Typical (12 page)

One day General Rancidity, running late, ran low on gas and in fact ran out. No one would stop and pick him up. Thousands of lower-ranking men passed him on the roadside, running afoul of military as well as human protocol. General Rancidity’s blood ran more than hot.

He ran for a period toward the officers’ club, where he ran up a giant tab, to have a drink before initiating procedures to court-martial the entire base. Luck was running low, or high, depending upon your affection for General Rancidity: he was run over by the woman he had run into and carried fireman-style to the infirmary. She hit and ran.

General Rancidity’s obituary ran to less than twenty-five words, the result of a twenty-five-words-or-less contest run by his best surviving friends:

General Rancidity and the turnip truck he rode in on ran off the edge of the earth last Thursday, rancid turnips, rancid general, and all.

Spirits on base were running high, most high, and weather fair, and all schedules on time, and all probabilities true. Soldiers, and small schools of fish in the golf-course water hazards, ran over shoal and dale, rejoicing, relieved, relying on the base without General Rancidity to most happily, most trottingly, run itself.

M
R. NEFARIOUS SMILED, AND
only when smiling was he able to do anything else. When smiling he could also do nothing, but when not smiling he could do nothing but not smile. He smiled as he scissored tiny stray threads from his clothes, smiled marveling at
how many
stray threads there were, almost… well, enough that you wondered how many non-stray threads were in position holding the garment together rather than … straying off, hanging off and out of seams like …
flopping
around on his clothes, loose cannons on the deck of haberdashery; he smiled and snipped and snipped and there was no end, logically—he kept cutting, smiling, cut a pair of pants to pieces.

He smiled phoning a girl who was in no sense his girlfriend, or anyone’s girlfriend; in fact, if you asked anyone who knew her, say even a tall woodsman type of fellow in his woodshop or on his horse how to get to this girl’s house, he was supposed to know because she had been supposed to be his (the woodsman’s) girlfriend once but of course wasn’t, only in her mind was she, for two minutes, he (the woodsman) said, “We went out four times and she wanted to get married,” and if Mr. Nefarious asked how to get to her house of the woodsman who had declined the fifth date on grounds of risk, the woodsman would say, Sure you want to go to her house? And Mr. Nefarious would smile and say, Not
her
house, I’m looking for that girl lives
near
her house, and actually both Mr. Nefarious and the woodsman would be smiling at this point, but Mr. Nefarious would smile longer, which would irritate the woodsman, and decide to phone the woman instead of risk going to her house—the tall practical fellow who could rip trees in his spare time was right.

So phoning her he smiled but when she did not answer he smiled and hung up.

Tossing a tennis ball for his dog he could smile for a quarter of an hour, all the dog and the ball could take, the dog fat and the ball a tennis ball, made for clay courts, made for concrete courts, not made for ivory and saliva courts.

He could look at bilge water and smile.

He smiled rarely at his mother.

The girl whose house the woodsman recommended they avoid reminded him of his mother, when she, the girl, smiled. When his mother smiled, she, his mother, reminded him of his childhood. When it came to his childhood there was no smiling. It seemed to him an era as humanly distant and crude as the Cro-Magnon’s. If he said something stank in this era of cave dwelling, his mother corrected him: it didn’t
stink,
it
smelled.
Okay, he’d assent, something
smells,
Mom, upon which she’d instruct him: “Look on your upper
lip
!” with a superior sneering tone that stopped him in his childhood tracks.
That’s
the way it was in this life? Nothing stank, it
smelled,
and it was always, if you smelled it, on your own lip. Even though it was his own, this motherhood struck him as odd.

Once, he had invited a girl to swim in the family pool after school, and they had spent a fine afternoon of it together, the girl barely constrained by her two-piece and the young Mr. Nefarious dog-paddling his nose into her breasts, occasionally sinking from the cumbersome weight and bulk of his teenage tumescence, rescued each time by the girl, who breathed life back into him with a peck of a kiss and released him to paddle upstream some more. When his mother uncovered this tryst she prohibited any more on the grounds that they had been unchaperoned (obviously, the young Mr. Nefarious thought to himself), and that, therefore, the neighbors would talk.

Everywhere they went, they sued all the neighbors first thing, but in this one instance his mother had a point. They had not yet sued any. Behind them was the mother of a hoodlum who lived in juvenile detention centers, to the side of them the people who’d sold them their house and held the mortgage and had a severely retarded child, across the street a millionaire who lived abroad, next to him ever-changing renters, next to them a man who had sired thirteen children out of his one, lame, eighty-pound wife. There was no one to sue. But they would talk. To whom, he could not guess.

The young Mr. Nefarious stood there that day following his pool tryst, still marginally priapic and limping slightly from his afternoon of unrelieved water ballet, ready to assent to this absurd prohibition because he did not know if his seminiferous system could take another four-hour throttling, when his mother pulled out another stop on the organ of her rectitude. “I want you to write me,” she intoned, smoking a cigarette and having her first cocktail, “an essay on
integrity.”

“On what?”

“On
IN TEG RIT TEE
. Do you know what integrity is?”

“Think so,” the young Mr. Nefarious managed. “If not, I’ll look it up.”

“Good.”

“Do you think it’s in the
World Book?”

He cannot remember if he actually made the last crack, only hope, and he does not remember looking up the word in the dictionary, but thinks he did, aiming to kill twenty-five words by copying the definition into his “essay,” which he did not—this much is for sure—ever write. Nor did his mother ask for it. It was clear to Mr. Nefarious, if not to her, that the matter of integrity between them was extinct.

When he thought of the girl whom the woodsman recommended they all avoid, smiling and looking like his mother, he suffered a wicked thrill and then shuddered and hung up the phone before she could possibly answer it. This was a dangerous moment for Mr. Nefarious. The next thought was invariably this: everyone looks something like his, Mr. Nefarious’s, mother, if you get right down to it, including himself. How could you go about life avoiding everyone on earth, and yourself, because humans resemble each other? The long-term answer to this question had worked itself out over time without his knowing it: dogs were safe, as were all people who demonstrated a total want of, or an aggressive dislike for,
integrity.
Those were your playmates in this tough world: dogs and people with shit on their upper lip. Mr. Nefarious had developed his nearly incessant smile by attempting to look at his lip.

At trees no smiling unless there was axing, and then the smiling was worked quickly into a determined slit-of-purpose mouth. But spiritually still a smile.

He smiled writing letters to people, overintimate, unsolicited revelations of himself, and smiled retrieving from the mailbox mail-order catalogues mostly from fancy gardening-tool concerns, in each of which was an outdoor bench costing not less than $500. To X, a woman who certainly had never been in any sense his girlfriend but who had been for damned sure somebody’s girlfriend, namely Charles’s, to whom she had been securely married for fifteen years or more, he wrote, “I do not customarily”—here he smiled—“write love letters,” and then he saved the day, which made his smile dim, or curl, ever so rancidly, by of course not declaring his love for her, which did not really exist anyway (he smiled: where, with whom,
on
whom,
did
it exist?), saved the day by just letting the letter drift off into a rather lame and nonspecific lament about his … not
depression,
just
downness,
all of which was designed—he smiled—to suggest he did love her, about 23 percent. That was enough love and at the correct angle to come at a married woman with better sense than to listen to garbage—she could certainly not entertain 25 percent, a full one-quarter throttle—and Mr. Nefarious smiled, sealed it up, stamped it with two stamps (one was extra so he could lick twice), packed it off in his country mailbox, raising the red flag, and wondered on the way back from the mailbox what it would be like to have—it bordered on not smiling to think of it—a $598.95 teak bench sitting out in the rain, the rain, and then the sun.

M
R. DESULTORY CANNOT, FOR
the life of him, or of anyone else, or of any
thing,
do
this
after
that,
or
that
after
this,
if either sequence might logically look sequential from a distance of, say, 2 cm or more. Mr. Desultory, as a somewhat colorful British roofer he once knew put it, referring not to Mr. Desultory but to the roofing concern in whose employ they at the moment were, Mr. Desultory an ordinary interloper and the colorful Brit somewhat more wayward in that he had accepted a proposal of marriage from an unnubile American woman to stay his imminent deportation only to find himself
praying
for deportation immediately after the honeymoon and thereafter referring to his immigration bride as the Dragon—anyway the colorful British roofer subject to a harridaning beyond the wildest torments of immigration authorities or coal mining or whatever he had to do back home, it must have been something unpleasant for the Dragon Knot, as the wedding was called, to have been tied in the first place, though even Mr. Desultory can remember the colorful British roofer’s having said she, the Dragon, was “sweet,” he used that word, and straight, without a glint of irony or sarcasm in his glinty little eyes, all colorful British roofers have glinty little eyes to match their glinty little Cockney mouths, where are we? The Cockney married to the sweet, fat (he said she was
huge,
a matter that all the boys on the roof found impossible to verify, though try they did—running to the edge of the roof when the Dragon came to retrieve her husband, and looking down from their roof at the roof of the tiny car from which she never stepped and speculating just how large she might be to be in so small a car, what is that a Comet or what? She can’t be
that
big, and look at old Bob stepping right on in, he step in there without a shoehorn, don’t he? Don’t see him squoze out the window either—look, he
smilin!
) American girl, the Cockney married to the American girl told her that the company for whom he and Mr. Desultory and those who speculated upon her size worked could not have organized a piss-up in a brewery or a shaggin session in a brothel, and it is arguable that both colorful expressions, which had to be translated somewhat to American idiom, both expressions could be said to apply, and to
have
applied, though not so much then as now, for he is worse now, to Mr. Desultory himself.

Mr. Desultory cannot rub two quarters—not quarters, ideas, he can’t get two …
things,
he can’t
do
two related, sequential, yes it is in sequencing that …
this
goes before
that,
so he’ll get
that
squared away and then go to do
this,
but it is already backwards, he must do this
then
that, so forget
that,
let’s do
this
now, but
this
could arguably precede
this
which is already
that
because here’s this new this here—two quarters refers to wealth, or lack of it, a tired little phrase that must have come from the Depression, a time which sometimes Mr. Desultory feels sounds like his kind of time. He could have handled the Great Depression, you either jumped out of a skyscraper window, no sequencing problem there:
one
open her up,
two
review at the last minute your collapsed financial state, weep and moil your hands shedding tears, ink running on your last financial statement—maybe not ink but pencil, would a last financial statement, even one coming to zeros zeros zeros, be in ink or pencil?

Is it ink or pencil? In the Depression did your accountant hold behind his back your last big ledger sheet and smile because maybe he did not like you and then whip out the pale-green Boorum & Pease ten-column double-entry ledger sheet and—did they have … was Boorum & Pease extant in the thirties? Or in ’29, rather? You’d think, wouldn’t you, that of all businesses to go out with the lights it would have been first and foremost, very head of the line, some outfit making accounting products, zero dollars after all does not require extensive books, so if Boorum & Pease existed before the Crash it had to have Crashed, it was therefore born from the embers, later, its gentle green products sprouting humbly up along with other, new, and miraculous shoots of recovery, the accountant could not whip out Boorum & Pease paper and you couldn’t wonder then or now if it was pen or pencil that sent you flying out the window, the good old double-hung sash window with two fine slugs, or pendula, what’s the right word, those long, hangy-down doobers on the rope inside the walls, iron, like billy sticks, hard to find now, very hard to find, hard to know what to do with them if you do find one, tell other people who are looking for them for whatever reason they’re looking for them that you’ve found one, or ten, maybe ten is enough to get them to buy them from you, then they go get some old windows, wind up fixing up a house of about Depression vintage—can you jump out of the window fifty years before the damned pig-iron thingamajigs are to be used restoring perhaps the same window? Can you jump? Is it an inked or penciled zero, whether on Boorum & Pease or not (let’s forget that absurd debate!), is it a zero … or maybe a
negative …
yes, why on earth would a zero inspire anyone to jump out of a window? Zeros never hurt anyone, it’s
negative numbers
make people kill themselves, zeros are perfectly harmless, often salubrious, just sometimes unsettling to the capitalist mind with its impractical insistence on constant growth, a more absurd proposition than the Boorum & Pease wrangle by a factor of … of a lot, so is it an
inked
negative million dollars which will keep your kids from attending college, which wasn’t so important in 1930 anyway, they could just go to your alma mater, the School of Hard Knocks, but a negative million dollars would keep your wife out of the beauty parlor and good-looking probably low-cut post-flapper dresses, and you out of walnut-wainscoted boardrooms for the rest of your bathtub-gin life, or is it a
penciled
negative million dollars that could be erased and changed either before you jump out the window or, if you take yourself by the scrotum and leap,
after
you jump out the window—