“Funny,” Hollis said, “I thought I heard you say you was going for a walk or something.”
“Bryan,” I said, “why don’t you and your friends go back to the bar and give us a chorus of ‘Silent Night.’”
“The silenter the better,” David said.
“Good night, boys,” Sandy said.
“See you around the pool hall,” I said.
“You got to be kidding,” Hollis said.
Yes, I thought, we are kidding. We certainly have no intention of starting up with you stupid cowboys. Holy Trinity aside, we recognize the full potential of your physical advantage, and are decidedly eager to avoid broken heads and bloody noses, not to mention whatever it is you have in mind for Sandy. We are kidding gentlemen. We have pushed this little charade a bit too far, and will probably have ample opportunity to regret our rashness during a long and painful hospital recovery. We are all kidding here (heh-heh), can’t you take a little joke, fellers? Whyn’t you all wander on back to the corral and break a few horses, huh?
“We’re not kidding,” I said. “Now shove off.”
The only time I ever received a beating in my life was when I was fourteen years old and called my father an irresponsible (or perhaps irrepressible) drunk. He took off his belt and beat me so hard I couldn’t walk for three days. He also blackened both my eyes with his fists. (Need I mention that he was drunk at the time?) Beatings are not much fun. Fantasies of being tossed around by Bryan and Company (perhaps even being buggered by them after they had broken all our bones) flashed through my head like the last images of a drowning man. I guess I expected Sandy to save the day. I don’t know why. I guess I expected her to say something or do something that would send these three hulking horse wrestlers back to the bar. But Sandy remained silent, and one look at her face (blue eyes wide, lips trembling) told me she was just as frightened as I. So who was going to save us? David? I looked at David. David was not going to save us.
Oddly, I began wishing Dr. Krakauer were there. Patiently but firmly, Dr. Krakauer would tell these three dopes that violence solves nothing. David and I, he would say to the cowboys, were just two fun-loving kids from Manhattan, out here to have ourselves a good time, certainly intending no harm to our western neighbors, farthest thing from our minds. Feelings of hostility, the good doctor would explain, were sometimes inexplicably present in chance encounters between strangers, but outward expression of such urges was contra-indicated and highly inappropriate. (That will be a hundred and twenty dollars, please. Forty dollars for each of you.)
The silence lengthened.
Dr. Krakauer did not appear on a winged couch.
Instead, from the door, there came an instantly recognizable voice, proving to my satisfaction that God is a woman.
“Hey there, Bryan!” Mary Margaret shouted. “How you doing, cowboy?”
Green parka wet with snow, face raw from the wind outside, red hair tangled and limp, she came toward the table with Foderman not a foot behind her, arms wide in offered embrace as Bryan, grinning, got immediately to his feet.
“Well, I’ll be shat upon!” he said, and lifted Mary Margaret off her feet in a fierce bear hug. “You’re back!”
“I’m back,” she said. “Put me down, you big ox!”
“You should be up at Snowclad,” he said. “Deader’n a doornail down here.”
“Not any more, it isn’t,” Mary Margaret said. “Hey, hi, Peter!”
“You know these guys?” Bryan asked, and blinked.
“Oh, sure, good friends of mine,” Mary Margaret said. “Hi, David, hi, Sandy. Who’re these two hulking monsters?” she asked, and poked her forefinger at Hollis’s bulging left pectoral. Hollis flinched, protectively covering his chest with both hands, like a virgin who’d just been molested on the subway.
Laughing, Bryan said, “That’s Duke and Hollis. Damn, it’s good to see you!”
“Let’s get a bigger table,” Mary Margaret said. “This is Seymour Foderman, from the Bronx.”
“Hello,” Foderman said, and smiled.
Our little party started in the back room of The Tiger Pit, at the bigger table Mary Margaret demanded. That was around eleven-thirty, when there were still seven of us. By a quarter to one, there were nine of us. It was a very peculiar party. It left us shaken and depressed, which is probably why Sandy, David, and I went to bed together afterwards.
Dr. Krakauer once hinted darkly that David and I in bed together with Sandy constitutes a symbolic homosexual act. Everything is homosexual to Dr. Krakauer. Shake hands with your minister, that’s homosexual. Pass the salt, that’s homosexual. I suggested to Dr. Krakauer that perhaps he had not personally resolved his own feelings of masculine inadequacy, and, true to form, he replied, “Perhaps not.” When I reported to Sandy that Krakauer thought she was a beard for a pair of fags, she unzipped my fly and blew me. (I did not report this incident to the herr doktor because he probably would have found it homosexual as well.) Good old Crackers. He should have been at the party. He’d have instantly committed both Foderman and Mary Margaret, who began revealing aspects of their personalities that had until then been almost totally hidden.
Foderman, I decided, was a masochist.
Mary Margaret, I decided, was a monster.
Alone together on a desert island, they might have effected a splendid marriage, Mary Margaret slowly whittling away, Foderman shrieking in ecstasy each time she approached him with a carving knife. But the presence of the Green Derbies (and later the two teeny-boppers) proved catalytic, providing for Foderman and Mary Margaret just the proper indulgent environment they both craved. Mary Margaret now had the audience of noted scientists necessary for the proper appreciation of her experiment. Foderman, strapped to the table without benefit of anesthesia, lifted his head and peered through the glare of the overhead lights, dimly aware of that same audience, and secretly pleased to be the prime object of their attention. Even later, when he lay there on the reddening sheet, sliced open from Adam’s apple to scrotum, he misunderstood the cheering and thought the applause was for his exposed guts rather than for the brilliant, mad surgeon who had performed the operation. As I said, it was a very peculiar party.
By way of openers (scalpel, please), Mary Margaret asked Bryan if they had any Jews down there in Arizona where he came from, and Bryan answered Why, sure, there’s Jews down there, why Barry Goldwater’s a Jew, ain’t he? Foderman nodded and said there were Jews all over the United States, and then smiled and said, “Though, probably, in lots of little southern and western towns, the people think we’ve got horns and a tail.”
“Nobody thinks that in Arizona,” Bryan said.
“Well,” Foderman said, and shrugged.
“Listen, how’d we get talking about Jews?” Mary Margaret said, and patted Foderman’s hand comfortingly, and then said, “Why don’t we order some drinks?”
A series of cross-conversations developed at the table, Bryan and Mary Margaret reminiscing about the good times they’d had here together last year, Hollis and Duke telling Sandy about the joys of living in the open and eating baked beans cooked over a small fire, and Foderman telling David and me that he had finally heard from the good doctor Schwartz, the call coming scant moments before he and Mary Margaret left the hotel. The result was a Robert Altman movie.
KR: I’m interested in this concept of yourself as the star of a movie.
ME: I never said that.
KR: You’ve repeatedly told me you have difficulty reconciling reality with fantasy.
ME: I said I sometimes feel out of it.