Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

  “Not my skull, man. Where do they sell that cane stuff, anyway?”

  In a whisper, pulling him under a tree: “Man, they’re going to be coming all the way, clear across the island, smack down the middle, right from Oriente!”

  “You’ve been talking to somebody, baby, you ought to watch who you hang out with.”

  “Batista’s going to lose, Paps, he’s going under, bang, like that.”

  “Listen, you know what I want to be when I grow up?”

  “You’ve got to make it, man, we’ll be in the goddamned mountains Friday morning, afternoon at the latest.”

  “A maker of mirrors, that’s what. Is it maybe too much to ask?”

  “You’ve even got a beard started, let it grow out, man.”

  Gnossos began to tell him that it was all right, to go in peace, and like that. A similar blessing had been on his lips when Aquavitus interrupted them on the ship. Only, this time it was the Buddha.

  He glided out of the shadows, across the square, a seven-foot Negro with an opal in his forehead. He stepped briefly through a patch of sunlight, grinned, and vanished into a bar. On the back of his orange robe was the single word:

  MOTHERBALL

  “Hey,” from Gnossos, pointing a quick finger. “Did you see that?”

  But from nowhere an armored car clattered into the street. Three helmeted soldiers rode the roof with automatic weapons, and everyone in sight dove at doorways. “Gangbusters,” said Heff, jerking around. Shutters banged shut, store fronts rolled down, tables overturned. They were the only people left without cover. The soldiers pivoted and opened fire madly at the entrance of the bar. Bottles splintered, windows crashed, and Gnossos tugged at Heffalump, first one way, then the other. The firing stopped for a moment but bullets sang and ricocheted through the tropical air. A palm frond snapped on the tree above them and tumbled to the ground. There were screams and more slamming shutters. The soldiers fired again, this time laughing. Gnossos dropped his remaining sugar cane, said, “Fake it, baby,” and ran with his hands cupped over his ears, yelling insanely as he moved, “Lalalalalalala . . . ” Heff stumbled by his side, grabbed for a leg, but said not a word.

  Again the firing paused but Heff stayed down. Gnossos had reached a splintered mimosa by the curb and was crouched against its trunk, rucksack tucked between his legs, body shielded from the armored car. Something on the façade of their hotel caught his attention and he glanced up to find Jack standing by the balcony, looking on as curiously as an opera-goer in a box seat. He waved her away as the soldiers began shooting up anything that moved. First a terrified cat, then a flag, finally the balcony. Gnossos’ stomach twitched. The glass around the window flew to pieces. He scrambled back to Heff and again tugged at his sleeve, pointing at the window, screaming crazily above the noise. But nothing happened. He tugged again.

  Heff had a hole the size of a thumbtack in his Adam’s apple. His eyes were wide open and twisted crosswise. There was blood soaking his kinky hair. Gnossos threw up his arms and wailed a single, faltering cry that rang in the afternoon like the peal of a shattering bell.

  19

  HEFFALUMP DOWN said the cable. One to an address in Harlem, the other for Beth Blacknesse.

  Jack, her face bandaged from flying glass, rocked the body in her arms, hummed a private atonal tune, whispered mortal secrets into the sealed and swollen ears, and kept from crying until the police arrived two hours later.

  When it happened, Juan Carlos Rosenbloom had been soothing the gun-shy Judy Lumpers with Cuba Libres in Sloppy Joe’s. He took a cab to the crowded scene, looked at the distorted face, choked on a tepid surge of liver bile, and ran away to search out a priest.

  Judy Lumpers crept into seclusion at the elegant Hotel Nacional. She locked the door and turned off the phone, after wiring her Larchmont parents for emergency bread. She felt a compulsive need to visit the continental foyer and play the slot machines.

  Gnossos, standing in the square, warned no one to touch so much as an eyelash of the souring body. He finally ignored the scorching gonococcus in his urinary tract and drank two frosted tumblers of straight Bacardi. The priest administered Extreme Unction and inquired, via Rosenbloom, if he should arrange some ground. There came a terrible throb of transcendent memory, a palsied vision of Monsignor Putti purging a hangover, annointing toes.

  But the Harlem cable returned unacknowledged. A long-distance call through the confusion of the neighborhood bodega told disquieting tales. Nobody know no Heffalump here, you trying to put us on? Boy used to go by, fit the description all right but that Abraham Jackson White, scholarship boy, he gone to college. You talk to the settlement house, man, he don’t have no family. He in trouble? He in some kind of mess? Everyone at the bar of the bodega stopping to stare as Gnossos wailed again. He had never known the name.

  Abraham Jackson White. Of all the ridiculous combinations.

  He left Juan Carlos as collateral for the telephone charges and went back to the hotel just as the rum began to etch. Yet incredibly, Jack had split for the mountains. In an envelope with a coconut palm on the flap were two hundred dollars in American Express traveler’s checks and a note which said she had copied his words from the wall and he would understand.

  But he didn’t understand.

  In the residential section of Vedado the priest wiped an oily face with a linen handkerchief and explained to Rosenbloom that no finer grave site was available at the price. The loose beads of perception seemed to be falling through a hole in the tangible surface of the world and spilling all over the four-dimensional floor. Gnossos rubbed his stubble wearily and asked if anyone was liable to bomb the graveyard.

  “The priest say every leaders like to live here when the shooting stop. Vedado survive all revolutiong.”

  He nodded, and helped the workers dig the inevitable cavity while an ebony casket rested in the shade, waiting. The silver-dollar kids from the seawall appeared again and stood behind trees. When the workers had trouble with the ropes and rusty pulleys, they came forward and helped, and silence was the password that brought them all together. The priest took out a book to offer prayers over the lowered body but Gnossos told him no. Instead he unfolded paper from his rucksack and wrote with the same stubby pencil he’d used in the hotel:

  This is Heffalump, coming back.

  Maybe, only I doubt it,

  the ashes of his tinted Innocence

  will annoint us all.

  The paper fluttered into the grave like a nearly weightless, injured moth. Behind it went the last of the severed rabbits’ feet, a bottlecap from Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Tonic, a piece of moldy feta, loose pot seeds to flourish in the tropical heat, a vial of paregoric and his Hohner F. He placed the harmonica above the buried head, and planted the pot seeds in a circle around it. You’re all through, baby; what can I say?

  Juan Carlos came over with his face down, skin still a little green. “The priest, Gnossos, he want to know about the stone.”

  Beads were still dropping through the hole, but with less frequency and clatter, and Gnossos only shook his head silently.

  “He tell me she importang.”

  “What’s that, man?”

  “He say, what kind of stone you want? For marking the graves.”

  The workers were sprinkling water on the clay to make it settle. “No stone, man.”

  There was more conversation in Spanish, much polite singsong inflection, then, “He say everyone got stones.”

  “I don’t want it marked is all, let’s skip the small shit, okay? It’s over. It doesn’t matter, man.” Gnossos stamped firmly on the remaining loose earth, fighting the sensations of excessive heat and exhaustion. “Tell him there’s no more. He can bill me at Casa Hilda.” He began to walk away but remembered something and went back with the keys to Fitzgore’s Impala. “You can drive, can’t you?”

  “Who me? You kidding?”

  “I’ll see you in Athené. You can leave in the morning. Take Lumpers.”
>
  “Where you going?”

  “Out.”

  “What you talking about? You okay?”

  He made a sign that he was, then motioned for the silver-dollar kids to follow. They hesitated, chattering among themselves, and finally marched after him in a long column, coins jingling in their pockets.

  Gnossos the gnu and his gnomes.

  Hup, two, three, four . . .

  The bar across the square from Calle O’Reilly was decimated by submachine gun fire and boarded up. A rusty rainspout, however, embedded in the caked adobe, spilled a torrent of water at his sneakered feet. Just about where we left off, buddy boy, but it won’t be too long.

  The gang of kids approached in twos and threes, breaking ranks, following his gesture, and heard him speak the single word “Motherball.” They smiled, poked one another, and he had to try again:

  “Señor Motherball, babies. C’mon, dónde?”

  They shook the money in their pockets for polite reference and started back across the square until he leaned against a lamppost, drawing dollar signs in the sky.

  Casa Hilda was where they took him and where it seemed to be. But then it only made the usual maniac sense. Like backtracking in the snow, where you’re going is where you’ve never been but it looks like you were there already, so everybody hunts the other way. They marched through the front door, down the narrow tiled corridor, into a damp courtyard, where a girl in a red dress was learning to play castanets. The kids shuffled about, sat in twos and threes, and pointed to a heavy wooden door that swung from the wall at a perilous tilt. “Thas him,” said one as another drew a dollar sign in the dirt, grinned, and indicated they would wait. All month, I’d bet. He hesitated by the door, sniffing, adjusting the rucksack on his shoulder, looking at the girl, who motioned him to go on. Bottomless pit on the other side, rodents in a typhoid pool, hear my falling scream.

  Inside, he could see nothing. Too much gloom after the bright pastels of daylight. A smell of musk and heroin, movements in the dark, tempt them not.

  “It’s only me, gang,” he tried, straightening up.

  “Flame,” said a familiar voice, by way of reply, and a hand lit the wick of a kerosene lamp.

  The light came up on a decrepit pock-marked bar and a pall of narcotizing smoke. Like the visage of a Cheshire cat was Louie Motherball’s benevolent grin. He stood without a shirt in fuchsia suspenders, sweatlines trickling across his hogshead belly, wiping glasses, breathing clouds of sen-sen fumes into the room. The flame-providing hand belonged to an emaciated Chinese-Cuban woman with a mustache. She sat in a faded maroon dress, sipping from a gallon bowl through a length of surgical tubing. A large sign said TONIGHT ONLY: GENERAL WILLIAM BOOTH ENTERS INTO HEAVEN. Gnossos with lockjaw, staring.

  “Long time,” said Motherball, indicating a stool. There was a pause. “Sit down, why don’t you.”

  “Down, why don’t you,” echoed the woman.

  Gnossos moved carefully, nodding, and said nothing. Another silence, this one longer.

  “You endure so well,” from Motherball. “Your vigor inspires.”

  “Vigor,” from the woman.

  The huge man leaned forward intimately, lowering his voice. “We heard of troubles. Monkey bites.”

  The woman turned down the flame, and hollows danced in her cheeks, flickering.

  “I’m all right,” said Gnossos.

  A towel which read “Havana Hilton” was used to mop up the lines of sweat, leaving the belly momentarily dry. “You don’t look it, but then we all know about appearances.”

  Gnossos shifted weight as the woman giggled. He leaned his head over to ask who.

  “Mrs. Motherball. I’d forgotten you were strangers. The second Mrs. Motherball.”

  “Charmed,” from Gnossos, avoiding her breath.

  Louie touched his eyes mournfully with the towel and said, “Poor Maude.”

  “Maude,” giggled the woman.

  “My first wife,” he explained, going back to the glasses. “Deceased. A violent end in the River Taos, perhaps word reached you. Pliers and acid. Fishhooks. Have a little Summer Snow?”

  The beads were falling singly now, but the hole through which they fell had narrowed, so that some of them missed the mark and bounced back up into the tangible world. “Why not?”

  “Why not, indeed?” Sen-sen fumes blew into the black, musty room. Motherball opened an icebox in the shadows and lifted out containers of milk and white rum. He blended them in a battery-driven mixer with crushed cubes, fresh heart of cactus, confectioner’s sugar and shredded coconut. Gnossos’ personal mug was served with a froth of chopped peyote buds, and he tested for bitterness as he heard, “You’re of course familiar with the works of Vachel Lindsay?”

  “Sooooon,” said Mrs. Motherball, mysteriously.

  “Little reading thing happening later. Like the sign says.”

  “Into Heaven,” came the giggle.

  “I’ve got business, Louie.”

  Motherball pausing in the glass-wiping to cast a suspicious glance. “Naturally, a little business, good for your head. Drink up, man, you want some surgical tubing, cuts the oxygen, gives a little side kick.”

  Gnossos took the length of rubber and said, “I want to see the Buddha is all.”

  “Business keeps the cells together, buys a little soul time, yes? Take Lindsay, now, the fellow had a great deal going for him.”

  “Just tell me about the Buddha, man.”

  “Peddled a pamphlet on the road, see, little thing called Rhymes To Be Traded for Bread. Cool, but functional, yes?”

  Gnossos put down his mug and set the rucksack on the bar, breathing deeply. “Where’s he at, Louie, I’m up-tight.”

  “He’s right behind you, Gnossos, stay loose and all. He’s always right behind you.”

  Before he turned around, he knew that Louie spoke the truth. The presence was ominous and sudden. A faint rustle in the shadows, a motion accompanied by the swish and whisper of heavy silk. Again the smell of heroin.

  The Buddha laid a serene, bangled hand on his shoulder. A voice with timbre mellowed by draughts of honeydew and ambrosia spoke the words: “Pretty eyes.”

  Gnossos chilled from nose to pubes as the impossibly gelid fingers froze the shoulder through his boy scout shirt. The touch of a year-old corpse, turn around.

  A massively robed personage towered twenty inches above his highest hair and offered a munificent smile. It had perfumed, nut-brown skin, flawless and taut. An impeccably wrapped turban contained its head and an iridescent opal flashed in the middle of its brow, gleaming, hypnotic. Its eyes shimmered like stygian moons. Stoned. Ossified beyond belief, corpuscles swimming in saturated horse. Say something.

  “Hello, man.”

  “Motherball, he got them pretty eyes. He want everybody to See what he See.” The Buddha lifted the entire punch bowl of Summer Snow in one hand and elevated it gracefully to his pursed violet lips. The castanets rattled in the courtyard, beads began to fall once more through the hole.

  “Jingle-jingle,” said Mrs. Motherball in a private reverie. “Bang-bang.”

  “I’m a long time coming, Buddha,” from Gnossos, turning cautiously on the stool. “Gimme some skin.”

  “It’s on you, baby.”

  Sure enough, it was. “Fat Fred says hello.”

  “He free to talk.”

  “That’s the Buddha,” from Louie Motherball, digging him, shaking his head.

  “Jingle-bang,” said his wife, sucking noisily through her empty tube, hinting for a refill.

  “Like I said, I’m a long time coming.”

  “I hear you, Gnossos.”

  “And a long time gone,” said Louie.

  “That right.”

  “You think it’s right?”

  “He told you,” said Louie, digging, “I heard him say it.”

  “Okay then,” from Gnossos, “maybe you can give me a little word, right?”

  The Buddha dipped his huge head refle
ctively, put down the bowl of Summer Snow, and replaced his hands in the folds of the silk robe. “I try, baby.”

  “Dig him,” from Louie.

  “Bang-bang.”

  “If you got them big ears,” said the Buddha.

  “He’s down,” said Motherball, mixing again, chopping buds.

  “How long, baby?”

  “Long enough,” from Gnossos.

  “Tell me.”

  Gnossos said, “It looks like up is all.”

  “That right,” said the Buddha.

  “In Taos,” added Motherball, “he was already down.”

  “Ting-a-ling, jingle-bang.”

  “That was fifty years ago,” said Gnossos. “You know about Heffalump?”

  The Buddha touched his opal with a manicured index finger, nodded his idol-sized skull, and said gently, “We saw him go down.”

  Gnossos remembered the Adam’s apple, gaping, dumb. “It made a sound.”

  “We heard the sound,” from Motherball, pausing.

  “Ting-a-bang, Bang-bang.”

  “Some people are going to hear it yet.”

  “That true,” said the Buddha, waiting.

  Gnossos scooped up some of the leftover froth with a spoon and munched on the buds. “Straighten me then, man; I’m looking to be straight is all.”

  The Buddha smiled and moved his elbows in his robes, Motherball pushed a new batch of liquid toward his mesmerized wife, but none of them spoke a word.

  “Somebody has a plan,” Gnossos went on. “You dig what I’m saying? I see the signs.”

  “Tell us,” from Louie.

  “Monkey signs, babies, signs in the Adirondacks—”

  “Heap signs,” said Motherball. “Pachuco signs.”

  “That’s right. Signs in Nevada you wouldn’t believe.”

  “We believe the signs,” said the Buddha.

  “But mostly there’s the Mojo sign.”

  “Yeah,” from Motherball, “we know the Mojo sign.”

  “Aquavitus-jingle-bang.”

  “Giacomo too, check. Where’s he at?”