Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (20 page)

“I’ve got a seminar,” she called after him, but he was almost through the doorway, waving back all right.

In the courtyard a crush of student cars, headlights criss-crossing in confusion, horns blowing anxiously, brake fluid heating, drivers itching to buttonhook the evening’s frustration with quickie tidbits. Peanut butter and jelly on rye toast. Warm apple turnover. Pizzaburger with hotsauce from Guido’s kitchen. Home to a Playmate tacked on the ceiling. Masturbation in a wet-strength Kleenex.

He cut off a convertible, white Lincoln Capri, and the driver leaned on his horn, protesting. “Shut the fuck up,” he screamed back, a homicidal bellow.

There came immediate silence everywhere, a number of cars stalling as if the sudden malediction had mortally stunned the little rotor-hearts in their distributors. During the pause Gnossos gunned the Anglia out of the driveway, swerved onto the dormitory lawn, and accelerated through a complex of footpaths and dormant flowerbeds. A police whistle blew in his unmistakable direction but he ignored it, continued along the middle of the sidewalk at forty-five, and watched the pedestrians fleeing to the left and right like startled giraffes. He drove into the street, between two narrowly spaced elm trees, kissing their barks with door handles, then bounced over the curb with a couple of stiff bumps and flashed across Harpy Creek Bridge, driving on the wrong side of the road.

As he approached the desolate Dairy Queen, he cut the motor and let the car freewheel into its old space. There were only a few automobiles left, a motorcycle and two Lambrettas. Probably a six-state alarm out for the Anglia, fuzz combing the countryside. See them swarming into Mojo’s little lair with searchbeams, he-ho, what have we here? But the loft was nearly empty, coeds safely home, only the vampires for possible partners. The hairy little man with the narghile was blowing eight-bar blues in the middle of the floor, snoring between measures, being ignored. Juan Carlos Rosenbloom was unconscious on one of the burlap-covered pallets, oblivious of the vampire who tested the gold of his Saint Christopher medal with her teeth and fondled the sequins on his rodeo shirt. Drew Youngblood sat sober in the corner, reading
The Foreign Affairs Quarterly
, looking up as Gnossos sauntered in. A yellow, caustic haze hovered
in the air, lingered among the smoke fumes like hydrogen sulfide or some yeasty reagent. Through the metal, clandestine door at the end of the brick wall came occasional, muffled whimpers and moans. Regular little Gomorrah.

“Where you been, baby?” asked one of the vampires, pupils adrift in a sea of mulberry blood vessels, “it’s all been happening since you split.”

“Talking to the mirror, man, you ever try it?”

“Don’t put me on.”

“Dig it sometime. Dig your mouth.”

“You’re putting me on.”

“Lip-synch goes off just a hair, slips ahead. Now be a good chic an’ get me a Red Cap, would you? Who’s the hairy cat with the ax?”

“Locomotive. And get your own goddamned beer.”

Gnossos picked a piece of her leotard between thumb and forefinger, hissed, and whispered, “Your life is in danger.” Youngblood at the same time gave him the high sign, and Locomotive sang:

“What’s up?” from Gnossos.

“Nothing much, really. Maybe something in that other room, from the sound of it.”

“I’m hip, but they’re choosy about guests.”

“So it seems. I’m glad you came back, anyway, we wanted to talk to you.”

“Hey listen, that girl I split with, that Kristin chic, you know anything about her?”

“How do you mean?”

“Like I said.”

“She’s a friend of Jack’s, I think. Why?”

“Nothing, man.” The vampire arriving with a tray of opened Red Caps, potato chips, and a bowl of creamy dip. She set it down next to the stoned Locomotive, who continued to sing with his shirt open, chest like a bear rug, thick lumpy glasses staring at the floor. “That’s all’s left,” said she timidly.

“Have a nightcap, Youngblood,” from magnanimous Sophocles.

“What else you want, baby?” the vampire taking a new tack, folding up next to them, blinking back runny mascara.

“And old Rosenbloom over there,” said Gnossos, ignoring her. “What’s his story? All those names.”

“I’m available,” said the vampire to her amulet.

“He’s German.”

“No.”

“You didn’t know that? Parents shipped him to Venezuela, got scared the war would spread and had him converted.”

“Catholic?”

“He picked up on it, that’s the weird part. He’s very devout.”

Poor old Jew. Saint Christopher keeps him safe in his wanderings. Me without a rebus, too vulnerable. “Oh, and another thing, Youngblood. This Pankhurst deal you keep in front. I’m a-political, right? No girl scout cookie campaigns, P.T.A. meetings, anything like that. I assume it’s what you wanted to talk about. They start moving in on my pad, I’ll deal with it all privately. But this committee-style setup; wow, really.”

“You don’t
have
to be so stand-offish, Paps. All the other independents—”

“Truly, man, you’d be wasting rhetoric, it’s not my pattern. Dig the Crusades. Lots of guys got hamstrung and staked out. The rest got the Turkish clap. Nobody got the old grail.”

“I got a little mixture left,” said the vampire, “you wanna make some movies?”

“Just the Red Cap, ducks.”

“Lush does your head, baby.”

“Ain’t lush, it’s Red Cap.”

“You?” she tried Youngblood, pointing an ebony fingernail.

Youngblood shook his head, then pressed for a last-minute advantage. “It’s not all as Mickey Mouse as you might think.”

“Please, man, I’m just not having any,” Gnossos glancing at the gurgling Locomotive, then at the forlorn vampire, who was giving up and crawling away on all fours. A sudden, colossal weariness blew through his bones as he watched her go. He yawned and slouched down, afraid that Youngblood was searching desperately for something significant to say. He waved him into casual silence and offered a benevolent smile for recompense, then stretched out on one of the Indian prints. “Later,” he said, closing his eyes.

The lids stung with soothing, soporific warmth.

Unh. What sound?

He was awakened by the squeak of unoiled hinges, the shuffle of tired bodies. He rolled over sluggishly, his night torn open, and with one eye watched a lumpy apparition in a silk dressing gown, emerging from the door in the brick wall. The figure was murmuring to itself, and an odor of evil swam biliously through the loft.

Mojo. Lie still. His hair mussed, mustache-ends drooping. From the shadows of the chamber within came sounds of wet flesh. A phthisic hand reaching, a girl’s, that same one. Whose? But before he could remember, Heap joined his master on the threshold and closed the ominous door. They moved along on tiptoes. As they passed the coiled, sleeping pile of unused vampires, the monkey jumped from the press of bodies and chattered a protest. Ugh, wake up.

All at once a semidark transparence glowed through the skylight. Dawn. Gnossos watched it for a moment, and when he looked again, Heap and Mojo were gone. He stood, stretched painfully, lost his balance, regained it, and found the monkey squatting on the floor, glaring. He tried glaring back, but the sight revolted him and he had to look away, taking deep breaths. The odor was overwhelming, like spilled ammonia. Finally he checked the rest of the loft, looking for an ally, but his friends were gone. Only the sleeping Locomotive remained, collapsed on the narghile. He struggled with his parka, threw it over his shoulders cape-style, and shuffled to the exit on wobbly legs. The monkey shrieked and struggled furiously against the chain as Gnossos, in a jolting rush of fear-inspired energy, jumped the last six steps to freedom.

Outside, the twittering whistle of morning birds, a wild, cleansing cacophony of tiny cries.

But after a moment he became aware of still another sound, a malevolent, slapping rhythm driving away the wings. What?

He made his uneasy way through the chilly morning mist, rubbing his eyes as he went, scraping the ale taste off his tongue with his teeth. The slapping was colored by a metallic ring, the kiss of leather on steel. Then a quick inspiration of breath, a sensual sigh, nearly a moan. It made the skin crawl along his thighs. It was coming from the Dairy Queen, not twenty yards away.

He stepped more cautiously now, not wanting to be seen, padding through the snow, pausing to pick up a handful for his headache. Eeeeeee, coldcoldcold. He wiped it off with his sleeves, ceasing all motion as the weight of the nearby slap became more forceful. He crept to the edge of the clearing, then stopped as if struck, his heartbeat crunching in his ears.

Heap was poised in front of the microbus, the bullwhip gripped in his bony fist. He raised it high above his head, swung it in a sinister circle, and flashed out, grunting, at the fenders and grill of the car.

Ten feet away, leaning with his back against the aluminum of the Dairy Queen, his silk robe fallen open, his legs apart, was Mojo. Beneath the robe he was naked and his pulpy knees were slightly bent. His penis was in his hand, his transfigured gaze was on Heap, and his rhythm was steady and forceful. “More,” he whispered, groaning, as the yellow bullwhip cracked again and again against the enamel of the microbus. “Please, harder.”

Gnossos stumbled away, perspiring the moisture of mortal dread. He paused for a moment, breathing deeply, then ran back to the highway, mind’s eye awash with the electrifying scene. At first he cantered, hands in his pocket, later he walked, and finally he ambled.

After an hour the birds had stopped their song of celebration and the dawn had lifted. He reached into his rucksack for the Hohner F, put it to his lips, and thought the day’s first tangible thought as he played along.

But the day became a new one.

He awoke at noon, the sun exploding under the lids of his eyes like silent-film incendiary bombs; ears ringing with the drip and seethe of the thaw. Through the slats on his bedside window (boarded up with plywood and gypsum since the night Pamela Watson-May had tried to kill him), he could see the swollen Swiss drolleries on the porch. The snow had melted and slipped away, saturating the wood. The fat icicles were gone as well, patches of lawn miraculously green after months of entombment, walks and porches clear but for the wet; beams and timbers creaking with the sigh of shrugged-away weight, stretching back into place. All the parts and parcels of the winter that had been were sliding down the gullies of the hill, plunging into gorges, swelling streams brown and gurgling, creeping through fissures and corridors of shale in the glacial countryside, skimming over tops of fallow fields, across slopes like ducks’ backs, seeking a level: the broad, steel-blue plain of bottomless Maeander, where if
you listened carefully you heard the French and Indian cannons booming as some monumental piece of earth or stone was shouldered loose from a cliff face by the swelling lunge of ice beneath and dumped into the flawless, pregnant surface of the lake.

He bellowed like a Cretan bull. “Fitzgore! Where the hell are you? I’m in love!”

But Fitzgore was nowhere to be seen. The apartment was silent and his tidy bed was still unused from the night before. The only sign of him was implicit in a partially unpacked shipment of Victorian hot-water bottles, copper and brass. “In
love
, Fitzgore,” Gnossos tried again, then leapt from the sack with an arabesque bound. He was wearing only a black motorcycle teeshirt and khaki socks. He hopped across the room on an imaginary pogo stick, and pounded heavily on the French doors, shaking the walls, jarring loose the hunting horns. “Rajamuttus!” he roared in celebration of the impossible event, “lotus, rosewater, Ravi Shankar!” Then zoom, away to the kitchen for a quick wash in the sink. (The basin in the bathroom was beyond use, swimming with waterlogged underpants, ammonia, and Listerine.) He tossed his teeshirt and socks on the mound of egg shells and cheese rind festering in the corner, and a small cloud of lazy bugs rose with the smelly disturbance. They settled again, sniffed at the new additions, and gasped off into cracks. Gnossos sitting in the sink, back to the faucet, washing his pits with a diluted mixture of liquid Lux, his feet in blue, lukewarm water, old vine leaves awash, blobs of poached egg white, puffy all-bran crumbs, and rice. This, the first ablution in weeks, humming Yerrakina under his breath, massaging his chest with a pink cellulose sponge, dehydrated and scratchy, good for circulation. He considered disinfecting his pubes, then decided to abandon body and soul to a later, evening bath. Take it just before she comes, salt and oils, little bit of scent. Max Factor bubbles?

drun droon droon droon-droon-droon-droon

He dried with a gray and tepid towel, flung it into the corner when he was finished, glanced hurriedly about the cupboards, and made mental notes on supplies that needed laying in. Then he ran around abandoning hermetic discretion, opening all the windows, some of them going up easily, others—like the one with the plywood and gypsum—needing a screwdriver. When the wood was too wet, he used Calvin’s hammer: must remember to return it someday, Exhibit A for Dean Magnolia’s case. Maybe melt it, have it cast as an evil eye, hurl it through the Mississippi cabbage-head with a sling.

On Academae Avenue, across the street from his house, an anonymous couple strolled hand in hand, colliding clumsily as they tried keeping step. He
pointed a deliriously happy finger, forgetting his nakedness, and screamed, “
YAAAAAAAAANH!
” They leapt apart and ran away, but nothing could stop him. He’d felt the potent surge of warmth in the new air, smelled the shifted wind. Mean Mother Winter, man, poof, all gone. He jammed the heavy parka into a drawer with mothballs and lifted a damp, crumpled pair of lightweight corduroys from the rucksack. They had come from the same cornucopia of a forgotten laundry bag in San Francisco’s Coexistence Bagel Shop that had yielded the 1920’s baseball cap he pulled down now over his hair and ears. The cap was a white dome with faded gray pinstripes, a little black button on the zenith, a pale orange peak. Om, zup goes the soul straight through the button, grand slam for the old gods, over the center-field bleachers.