do the push and pull. Gross. Vulgar. No real sense of humor, just that kind of crude sexual innuendo, that’s all they understand. The old double entendre. And they think it’s so funny. So fucking funny. Just sick if you ask me.
And weak. Frail. Always getting sick. Always feeling sorry for themselves. Come on strong, fade fast, that’s them for you. Big talk, small cock. Big truck, puny fuck. The bigger the buckle the teensier the weeny. Those little shriveled tubes they’re so proud of, you’d think they’d paint them red, let them hang out all day. But wouldn’t dare, some little bird might come along, snip it off. Snip snip snip, said little bird, now I’ve got your little worm, take it home and feed it to my nippers. Luncheon tidbit. Hors d’ouevres and horsecock, it’s all the same old baloney.
Men.
Thank God I’m a woman.