Dove didn’t want to see what a sun like that was up to. He opened his Bull Durham sack and sure enough, folded neatly quartered so as to let him read the ‘100’ without unfolding it, Finnerty’s c-note still waited to be spent.
‘As long as I done it, it was just as well I got paid,’ he philosophized his guilt away.
Out in the lake-palmed suburbs, far from the dong and the glare, in a house that had once been human, Dove climbed a soundless stair.
The stilly stair to O-Daddyland in a pale hygienic glow. Feeling some sign he could not read must say ZONE OF QUIET. For the weather in the streets, and the seasons there, are no more permitted in O-Daddyland than in a surgeon’s washroom. Rainwinds washing children’s voices have nothing to do with O-Daddies. Step up in an airless quarantine, go down a passionless hall. Stand before a door without knocker or bell.
Till an anesthetic odor, as of gas or seeping ether, trails from below; as though abortions might be performed here.
Stranger on a strange-lit stair, you have come to a strange frontier.
The frontier of a principality whose only law is Rhino Gross and Gross’s many moods. A totalitarian state whose single industry is a curious craft in Goodrich rubber, worked out in forms sufficiently fanciful. Rhino Gross is his state’s sole industrial designer and Gross is a fanciful man. Indeed, abortions are aborted here.
(At night in the deep and dead time, old Gross hears again the soft scraaap of his curette against the uterus wall in a room that holds no other sound. Scraaap scraaap scraaap.)
Now the daylight man, ex-physician, ex-abortionist, ex-quack, ex-con, ex-man, ex-everything, enfolded and armored by layer across layer of swart encrusted fat, clasping his distended gut to keep it from slipping down over his rusted truss, is an aging animal come to the jungle’s rim whose hearing is excellent but whose sight is waterish, ready to turn at a tiny twig’s crack and lumber back to his forest’s protecting gloom. Yet stands one moment snout upturned and quivering, to sniff the dangerous air: now he is wondering whether it would be perfectly safe to try a little mock-charge on whoever that was across the room.
Dove caught a good strong whiff of the sniffer at the jungle’s rim without knowing that what he whiffed was actually burning rubber. When you work with guano you live with guano till you smell of guano. Gross’s hide was impregnated with it clear down to his money that stank of it.
(Who else but a disbarred gynecologist could have devised that technicolor fantasy so long before technicolor, of liverish yellow dipped at its obscene head in firehouse red and tipped by a delicate rainbow silken as baby’s first down? An improvement in style, function and line worthy of its proud name O-Daddy, The Condom of Tomorrow.)
‘First you learn your craft,’ Gross told Dove. ‘How else do I tell what you’re worth?’ Then deciding to show Whoever-It-Was that he really was a furious charger at heart, lowered his snout and trumpeted terribly – ‘Welma! Welma!’
A swift light step and there materialized a woman whose life had been consumed. She may have been thirty-five or sixty but wasn’t quite through burning yet. She was wearing a rubber apron over a gum-colored dress and pigtails bound by a big pink bow that bounced as if the very hair were rubberized. Apparently her sight wasn’t much better than Gross’s, for she stood dangling one glove, specs in hand, looking about for some way to clean them of particles of reddish dust. At length she stooped, brought up a corner of her slip far enough to serve as a lens-cleaner.
‘Look the bow ribbon!’ Gross squeaked with mocking glee – ‘Welma the wulcanized woomin! Aint a wife! Aint a mother!’ – his voice turned stern with shame for her – ‘What are you? You think a bow ribbon makes a woomin?’
The woman snapped her specs on and beamed upon Dove through them as benignly as if Rhino’s derision had been praise. ‘He’ll mouse on me and he’ll mouse on you,’ she explained without heat. ‘He’s a forty-faced pigeon straight from Rat Row, quack from head to toe. Rather steal from his mother than ride a passenger train and I give him eighty percent the best of it at that. Now if you want to see how we get these things out come back here and I’ll show you how.’
The kitchen, so commodious it might once have served as a slave quarter, was now largely given over to half a dozen small molds of individualized design. About the molds stood cans of liquid rubber, open paint-tins and brushes soaking in solutions. Above a wide white oven a line of O-Daddies hung like sausages to dry.
This was also the place where Cupid’s Arrows came warm off the forge and Ticklish Tessies lounged about. The craze in Laughing Maggies had almost died but Ding-Dong Darlings had a promising future. Happy Hannahs roomed here; Barney Googles were having their noses pinched by clothespins on a wire line. Here Gross moved Love’s Fancies by the gross; and a reddish dust lay over everything. For the O-Daddy was not the only creation of the hand and heart and brain of this dishonored genius. It was only his masterpiece.
Yet through the air made thick by gum, by paint, by turpentine, Dove smelled something better than any of these – something was doing inside that oven for sure. When Velma peered in he caught a glimpse of a chicken roasting on a bed of yams.
‘Don’t mind Gross,’ she reassured him, ‘all it means when he hollers is he’s scared. I’m sure I don’t know what he’s scared of because there’s nobody here but me. The creature is ill of bad conscience and don’t have long to go.’
‘I didn’t pay him particular heed,’ Dove told her, ‘but your ribbon bow strikes me as mighty purty, m’am.’
‘Thank you, son.’ She seemed genuinely flattered. ‘Now let me show you how to turn out a condom you can trust.’
Painting a skin with a film of liquid gum, she nodded her head to indicate that Gross was listening at the kitchen door and deliberately spoke loudly enough for the old man to overhear. ‘He’ll give it out that his only trouble is that Broomface wants a word with him, but that aint his real worry. He’s a man with a double-W on his forehead and Broomface is the least of it. Those other parties who would like a word with him won’t bother to give warning.’
Gross’s big head came through the door: ‘Old-time shoplifter stealing all her life!’ he announced like a station caller. ‘Wanted by everyone but the church! One hand over her heart and the other in your pocket!’ He slammed the door before she could insult him in turn.
Velma the Vulcanized Woman, Dove saw, retained a faint copperish tint to her ash-blond hair and her face bore traces of Saxon beauty. She was humanized as well as vulcanized, he perceived.
‘Every bare window in this town reminds me of Arkansas,’ she admitted to Dove. ‘I might as well be in jails as the way I am.’
Sitting at the window she looked out upon a world of rogues with innocence and wonder, and both her cheekbones smashed. Her ash-blond bangs, streaked broadly now with gray, belied the fact that there wasn’t much on the books Velma hadn’t tried and a few deals she’d thought up by herself.
Goin’ to town Mama, what’ll I bring you back? she invited herself, and answered—
Just a great big bag of candy and a J. C. Stetson hat