Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (36 page)

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 reflectively, 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?”

“Giacomo on the payroll, baby.”

“What payroll, man?”

“He on the Mojo payroll, baby.”

The lockjaw hit Gnossos again, this time from the bottom up.

“Mojo movin’ out,” continued the Buddha. “He goin’ big.”

“He’s looking around, all right,” from Motherball. “Listen to the Buddha.”

“Mr. Giacomo, dig, he only on the payroll.”

Gnossos traced little figure eights on the moisture of the portable mixer, first one way, then the other. Everyone was silent, and in the pause, he fancied he could hear the visceral seepage in his gonococcic cells. The fantasy brought with it a fleeting sensation of mortal danger, blowpipes hidden in crevices, belladonna in the Bacardi. He measured his situation, the three improbable creatures who made up his company, the squadron of
cannibal kids who waited outside, the uniformed assassins who cruised the streets, the moneyless rucksack with the dwindling remains of his identity shredded among the fluff. “You guys,” he finally asked, “what about you?”

A pause before Motherball answered with a grin, “Independent.”

“We in the shadows,” said the Buddha.

“No more franchise,” said Motherball. “We have our own little thing. We can’t be bought.”

“Man,” said Gnossos, “I want to believe you.”

“You been down too long,” from the Buddha. “You got to have faith.”

“Ring-a-ding-dong, Mojo-bang.”

“I know what Gnossos needs,” said Motherball practically.

“Bread,” from the Buddha, again touching his opal.

“Let’s us talk a little bread, baby.”

That night Louie Motherball wove his magic circle, spun his rhythmic words, hypnotized his psychedelic legion, spoke to opiated faces. Gnossos sat with taxi drivers, prostitutes, refugee Taos Indians, and the recently paid-off gnomes. Each of them sucked at a private surgical tube connected to a regulator which pulsated in the contents of a cyclopean bowl. The megaphonic voice spoke out:

“Booth led boldly with his big bass drum
—

(
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
)

The Saints smiled gravely and they said, ‘He’s come.’

(
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
)”

In the shadows behind Motherball, on the tops of a dozen antique barrels, the girl in the red dress from the courtyard worked with her assistants. They unscrewed the hollow shells of castanets by the hundreds, they opened the secretly hinged gourds of embellished maracas, they filled the waiting pockets with sweetly smelling horse.

“Unwashed legions with the ways of Death
—

(
Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?
)

(
Banjos
)”

A phonograph needle was dropped into place by the swimmer who’d been hit on the head by one of Gnossos’ silver dollars, and a percussive chorus of marching mummers rendered the smoky air.

“Sages and sibyls now, and athletes clean.

Rulers of empires, and of forests green!

(
Grand chorus of all instruments.

Tambourines to the foreground
)”

Mrs. Motherball directed the packing operation as eunuchlike coolies stacked the castanets and maracas in vending trays and stuck little name
tags onto their sides. The Cubans and the Indians strained forward, sucking intently on their tubes while the milk machine chugged and the Buddha reclined on his beatified side, smiling on everyone with an expression of inscrutable and abundant love.

The next four days found Gnossos selling souvenirs. He hawked on corners, buses, the backs of trolley cars, under palm-frond huts at Varadero Beach, to old fishermen setting off in marlin dinghys from Cojimar, to couples walking the
paseo
in Santa Clara, to cabana boys at the Havana Hilton, to Batista army sergeants dressed like field marshals, to bearded law students lurking under sewer plates, to Superman between acts at the Little Theatre, to croupiers at the Nacional, to every genus of lewd stateside pedestrian panting the alleys.

He paid the priest for the funeral, arranged a CARE package for Jack in the Sierra (Hersheys and khaki socks), got three heavy jolts of aureomycin to check his clap, and won nearly fifteen hundred dollars from a near-sighted Palm Beach masochist who couldn’t have seen the double deck anyway. The tide seemed to be turning but Gnossos took no chances.

He bought a first-class ticket on the executive flight to Idlewild. The Motherballs came to wave goodbye with the squadron of gnomes, and a Congo band. From the steps leading to the waiting plane he threw a handful of new dollar bills into the air, and the terminal was chaos. A hostess emerged through the curved door and offered him a bouquet of American Beauty roses. He wore rope-soled sandals, white linen trousers, a freshly starched Cuban boy scout shirt, his bulging rucksack, and a campesino hat for the sun. He carried the quota of liquor in the form of four quarts of Summer Snow, V.S.R. From his woven Pueblo belt were strung six pairs of clacking castanets. He kissed the hostess under the ear, and flashbulbs popped. He waved a blessing to the control tower, and they popped again. Mrs. Motherball fainted, it seemed from the heat and the sudden exposure to daylight.

In his rucksack was a pinch of clay from the grave of Abraham Jackson White.

As the aircraft revved its engines above the sound of the frenetic band, he rolled the grains in his palms and wailed again, this time silently, in his heart, with an anguish of ironies.

Help help, a horrible Heffalump.

Horr Horr, a heffable Horralump.

109 Academae Avenue
Athené                         
May 13, 1958              

Selected Friend:

In your hour of sorrow I am imbued with a spirit of agapē. Please to accept humble apologies and felicitations.

The mandrill was of course an error. Conjurations were only practiced on behalf of Mr. Oeuf’s demise. Yet one’s requisite disciplines are perforce compromised by the juniper berry, and my husband was lax in gleaning coherent information. I am shamed. Please to convey amends to your Miss McCleod, who it seems was terrorized in error. Neither was your own person spared tiresome dangers. Alas.

George, having completed factotum studies in the college of hotel administration, has accepted a position with The Dorchester in London. In that sober atmosphere perhaps we will temper our tastes. As you read this, we are on the seas. Please to forgive. Should the demon continue advances, a daily enema of Lux and warm ale is recommended. I love you.

Extreme and fervent condolences,
Irma Rajamuttu, D. B. E.              

There was the feeling he might lose his diluted Aegean mind. He put some Corelli on the record machine, drank a warm glass of Summer Snow, and listened to the duel of tutti and ripieno. It did no good. The spongy fibers of his agitated innards sucked up the stimulation and burned it off directly, leaving nothing behind but the subtle fumes of anxiety. Every so often he belched them out.

The letter had been rolled into the neck of a blotched grenadine bottle on the floor of the empty Benares pad. Window shades flapped in the evening breeze, dustballs blew across the vacant floor. Furniture, books, pots and pans, zoom all gone.

But in his own apartment, things had been happening. The Navajo rug was littered with lists of names, ashtrays were piled high with filters, beercans lay crushed on their sides, four electric typewriters stood plugged into an extension, and a Pitney-Bowes mailing machine hummed in the corner. Hunger gnawed at his stomach but the refrigerator was empty of everything save lint, and the Proctor Slug prowl car that had followed from the airport was waiting patiently by the curb.

There was also a hastily scrawled note from Rosenbloom telling him to get to the campus the instant he arrived, but when he used the phone to find out why, no one answered. Even Kristin’s dormitory number, kept for last, rang a mysterious ten minutes. He drank three more fingers of Motherball’s brew, took a bath to pass an hour, slipped his hands into a
pair of discarded loafers, clomped about on all fours, did a handstand which knocked a brass plate off the wall, rang the weather bureau, chatted obscenities with the recorded operator, fondled his old pillow for Kristin’s jugular, hung the horse-filled castanets from a copper hunting horn, and checked the ever-present fuzz. When it was dark he crept furtively through the Rajamuttus’, climbed out a window, and made his way to Guido’s Grill. The place was empty of anyone he knew, so he bided time with a pizzaburger and cherry malted, finally calling Fitzgore’s fraternity as a last resort. The houseman told him all the brothers were at the Demonstration.