One-Track Peckenpaw had once spent centuries of his life hunting the North American counterpart of the Yeti: Big-foot. He had never caught him. His tales were full of the aggressive melancholia of failure, sterile inventions about how the big one got away. It was to catch Bigfoot that he had accepted the burden of immortality; it was the grudging certainty that he never would which eventually made him a Candidate for Calf Mountain.
– There was this time, he was saying, I got sure he was a woman. It was the cunning of him, the way he played me along, the bastard. I got to thinking, if he’d been a human-been he’d’ve been a woman for sure and a cockteaser to boot. It was a fool idea, him being a female, but it climbed in my head and wouldn’t get out. Once I dreamed I fucked him… her. Jesus that was a wrestling match. Woulda broken you in two at the least, Mister Two-Time.
– I’ll try anything… began Hunter mildly.
– Twice, bellowed One-Track Peckenpaw, drowning his audience’s voice. Yeah. Anyway. It was a pleasure to track him. Like being on the heels of a wilful woman needing taming. I’d think how a woman would behave when I saw his footprint near a stream. Was it a bluff or a double-bluff? Which way was he really going? I’ve always trusted to instinct. You get a feel of your quarry stronger than any scent. If the signs don’t add up with the feel you ignore the signs. That’s the difference between a lousy tracker and a great one.
– You never caught it, though, interposed Two-Time sweetly.
– Saw him twice, said Peckenpaw from a distance. This shape, huge like a mountain, going through thick forest growth like it wasn’t there. When I got to the spot it was like a tank had gone through. It gives a man respect seeing a thing like that.
He was silent for a moment.
– The second time, he went on, was the time he came to visit me. Sleeping’s a risky business in Bigfoot land. I used to put an alarm system round my campfire-tripwires everywhere to ring bells and clatter my pans. One night I wake up and there he is, just standing there, looking down at me. Walked through all the alarms as neat as you please just to take a good look. That’s when I stopped thinking he was a woman. I lay there still as the grave and he nodded and walked away so then I turn to grab my rifle, IT WASN’T THERE. He moved it to the other side of the fire. O he was clever all right. And I’ll tell you something else, Mr sophisticated Hunter. I may not have caught the motherfucker but he made me more of a man than You’ll ever be. COME AND GET ME, he meant when he gave me that stare, CATCH AS CATCH CAN. YOU see: he showed me a point of no return. didn’t matter that I was the best tracker that ever lived with ten lifetimes’ experience. He had a million years’ practice at running away. So now? Now I respect his privacy.
One-Track Peckenpaw leapt to his feet suddenly, his arms windmilling as he shouted: -COME AND GET ME, YOU BASTARD! CATCH AS CATCH CAN I and burst into convulsive laughter, great gulping laughs that shook his eyebrows; while Two-Time Hunter pulled the last leg off his spider, leaving it a round, wriggling, dying core.
Blink.
Elfrida Gribb had always thought the trouble with Flann O’Toole had to do with two things: his preoccupation with being such a disgustingly uproarious broth of a boy, and the fact that his middle name was Napoleon. An Irish Napoleon was a concept so grotesque it had to end up like O’Toole.
O’Toole made potato whisky in a back room and seduction attempts upon the person of every female who entered the Elbaroom; he swore oaths regularly and broke promises unfeelingly; he was prone to fits of violent temper, but thought himself a reasonable man; he was likely at any moment of the day or night to keel over in an alcoholic stupor, but he considered himself a man of power; he was carried to his bed every night in a haze of obscenity and vomit, but was convinced he was a leader in the community; he quoted poetry as he did ugly things. To Elfrida, his presence darkened a room and denied the beauty of life; to himself, he was a lightning-rod, conductor of electricity, Prometheus unchained, raw, carnal man in his prime, the very vitality of life. There was, too, a strong religious streak left in him; on mornings-after he could be seen mortifying his flesh with a cane, or heard crying in agony through the door of Mlle de Sade’s chambers at the House of the Rising Son. It was one of the reasons Dolores had left him; those who undergo physical suffering or mutilation involuntarily naturally loathe those who inflict it upon themselves in the name of God. Her only possible reaction had been flight.
– Holy Mary, cried O’Toole to a farmer’s wife, who had shrunk away in fear, you look about ready for it, me darlin. What wouldn’t you say now to a large dose of O’Toole’s hot cock, eh? There, don’t shrink away. ’Tis the Organ O’Toole I offer, you Protestant whore. And that’s no mean gift I can tell you surely with the stops pulled out and all.
The farmer sat bridling by his wife, but made no attempt to defend her; a bellyful of potato whisky makes a mean fighter.
– There now, observe your husband, lurched O’Toole, if he isn’t being more sensible than yourself, then I don’t know what. Compliance is a virtue; resistance is an act o’ violence and me I’m a hater of all that. Come now, up with your skirts, down with your underwear and Napoleon O’Toole will give you an evening to remember him by. ’Twould be an act of true pacifism. For which I believe the Sanskrit word is Ahimsa. Mr Gandy himself’d be proud of you.
The woman shook her head imploringly at her husband.
– Now then, he said, half-rising from his seat. O’Toole shoved him back.
– Would you deny me my due, sir, would you? This place is my land and a seigneur on his land has droits. Do not cross me. Do not. In the morning no doubt I shall chastise meself as once I chastised meself for years upon years through a holy union with a broken hag of a wife. That was a religious thing to do if you like, to pleasure the crippled and suffer agonies in the doing. Have you ever screwed a hunchback, farmer? Then do not deny me my freedom. My time is served.
– I will not go with you, said the woman.
– Will you not? roared O’Toole. Will you not now? You come to the Elbaroom and will not go with its master? Is that manners, woman, to treat your host so? The name itself gives you fair warning, El Barooom! The blast of the rocket and the prick of Napoleon. Have you no wish to roll with emperors? I would give you children of genius. If I could.
– I will not go, insisted the woman tearfully.
– Then go to the devil, cried O’Toole, and raised the small table that sat between the peasant couple over his head, scattering glasses and drinks. He made to throw it across the room.
Blink.
(In O’Toole’s version of the breakdown of his marriage to Dolores, he held that when he had suffered long enough, been tortured long enough by her deformity and ungratefulness, he had thrown her out. The truth was a different matter. Dolores O’Toole had left her husband because he could not satisfy her. Flann Napoleon O’Toole had only half a testicle, having lost the rest in a fight with a dog; his limp penis was but an inch long and, owing to the depredations of the demon drink, he could only rarely stiffen it to twice that size. These circumstances are offered in extenuation of his behaviour.)
When Jocasta had replaced Liv as Madame of the town’s brothel, it was Virgil Jones who had suggested the ironic play on words that was now its name. But though she insisted on keeping a spotless house, it possessed none of the expansive, trellised, wrought-iron elegance of the city that New Orleans had once been; nor did the Madame resemble the tragic queen, wife and mother to the oedipal Rex, in any wise but their shared name. Thus both arms of the pun were somewhat truncated, and the House of the Rising Son forged its own style.