V. (31 page)

"How about a night watchman," she said at last. Over you? he wondered.

"Where," he said. She mentioned an address nearby in Maiden Lane. "Anthroresearch Associates:" He knew he couldn't say it as fast. On the back of a card she scribbled the address and a name - Oley Bergomask. "He hires." Handed it to him, a quick touch of fingernails. "Come back as soon as you find out. Bergomask will tell you right away; he doesn't waste time. If it doesn't work out we'll see what else we have."

At the door he looked back. Was she blowing a kiss or yawning?

II

Winsome had left work early. When he got back to the apartment he found his wife, Mafia sitting on the floor with Pig Bodine. They were drinking beer and discussing her Theory. Mafia was sitting crosslegged and wearing very tight Bermuda shorts. Pig stared captivated at her crotch. That fella irritates me, Winsome thought. He got beer and sat down next to them. He wondered idly if Pig were getting any off of his wife. But it was hard to say who was getting what off Mafia.

There is a curious sea story about Pig Bodine, which Winsome had heard from Pig himself. Winsome was aware that Pig wanted to make a career someday of playing male leads in pornographic movies. He'd get this evil smile on his face, as if he were viewing or possibly committing reel on reel of depravities. The bilges of the radio shack of U.S.S. Scaffold - Pig's ship - were jammed solid with Pig's lending library, amassed during the ship's Mediterranean travels and rented out to the crew at 10 cents per book. The collection was foul enough to make Pig Bodine a byword of decadence throughout the squadron. But no one suspected that Pig might have creative as well as custodial talents.

One night Task Force 60, made up of two carriers, some other heavies and a circular screen of twelve destroyers, including the Scaffold, was steaming a few hundred miles east of Gibraltar. It was maybe two in the morning, visibility unlimited, stars blooming fat and sultry over a tar-colored Mediterranean. No closing contacts on the radars, everybody on after steering watch asleep, forward lookouts telling themselves sea stories to keep awake. That sort of night. All at once every teletype machine in the task force started clanging away, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Five bells, or FLASH, initial contact with enemy forces. It being '55 and more or less peacetime, captains were routed out of bed, general quarters called, dispersal plans executed. Nobody knew what was happening. By the time the teletypes started up again the formation was scattered out over a few hundred square miles of ocean and most radio shacks were crowded to capacity. The machines started to type.

"Message follows." Teletype operators, com officers leaned forward tense, thinking of Russian torpedoes, evil and barracudalike.

"Flash." Yes, yes, they thought: five bells, Flash. Go ahead.

Pause. Finally the keys started clattering again.

"THE GREEN DOOR. One night Dolores, Veronica, Justine, Sharon, Cindy Lou, Geraldine and Irving decided to hold an orgy . . ." Followed, on four and a half feet of teletype paper, the functional implications of their decision, told from Irving's point of view.

For some reason Pig never got caught. Possibly because half the Scaffold's radio gang, also the communications officer, an Annapolis graduate named Knoop, were in on it and had locked the door to Radio as soon as GQ was called.

It caught on as a sort of fad. The next night, precedence Operational Immediate, came A DOG STORY, involving a St. Bernard named Fido and two WAVES. Pig was on watch when it came over and admitted to his henchman Knoop that it showed a certain flair. It was followed by other high-priority efforts: THE FIRST TIME I GOT LAID, WHY OUR X.O. IS QUEER, LUCKY PIERRE RUNS AMOK. By the time the Scaffold reached Naples, its first port of call, there were an even dozen, all carefully filed away by Pig under F.

But initial sin entails eventual retribution. Later, somewhere between Barcelona and Cannes, evil days fell on Pig. One night, routing the message board, he went to sleep in the doorway of the executive officer's stateroom. The ship chose that moment to roll ten degrees to port. Pig toppled onto the terrified lieutenant commander like a corpse. "Bodine," the X.O. shouted, aghast. "Were you sleeping?" Pig snored away among a litter of special-request chits. He was sent down on mess cooking. The first day he fell asleep in the serving line, rendering inedible a gunboat full of mashed potatoes. So the next meal he was stationed in front of the soup, which was made by Potamos the cook and which nobody ate anyway. Apparently Pig's knees had developed this odd way of locking, which if the Scaffold were on an even keel would enable him to sleep standing up. He was a medical curiosity. When the ship got back to the States he went under observation at Portsmouth Naval Hospital. When he returned to the Scaffold he was put on the deck force of one Pappy Hod, a boatswain's mate. In two days Pappy had driven him, for the first of what were to be many occasions, over the hill.

Now on the radio at the moment was a song about Davy Crockett, which upset Winsome considerably. This was '56, height of the coonskin hat craze. Millions of kids everywhere you looked were running around with these bushy Freudian hermaphrodite symbols on their heads. Nonsensical legends were being propagated about Crockett, all in direct contradiction to what Winsome had heard as a boy, across the mountains from Tennessee. This man, a foul-mouthed louse-ridden boozehound, a corrupt legislator and an indifferent pioneer, was being set up for the nation's youth as a towering and cleanlimbed example of Anglo-Saxon superiority. He had swelled into a hero such as Mafia might have created after waking from a particularly loony and erotic dream. The song invited parody. Winsome had even cast his own autobiography into aaaa rhyme and that simpleminded combination of three - count them - chord changes:

Born in Durham in '23,

By a pappy who was absentee,

Was took to a lynching at the neighborhood tree,

Whopped him a nigger when he was only three.

[Refrain]:

Roony, Roony Winsome, king of the decky-dance.

Pretty soon he started to grow,

Everyone knew he'd be a loving beau,

Cause down by the tracks he would frequently go

To change his luck at a dollar a throw.

Well he hit Winston-Salem with a rebel yell,

Found his self a pretty Southron belle

Was doing fine till her pappy raised hell

When he noticed her belly was beginning to swell.

Luckily the war up and came along,

He joined the army feeling brave and strong,

His patriotism didn't last for long,

They put him in a foxhole where he didn't belong.

He worked him a hustle with his first C.O.,

Got transferred back to a PIO,

Sat out the war in a fancy chateau,

Egging on the troops toward Tokyo.

When the war was over, his fighting done,

He hung up his khakis and his Garand gun

Came along to Noo York to have some fun,

But couldn't find a job till '51.

Started writing copy for MCA

It wasn't any fun but it was steady pay,

Sneaking out of work one lovely day

He met him a dolly called Mafi-yay.

Mafia thought he had a future ahead,

And looked like she knew how to bounce a bed

Old Roony must've been sick in the head

Cause pretty soon, they up and they wed.

Now he's got a record company,

A third of the profits plus salary,

A beautiful wife who wants to be free

So she can practice her Theory.

[Refrain]

Roony, Roony Winsome, king of the decky-dance.

Pig Bodine had fallen asleep. Mafia was in the next room, watching herself undress in the mirror. And Paola, Roony thought, where are you? She'd taken to disappearing, sometimes for two- or three-day stretches, and nobody ever knew where she went.

Maybe Rachel would put in a word for him with Paola. He had, he knew, certain nineteenth-century ideas of what was proper. The girl herself was an enigma. She hardly spoke, she went to the Rusty Spoon now only rarely when she knew Pig would be somewhere else. Pig coveted her. Concealing himself behind a code which only did officers dirty (and executives? Winsome wondered), Pig he was sure envisioned Paola playing opposite him in each frame of his stag-movie fantasies. It was natural, he supposed; the girl had the passive look of an object of sadism, something to be attired in various inanimate costumes and fetishes, tortured, subjected to the weird indignities of Pig's catalogue, have her smooth and of course virginal-looking limbs twisted into attitudes to inflame a decadent taste. Rachel was right, Pig - and even perhaps Paola - could only be products of a decky-dance. Winsome, self-proclaimed king of it, felt only sorry it should ever have happened. How it had happened, how anybody, himself included, had contributed to it he didn't know.

He entered the room as Mafia was bent, stripping off a knee sock. College girl attire, he thought. He slapped her hard on the nearest buttock; she straightened, turned, and he slapped her across the face. "Wha," she said.

"Something new," said Winsome. "For variety's sake." One hand at her crotch, one twisted in her hair, he lifted her like the victim she wasn't, half-carried, half-tossed her to the bed where she lay in a sprawl of white skin, black pubic hair and socks, all confused. He unzipped his fly. "Aren't you forgetting something," she said, coy and half-scared, flipping her hair toward the dresser drawer.

"No," said Winsome, "not that I can think of."

III

Profane returned to the Space/Time agency convinced that if nothing else Rachel was luck. Bergomask had given him the job.

"Wonderful," she said. "He's paying the fee, you don't owe us anything."

It was near quitting time. She started straightening things on her desk. "Come home with me," she said quietly. "Wait out by the elevator."

But he remembered, leaning against the wall out in the corridor: with Fina it had been like that too. She'd taken him home like a rosary found in the street and convinced herself he was magic. Fina had been devoutly R.C. like his father. Rachel was Jewish, he recalled, like his mother. Maybe all she wanted to do was to feed him, be a Jewish mother.

They rode down in the elevator crowded together and quiet, she wrapped serenely in a gray raincoat. At the turnstile in the subway she put in two tokens for them.

"Hey," said Profane.

"You're broke," she told him.

"I feel like a gigolo." He did. There'd always be some 15 cents, maybe half a salami in the refrigerator - whatever she'd feed him.

Rachel decided to lodge Profane at Winsome's place and feed him at her own. Winsome's was known to the Crew as the West Side flophouse. There was floor space there for all of them at once, and Winsome didn't mind who slept on it.

The next night Pig Bodine showed up at Rachel's at supper time drunk and in search of Paola, who was away God knew where.

"Hey," Pig addressed Profane.

"Buddy," Profane said. They opened beer.

Soon Pig had dragged them down to the V-Note to hear McClintic Sphere. Rachel sat and concentrated on the music while Pig and Profane remembered sea stories at each other. During one of the breaks she drifted over to Sphere's table and found out he'd picked up a contract with Winsome to do two LP's for Outlandish.

They talked for a while. Break ended. The quartet drifted back to the stand, fiddled around, started off with a Sphere composition called Fugue Your Buddy. Rachel returned to Pig and Profane. They were discussing Pappy Hod and Paola. Damn, damn, to herself, what have I brought him to? What have I brought him back to?

She woke up the next morning, Sunday, mildly hung over. Winsome was outside, pounding at the door.

"It is a day of rest," she growled. "What the hell."

"Dear father-confessor," he said, looking as if he'd not slept all night, "don't be angry."

"Tell it to Eigenvalue." She stomped to the kitchen, put coffee on. "Now," she said. "What is your problem?"

What else: Mafia. Now this was all deliberate. He had put on the day before yesterday's shirt and neglected to comb his hair that morning to put Rachel in the mood. If you wanted a girl to go pimping for her roommate you didn't come right out and say so. There were subtleties to be gone through. Wanting to talk about Mafia was only an excuse.

Rachel wanted to know naturally enough if he'd spoken to the dentist at all and Winsome said no. Eigenvalue had been busy lately holding bull sessions with Stencil. Roony wanted a woman's point of view. She poured coffee and told him the two roommates were gone. He closed his eyes and jumped in:

"I think she's been slipping around, Rachel."

"So. Find out and divorce her."

They drained the coffeepot twice. Roony drained himself. At three Paola came in, smiled at them briefly, disappeared into her room. Did he blush a little? His heartbeat had speeded up. Dingy damn, he was acting like a young blood. He rose. "Can we keep talking about this?" he said. "Even small-talk."

"If it helps," she smiled, not believing it for a minute. "And what's this about a contract with McClintic? Don't tell me Outlandish is putting out normal records now. What are you getting, religion?"

"If I am," Roony told her, "it's all I'm getting."

He walked back to his apartment through Riverside Park, wondering if he'd done right. Maybe, it occurred to him, Rachel might think it was herself he wanted, not her roommate.

Back at the apartment he found Profane talking with Mafia. Dear God, he thought, all I want to do is sleep. He went in to the bed, assumed the foetal position and soon, oddly enough, did drift off.

"You tell me you are half-Jewish and half-Italian," Mafia was saying in the other room. "What a terribly amusing role. Like Shylock, non a vero, ha, ha. There is a young actor down at the Rusty Spoon who claims to be an Irish Armenian Jew. You two must meet."

Profane decided not to argue. So all he said was: "It is probably a nice place, that Rusty Spoon. But out of my class."