"Yes," Grijpstra said.
"You had the same dream?"
"What's your instrument?" Grijpstra asked.
"Keyboards." Ishmael had been rolling more cigarettes out of the trumpeting-soldier can and he had to crack a window to let air into the cockpit. There was too much wind whistling in to talk through but Ishmael pointed things out below, with the coast roughening up. No more townhouses on sand beaches raked by tractors but bays, coves, peninsulas, and ragged islands, each with its own moving luminous froth surrounding bare rocks leading up to carpets of shrubs and firs or pine trees. There were a few fishing boats thumping through turbulent seas, white wooden vessels, and a three-masted schooner with billowing brown sails.
"Tourist charter boat," Ishmael shouted.
There was a modern yacht, sleek, whizzing along under a cloud of white nylon. Grijpstra thought that the yacht was the ideal situation.
Ishmael made the plane lose altitude. The Tailorcraft, its tiny wheels a few feet above the waves, circled the yacht. The crew waved. The crew looked young and beautiful, both sexes from late teens to thirties. Grijpstra thought that these had to be the Magazine Cover People, temporarily released from their second dimension. He noticed a white-maned, ruddy-faced, sharp-featured, tall rnilitary-looking authority at the wheel. The authority smoked a pipe. Grijpstra thought the authority could be General MacArthur, or the United States god. Grijpstra waved. General MacArthur or the United States god lifted an imperial hand in response. There was immense power in the figure.
The little plane headed north again. Grijpstra thought of de Gier, subject to American authority now. "Do you know Sheriff Hairy Harry?"
Ishmael discussed Hairy Harry while the Tailor-craft wiggled through the last hundred miles to Jameson, in between showing his passenger such curiosities as a finback whale coming up to spout between dives, over seventy feet of smoothly shaped gray-blue creature calmly pursuing a majestic existence framed by whitecaps on green waves.
"Thirty elephants," Ishmael said, "thirty elephants wouldn't outweigh that mother."
"Big mother," Grijpstra said, as the whale dwarfed the airplane.
"Bigger than Tyrannosaurus rex," Ishmael said, "and that mother stood five stories. What did you hear about our sheriff?"
"To stay away?" Grijpstra asked.
Ishmael thought that might be a good idea. Grijpstra might think this whale was big but Sheriff Hairy Harry was bigger. Why, did Grijpstra know that Hairy Harry, ruler of Woodcock County, Maine, had bought a two-hundred-thousand-dollar house from Farnsworth for one hundred thousand, twenty-five down, and an easy mortgage?
"From Flash Farnsworth?" Grijpstra asked.
"So you know everybody?" Ishmael's dentures clicked in amazement, moved sideways a little, overadjusted, came back in place. "No. Bildah Farnsworth. He'd be kin to Flash. All Flash has is an osprey nest for hair and a half share in a leaky tub."
Grijpstra said there had to be a slump on for houses to sell at half their value, and Ishmael said that would be so, but then there was always a recession in Maine. But Hairy Harry's house was custom-built, complete-turn the key and step into Hairy Harry Land, the sheriffs individually adjusted theme park. Country music on compact disc in an electronic jukebox loudspeaker-extended to all rooms, full-size snooker tables in the basement, inside golf carpet wall to wall in the loft, bar with foreign beers on tap, a gun room, a video room.
Ishmael looked sly. Now he wasn't sure but just for the sake of argument, of pure cussedness, there might even be a supply of skinflicks there, no kidding around for Hairy Harry, the old in-and-out perhaps. Imported, most likely. Probably quite a collection. Ishmael liked to collect things himself and there was something to be said for naked women, okay? Grijpstra didn't mind his bringing up the subject? But they, the women, might make the viewer, Ishmael in this case, kind of nervous, especially if they moved and talked, and had company and so forth. "You happen to care for that sort of thing yourself, eh…"
"Grijpstra."
"Kripstra," Ishmael said.
"In Holland we get too much of that now," Grijpstra said. "Like masturbation classes on prime-time TV. Holland used to be Calvinistic all over but it's the other way around now. The Dutch are compulsive in any direction. Prescribed group sex and all that." Grijpstra didn't care for the activity himself.
"What if they're good?"
Grijpstra said he always preferred them to be out of sight, behind drawn curtains. "And quiet," Grijpstra said. "They better be quiet."
"You could switch them off."
Grijpstra said his girlfriend liked to watch sometimes.
"You really don't like looking in?"
"Makes me shy," Grijpstra said.
"That's like Flash Farnsworth," Ishmael said. "Flash closes his eyes at the good parts."
"Porno?"
"No, regular," Ishmael said. "But regular shows it too. Flash says he can see it better in his head."
"Flash with the bird's nest on top?"
"Right." Ishmael made the Tailorcraft skim waves, nip between islands here and there, while he told Grijpstra about Flash, and while summer people, lounging on verandas of island summer houses, looked down on the antique airplane putt-putting bravely below.
Flash Farnsworth, Ishmael remembered, was with the Coast Guard once, and a drinking lad at the time, until divine justice sent the big woman bouncing down the boulevard in Boston. So now Flash limped. "You see, Krip, that's what Flash finally figured out the big woman to be- heaven-sent. Get me?"
Amsterdam police officers, in view of the city's partly alien population, are required to take English spoken-language exams. Grijpstra also watched American rental movies, with Tabriz, de Gier^ left-behind fat furry cat, bunched up on his lap, blocking the subtitles. On the other hand there were Ishmael's Maine accent and Grijpstra's fear offlying low in a small aircraft above turbulent seas. Nevertheless Grijpstra got the general drift of Flash's trial, which, Ishmael said, had to do with faith and reason, and the simplicity of Flash, who wanted God in heaven. One who accepts nothing at all, Ishmael said, has to look for reasons to hang his soul from.
"Always for a reason," Ishmael was saying. "Got to be the Lord who sent this woman. So here is Flash, marching along on the Boston boulevard, with a flask in his back pocket, in his Sunday whites, and there's Bigga, bouncing along, and divine design says they gotta meet, right, Krip?"
Grijpstra nodded, wondering about the splashing against the windscreen. What was it, sea spray? Had to be spray, with the plane flying that low.
"So Bigga wants the flask and Flash wants Bigga and divine design provides the side street and the alley off the side street and a garbage can in the alley, and Bigga puts Flash on the lid and sets herself down on him and…"
Ishmael's two-tone whistle and the flat of his hand hitting his thigh rhythmically indicated their having sex.
"Flash is a quiet man, but at that particular time and place Flash was yelling, and Bigga thought that it was she who caused this joyful agony, but it was the broken flask up Flash's ass." Ishmael sang:
And all the Coast Guard's surgeons and all the Navy's men couldn't put Flash's rear end together again.
Grijpstra wished he had never taken the English courses, never watched the American rentals. Full comprehension of Flash's anal problem turned his testicles to glass.
He concentrated on the windscreen, with moisture splashing up, dribbling back to the hood. Ishmael had made the plane fly high again, at some five hundred feet, veering back to the coast. The weather was good: clear sky with thin cloud lines parallel to the horizon.