My Amputations (Fiction collective ;) (17 page)

“ . . . He was born in, I think, red-dirt Georgia, grew up, maybe, in hog-butcher Chicago, had many thick-headed problems in elementary and high and was a hardcore dropout . . . got into trouble in the Air Force . . . He's got something against all of us: was busted for possession . . . served time in
Attica from 1977 to 1978; while there he was betrayed by a guy who claimed to be . . . this other so-called writer was receiving grant money due him, the
real
writer . . . the Foundation had gained a reputation for giving such awards to ‘people of talent and accomplishment’ who had not been widely recognized for their professional efforts . . . Victim he surely was . . . It's true he'd been a fart and a troublemaker from day one, he'd fathered—in and out of unholy wedlock—possibly as many as fifty kids, certainly a minimum of thirty-five . . . Before going into the joint he'd come through, so they say, many failed marriages . . . Though there were those who protested his right to everything, even his birth, he insisted he was born December thirty-first, 1936 in Georgia at Grady with wristband number 105847 clamped tightly to his little red arm . . . He was taken home to six-o-seven McGrader Street, South East, by his parents . . . so how did he find himself years later in Amesville, ready one fine day to step down from a John Deere and set out to reclaim his identity? . . . Well, parole ended: that was certainly a factor plus a private detective in New York had agreed to find the culprit . . . But, Jez, it was like coming out of amnesia with a sudden cold memory of endless dark tunnels of the past . . . Walking away from that tractor, he looked up at the pancake in the Sherwood Anderson sky and took a Saroyan-breath, exhaled it . . . Minimum wage was chicken, no birdshit . . . He stepped through freshly turned earth till he gained a road then the highway . . . Beat his blunt toetips on concrete . . . He stopped in the city of Amesville for a cup of coffee . . . A yellow-white cat with one green eye, one blue, leaped onto his lap . . . He rested his elbows on the red-dotted plastic tablecloth . . . Cat refused a sip of the brew . . . Clock on wall reminded him of something: what was it: gave him an awful feeling of anxiety . . . clocks were always running: warning you of the thing you didn't want: that magnetic force: hands without fingers: radium into visible light . . . He had to move on: it was urgent . . . He though the cat was . . . he set her down . . . He didn't have much faith in his luck to thumb a ride so he began walking . . . His mudfrog, a birthmark on his right forearm,
itched horribly . . . Ass still sore from the tractor seat . . . He stopped to rest under a tree: turned out to be Joyce Kilmer's . . . Quick! a train was coming along the tracks only a few feet from the tree . . . Was he dreaming? A woman was tied to the tracks where another set crossed . . . He got to her in time: untied her and threw himself and her into the ditch as the iron beast shot by . . . she was nutmeg color: a dark beauty and spoke in a musical and mysterious voice . . . said she was from a reservation in New Mexico, had worked the canteen circuit, made movies, danced professionally, hung out with gangsters, but was now seeking a new life . . . She told him her name was Painted Turtle . . . He was heading for New York and she, well, she'd go there just as soon as she'd go anywhere . . . ”

A barrage of bullets swept the room. Mason hit the floor and crawled under a table. Munich was not a safe place. He'd been talking to an old friend, Lilia Pant, when the violence struck. Leaves fell from winter trees. It snowed upside-down. Knucklebones broke in butterfly lava. Gangsters were moving in. Who would have thought the gambling room (called The Wheel) at the Greta Garbo Entertainment Palace would become the scene of buffoons of death? Pant hit the floor too. Some folks ran. A barracuda fell from the wall and got stuck on Marlene Dietrich's head as she too fled the madness. The air felt like that of a Prussian boarding school. Except at the moment nobody was much for bedside-baroque-chatter. Gunsmoke seeped into wool cotton and silk. Screaming and crying competed with drum rolls and bells. A stranger under the table with them said, “It's just carnival time coming early. Somebody thinks it's February.” Another, who introduced himself stiffly and drunkly as Eichberger-the-Calan, spoke: “If we crawl slowly, being sure to stay under the tables, we can make it to the Faust-Mephisto
Room where they're showing an erotic film of Otto and Lucie against a yellow sky. They're supposed to be immoralists who've escaped the Russian October Revolution. Lots of finger-fucking.” Mason figured he had nothing to lose so he was the first to follow this Rasputin. Lilia trailed him. They were snails with scales moving along the surfaces of the soggy orange rug. Rasputin's big ass waved in front of Mason's reluctant face. He held his head sideways. He could still hear shouting and fists smashing into wine glasses and Peter Lorre-lips. In the Faust-Mephisto Room the three escapees stood and blinked. Mason's sugar-coated eyes saw an orgy at its peak. Geese were flying up out of flesh. One man was dancing with a bullhorn hanging from the crack of his ass. Intestines were scattered around the floor. Expressive ladies and unrelenting men were deeply engaged in a daisy-chain of sixty-nine action. Projected on the wall was an ongoing series of scenes depicting Otto and Lucie in goggle-eyed combat: frosty steam lifted skyward from their action. Lilia Pant groaned. “Here we go again!” Mason laughed with her. Six sailors emerged from a torpedo and joined the carnival. One waved to the camera. An expressive lady grabbed his left thigh. “Oh, Chief Mack-Verand! You're back!” He took off his mask just as Lilia fainted in Mason's bruised arms. Rasputin said, “Oh, my dear!” Back in The Wheel the gunfire stopped. Mason could hear the official counting of the dead.

Early December sky over Catania was filled with a calmness in casual contrast to the chaotic life below. (The day before, Mason'd driven his Fiat up onto one of the giant white ships of the Tirrenia line at Genova; he'd paced the upper deck while gangs of Italian kids, lovebirds, old folks and crew, also restlessly wandered about: a long tiresome voyage; older passengers sprawled before the TV set in the lounge absorbed in
artificial light. This thing—il dio, il re, l'eroe! The food was horrible. Fearing he might throw up he stood at the rear watching a crazy flock of gray gulls flapping in the ship's wake which, in its splitting of the sea skin, turned up fish they fed on . . . When he woke in the morning he was sick, truly. Claustrophobia in his narrow private space got to him. He was sure the room was bugged. Why hadn't they simply arrested him? How much more rope would they give? They docked at Palermo and in line he drove the Fiat off into the honking, busy city. Famished. He went to a restaurant a truck driver he'd met in the lounge recommended. This guy was from Napoli and knew his way around. Here he pigged out on lasagne verdi al forno and two big bottles of vino. Stuffed, warm and a little tight, he drove that long green stretch through plush countryside to Catania.) The sky, as I said, was serene. Below: one way streets that didn't make sense: insane intersections crammed with cars and people crossing in every direction with no direction. Madness! Whistle-blowing traffic cops who made no sense either. It was dusk. Lighted shops. Packs of teenage boys intent on their desperate enterprises (one tried to open Mason's door at a stop)! It took an hour to find the damned hotel—instructions had been so poor. Hotel Pericolo: the perfect secret of the sunny southern tip of Italy! A warning—? In the hotel room he took a shower and while doing so the phone rang. Wet, he answered. Professor Carlina Momachino wanted to know if he'd arrived and if all was well. Well how? . . . That night Mason had dinner with the Momachinos: polla alla cacciatora. A childless happy couple: she, a specialist in American fiction, he a specialist in marble. He looked like a palm tree with arms and she was this little dainty thing all motion and flutter with painted nails and pointed toes. Signor Vito Momachino drove him back. Exhausted, he went to sleep and while there found himself in this strange market place called Albano (wait, hay, this wasn't Italy, whhha . . . ) off some place called Gran Via to the, uh, right and another way, Casa Christino; and passing showcase glass seeing himself (just like some prison mugshot of himself) and here an old man was pushing his way through the
crowd carrying a poster with some squabble about some government official whose identity was in question but there was a caption about the Union of the Democratic Center or the Centrists or was it the Left. Boy oh boy. Then this young dark guy—he could have been Italian or Spanish or even French—came knocking his way through—pushing aside two chubby senoras with yellow straw baskets, knocking over stalls crammed with cheap leather colorful cotton radiant metal glazed plastic painted glass and the guy, a hisser, tugged at Mason's sleeve, speaking in what sounded like Spanish or maybe Italian all the while flashing a wrist of Bulovas and all Mason could think was, Take me to your padrino. You from Morocco? And the watch-pusher said he was Pocoraba or Ernesto or Piazza but it didn't matter; in a nearby cafe they ordered government approved vino blanco. Now you don't want coca leaves, right. You got cash. When can you get it. Senor Aristides Rayo Barojas you see. Very formal. And suddenly they were at the entrance of a cluster of dilapidated chartreuse apartment buildings. Across the street for no reason: a fancy hacienda surrounded by kidney-brown debris and a vacant lot of broken bottles and gun shells. Before Pocoroba knocked on wood he kindly requested five hundred—not lire—but pesetas! Mason vaguely suspected he was somewhere in Spain: again, after . . . Mason unhanded the bread and waited. His moneybelt itched worse than a mudhound. A servant came and led them to Barojas: through tall dark hallways with pictures of thieves generals ancestors fingering the handles of swords, guys with chins stuck out, dudes with waxed mustaches curled up to a fine finish. It all
felt
like black lace. The languid summer outside hadn't ever reached this depth. The watch-pusher and Mason waited in a canary-yellow room lined with gold-painted Nineteenth Century volumes nobody'd touched in fifty years. A rotund gentleman in a smoking jacket entered. “I am Senor Barojas.” He didn't offer his hand. “May I help you?” Mason realized he didn't know why he was here. Barojas obviously sensing the confusion spoke again: “Don't be shy. I have the documents ready. Do you have the money?” But the
dream he woke on was of Edith in New York and he had an erection straining up through it—her?—then one thing led to another and he knew he had to lecture at nine at, what was this place, Universita di Catania, section: Facolta di Lettere e Filosofia, Cattedra di Letteratura. He sat on the side of his bed waiting for the right moment to stand. Why had a player in such a casual ancient moment come back tugging at him with her big-girl erotic self. A light changed in him: brilliant green.

A gas bomb, they said, started the fire in Misterbianco. Just for the ride, Mason went out in the jeep with Vito, a shy man in a red plastic jacket. Vito was a new inspector for the Catania fire department. “Go see the flames,” Carlina had said, tossing her dark shoulder-length hair back from her left eye and giving Mason one of those serious-blank Modigliani looks. On the way to Misterbianco Vito said it had to be the work of either a crazy arsonist or a revolutionary. It'd started at the Guglielmo Vanvitelli, a food processing plant, and, according to the voice on the phone from Misterbianco (where there was no fire department), the nearby hillside, trees and grass were burning away rapidly. Vito'd called for help from coastal Contana Rossa and Paterno, slightly inland to the north. As they approached, Mason saw the smoke drawing the village of Livorno as it looked on July 12, 1884, against a red chalk and terra verde sky. “Holy Galileo!” Vito slapped his own cheek. The yellow-orange flames were leaping furiously up the hill, higher than the cypresses, leaving a blue-gray ash in their wake, Mason and Vito jumped down from the jeep before it stopped moving. An old rusty fire-truck with
Paterno
painted clumsily on its left door was parked about fifty feet from the food plant. Several men, working one hose, were fighting the flames and smoke there but nothing was being done about the spreading. Beyond the cypresses was an
orange grove. It would be next—and soon. Mason looked into Vito's excited eyes. “What'd you do
now?
” Vito didn't answer: he ran back to the jeep and snatched his telephone and began shouting in Italian into it. Mason wished he was on the Titanic, going down slowly. Rowing a mean boat. Or how about being at the Battle of the Amazons. Or at the Resurrection or at the Descent from the Cross. Where one
was
counted, every moment. Maybe being the Snake in the Apple Tree was a good role. But here? Watching a fire. Well, there was always Mardi Gras. He watched a woman with a Medusa face running from the plant toward Vito. Then beyond her, he noticed for the first time about fifty workers, mostly women, on the northeast side of the building, watching it burn. One man in the crowd seemed to be playing blind man's bluff. Suddenly a horse appeared on the burning hillside, stopped, gave the fire a skeptical look, then ran off—toward Mason. Something wild in Mason turned him into a seventeenth-century general as he leaped upon the galloping thick-footed Calabrese. It was white with black spots. Mason held on by its mane and gave the right pressure (with his thighs) to slow its pace. Luckily, it wasn't a wild trotter breaking out of some sepia and wash landscape. Its lines were as graceful as Venetian quill strokes. Vito was shouting and gesturing to Mason as the horse reared. Medusa too was shouting at Mason. Several people from the crowd came running down to the jeep. The horse kept trying to dislodge its rider by rearing and dancing around in the plush blue grass. Two police cars and two more fire trucks arrived just as four thick-set Venetian horses, straight out of the Iron Age, appeared on the same hillside where Calabrese first paused to inspect the heat. Everybody now, except the fire fighters, had come down from the food plant. They were watching Mason's effort to hold his own: some cheered him on, others angrily shook their fists at him. One man, who looked like Pope Gregory III, tried to catch the horse by its neck. Another yanked at Mason's right leg till his shoe came off. This one had a Caligula-look. As the cops approached with drawn pistols, Mason fell from his perch into a soggy spot in the grass. Did he
think he was a figure in Beckmann's
Carnival
triptych: in solemn pursuit of a sexual posture? Vito helped him up. So did two policemen. In Italian, the one with the frog-head asked for his identity paper. Meanwhile, Calabrese ran off to join the Venetians. As Mason brushed at the wet seat of his jeans, he glanced over his shoulder in time to see Calabrese lead the Venetians down the other side of the hill, like paper figures dropping into a manila envelope. They side-stepped the fire with the heavy grace of Degas ballet dancers dislocated in Bartolomeo's
Assumption of the Virgin
. Mason handed frog his passport. “Come si chiama?” frog asked as he flipped the pages of the passport. His companion, meanwhile, was speaking to Vito: “Chi è quest'uomo?” Then Vito explained in Italian that Mason was a writer visiting the university in Catania. Yet, in minutes, despite Vito's protest, the officers had Mason in handcuffs. They gagged him and tied his legs together, too. He struggled like a Tintoretto figure. The crowd had become a mob. Fist fights broke out. The firemen continued to fight the flames. One, under orders from the police, turned the hose on the crowd. Mason was thrown in the back seat of a police car. The horse returned, running through the burned grass, up past the food plant. Something with huge wings flew overhead, causing a momentary shadow to cover the chaos. Mason spat phlegm on the seat. His nose rested on a spot that smelled of semen and sweat. As he was driven away, he heard Vito shouting after the car. One cop sat in back with Mason. In the front, Mason was aware of a woman's voice and the voice of the cop driving. The woman was called Priscilla. The cop beside Mason said, “Da dove viene?” When they arrived at the police station in Catania, the cops went for an officer who spoke English. He was plump with pendulous breasts. He seemed happy as he spoke this distant tongue: “ . . . you will be charged with arson,” he told Mason. Priscilla'd come into the station with them. She got slapped on the ass several times by cops just passing the reception desk where Mason stood still in handcuffs. His legs now though were free. He wished he were back in 1920, in bed with Jeanne Hébuterne, soothing her, giving her a reason
to live. Mason's rage was met with a slap across the face. He kept telling them they had the wrong man. Breasts laughed at him as the officer at the reception desk, with Mason's passport spread before him, booked the Afro-American for arson. How much injustice could one endure. Moments later, Mason was pushed into an interrogation room. Bats hung upside-down from the ceiling. A couple of men in armor hung out in one corner playing cards. A portrait of Mario Buggelli was tacked to the wall alongside a reprint of Beata Matrex. Mason almost wept on sight of it: what lovely African lust lingered beneath its intentions! He was forced down into a hard wooden chair. Four or five cops surrounded him. Breasts held Mason's bearded chin in the palm of his hand. Then he spat in his face. Mason blinked: while his eyes were closed he saw Abraham travelling toward the Promised Land. Then the door behind him opened and somebody said the name Vito Momachino. His wife, the professor, they said, was with him.