The first players to his right were neither one Latouche. Coots could tell by their faces that they were dumbed by privilege and bucks, and he hissed straight at them, feeling the hidden stiletto in his cane. How a sweep of it across the throat would tumble them, gasping Why? Why? Queer angels would then move down on them with a coup de grace of quick sodomy. Coots’s grandfather was a rich inventor and Coots had never been without a constant monthly sum, but the frigid regard of certain wealthy raised a fire from balls to crown in him. And where was Latouche? In another parlor, vainly ignoring active grofft by placing himself in public at billiards. Coots had only, with delight, heard of grofft in his Central American travels, where he’d made himself fit enough to penetrate the wilds in search of a storied hallucinogen. The drug was a retching bust, but the grofft tales were very interesting. Latouche must have been there to contract grofft. Coots had never heard of a white man with it.
A man near ninety could not have pushed into the deeps down there. Coots remembered the horrible misunderstandings with natives, the dangerous approach through a white-water creek, the malarial bottoms, where mosquitoes were the air. He had written solemnly about his explorations, but in the back of his mind he’d since wondered if he was thoroughly had by the tribesmen. Some foliage had moved, a barking human face emerged briefly, and the thing had run off lowly like a pointer, having smelled or seen that Coots was not the right thing. Grofft! shouted the natives, terrified. He didn’t understand what was going on, but he was alarmed too, near killed by a fer-de-lance before he snapped out of it. In the University of Mexico medical library he had looked up the pathology. But the entry on grofft read as if it didn’t belong, as if it had been written in dread by a haunted mystic of the seventeenth century. The cause: probably the bite of a grofftite — the breath or saliva. Etiology? Symptoms: lupine facial features and doglike barking and whining; quadruped posture; hebephrenia; extremely nervous devotion to a search, general agitation, constant disappointment; lethargy, then renewal. Treatment: Nobody of any medical skill had ever run down a grofftite. History: The skeletons of grofftites had been seen (and avoided) in places near and far from settlements; no uniformity in demise except bones of the fingers, forehead, and sometimes neck were often (twelve cases reported) fractured, the teeth broken; head in three cases planted to jaw depth in dirt, as if thrown violently from a high elevation. And this: Grofftites have lived up to fifty years after being stricken. It was claimed infants were taken off by grofftites but these might be mere Indian tales or manipulative responses to the urban interlocutors. N.B.: Indians have demanded money to imitate a grofftite.
Coots, peering hard at old Latouche in the last parlor now, suspected it might be a powerful drug that induced grofftism. He was in the country of powerful brews, and he could not shake the idea that it was a vaguely religious, maybe even saintly condition, drunk deliberately down by the devout, enough d’s to go direct to disease, the divine. The sight of noble old Latouche, cuing the ball and doing something smooth with it, was making Coots silly.
Thinking back through the years, he had known very, very few people of pure virtue, if that was Latouche’s case. In his suit Coots felt rude and small. Latouche — another endearing trait — wore wonderful clothes, but he was a bit sloppy and misfit in them. They loved his rumpled way, his scuffed shoes, the speck of sauce on his tie. What an agreeable granddad of a guy.
The doctor was playing a young man with a built-up physique. The young man wore a blazer. Ribbed socks — Coots noticed — with spangling black loafers. He acted familiar with old Latouche. Coots wondered if Latouche was the ward of this muscular stooge.
“Good evening, our genius,” said Latouche, surprised. “You’re a billiards man too?”
“Hardly. Just a watcher. Lifelong.”
“Order you a drink?”
“Too early. Perhaps a tonic with lime.”
“We’re just talking about the rumors that God is a woman. What do the literary people say about that?”
“When wasn’t it? It’s a neurotic hag demanding worship while it lays a pox down. An obtuse monster, a self-worshiping fiend. I know gods, Doctor.”
“Should have guessed you’d have an opinion. This is Riley Barnes, Coots. Barnes, the author. Barnes knows your work. I’ve been reading you. Some difficulty, I confess, for an old sawbones. I liked the surgeon using the plumber’s friend in a heart operation. I’d suppose you’ve known some awfully bad doctors. So have I, but—”
“You have literary interest?” Coots asked Barnes. “I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?”
“Yes sir,” said Barnes, knowing Coots too. “I’m a stevedore. The docks.”
“You know, I’d spotted Riley. Somehow I thought I must meet him. So I did. Very fortuitous circumstance. I watched him through a telescope. How could I have guessed he was a literary man and wild for billiards? The city always surprises you,” explained Latouche.
Coots had written about men like Barnes, one of his physical type of boy. He had them falling through space, ejecting incandescent sperm while being hanged by the neck. . Old duffer consuls would gobble it up. Sacrifice of the young to evil, entrenched needs. The way the world worked.
“You and your friend bought. . commodities down there. I was in different clothes,” said Barnes. “Didn’t think you’d recognize me, sir. Anyway, it’s an honor. I know people who’d pay to be here.”
“Go on with your game, please,” said Coots to the young man. Was he in his late twenties? Coots wondered. Straight. Off a mural of American Labor in an old union hall, dusty hoarse Commies around being ass-fucked by shark-skinned fat union bosses with stogies. Brando, On the Waterfront. What we pansies would have given to jump his bones. Stop. Latouche is the mission. The doctor did seem a little depressed, anxious, behind the jolly front. In the old days I’d have shucked him for drugs. Exactly the kind of croaker we’d set up till thoroughly burned down. Some of them were so stupidly moral they believed they were helping my endless kidney stones. Could be literary because I was so good at those riffs. Multiple personalities I developed. Then no personality at all when sick — protoplasm, whimpering, completely dishonored. Working the subways for drunks, at my best. New York, New York! Never again, knock on wood. Paper cup of coffee dissolving at the edge with spit. Ketchup on crackers, free at the Automat, for weeks. Harvard education. Unfit to attack Hitler or Tōjō, thank God.
“How’s your dog, Doctor? It isn’t here?”
“No.” Latouche looked guilty, furtive. “Had to bury her. She got something, poor girl. They didn’t know what.”