A CIRCUS-MUSIC AIR SEEPED THROUGH THE WALLS, a voice croaking on about whispers and dances and the lie that was home. It was the mongoloid glee of pots and pans, and marimbas, and accordions, and guitars that wouldn’t tune. And like the song, all inside was doorway huddlings and splashing wine, the mirth, it’s true, of fantastic ends. The world had changed between now and then, but the cabin had not, nor the humans in it. How is it the strangest people we know are nearly always ourselves?
My boys and girls were at it again, none of them eager, of course, to know how we’d fared. The two girls and Dinky sat round Basil sprawled on the floor with a bottle in his fist.
Lucille was making a pile from the mud she’d pinched off her man. She paused when I walked in, more, it seemed, from the disturbance I’d created than anything else.
Dinky had propped himself on an elbow to motion at his drink. No doubt he’d struck the pose merely to impress. In all our years, our lasting pride was standing off the Comedown.
The Comedown — ah — what’s got to be the nearest drunks can get to Old Scratch’s terror when Sir Nothing cast him out — far from your mother’s kisses and the SweeTarts bought on Sunday with the coins from Saturday’s chores after waffles and bacon and eggs — crushed in that void, totally confounded: Jim Carroll’s lovely at the corner of Seamen and Dripp, who every Friday night bangs this jerk or that to rise come mañana with a frog in her throat and Ding Dongs and beer and rubs on the floor: the tone arm’s bouncing in “Angie’s” last groove, the stench is sick as a cheeseburger’s ghost, the light through the blinds are the fires of hell, and nothing—nothing like a blot — of true love is lost in the depths of her hair. Still, and for all that, you’d never find us giving in to the thing, admitting our defeat, not ever. The Comedown could gouge our eyes and break our teeth, stab us and choke us and carve its name in our heads, but we’d only scream for more. It didn’t matter that we’d slipped down its throat, our hands gone utterly wild. Fuck that beast! It could swallow us whole! And whenever we did find ourselves in that dark fix, really and truly — and we did, we did — you’d not once hear us say it. Someone came along to ask our thoughts, they’d get the old two thumbs. Serve up that grime. Serve up the shit entire. We’d be there sure with bibs besides, slurping it down to the drop.
Something good and mean had Dinky all right, if not the Comedown then some other such piece of woe. Anyone could see it. He gazed out emptily now, frogish and huge. A person could’ve slapped his face with a skunk or crammed his ass full of melon, he wouldn’t have squawked a peep. His face didn’t lie. It was a fallen house, in whose halls slunk that oaf, Remembrance.
“You’re back,” he said, struggling to his hands and knees. He couldn’t decide to stay put or stand, or even what to say. “Welcome once again, old pal… to our little… fold.”
And then Hickory rose to greet me, the shag fell away, goofy and light she floated my way, petals in her hair and from her eyes, though still I was numb, still my head was a bucket of sand, that floating blossom, dancing girl, she came my way to pour herself out and smother me gold, it was only for me to cry the word, her with her voice, her with her lips and eyes, for now I was home, made limber and fine, another time yet I’d been brought clear, I could smell her now, she drove me bent, hallelujah, lord, praise be the stars, for man, oh man, this I knew, I was most certainly fucked…
“Look at you,” she said. “Your face…”
They were gawking at me, then, all of them, the mannequin, too, staring me down with its empty eyes. Then clarity took me, and I snatched up the mannequin to kiss it again and again. And then I tucked it in my arm and with my free hand high went forth.
“My friends!” I said. “My friends!” I grabbed a bottle and poured five shots. “I’d like to propose a toast!”
“Come again?” Lucille said.
“A toast, my dear. In fact, a toast to you. In honor of your promotion.” I raised my glass. The spirit of the underground man had crept into my head, through the porch of my sleeping ear. “Let us all drink,” I shouted, “to the success of Lucille Bonnery. May she live long and prosper in her new status as Queen of the Corporate Raiders!”
Dinky found the strength to burble “Hear! Hear!” while Basil sat up with “I’ll drink to that — hell, I’ll drink to anything!” They emptied their glasses with a single draught, Hickory and Lucille, too. “A toast!” they said, and drank.
I choked down my shot and began to convulse…
When at last I came to from an apparent fit of speaking in tongues, Basil was standing above me, rubbing his eyes. He looked hideous and comical, encrusted with mud, it and that hat perched on his head like some ugly bird from the sea.
“Maybe you guys’ve got the skinny from the inside,” he said, “but I haven’t understood half the crap this whacko said.”
“So your question is…?” Lucille said.
“Hatchet Lady!” Hickory said.
“Nice,” Dinky said.
On the mantle, between a badly carved falcon and some frou-frou matches, stood a little doll from Mexico, huaraches, serape, sombrero, all. When you pulled the sombrero off its head, a giant boner sprang from its pants, only some wise guy had wedged a twig beneath the thing’s sombrero to keep the boner boned.
I held up the mannequin like some ventriloquist’s dummy. “This is not a prison,” it said. “Because if it is, what the heck is the world?”
Dinky coughed. “Well put, mannequin,” he said.
“You, my fat-headed friend,” said Basil as he whirled on Dinky with more savagery than he seemed able, “had better watch it.”
Dinky fell into another fit, his worst so far. Super had returned to fix the phone, I remembered. That’s what he’d been doing in the basement, working on the wires for the phone. If the phone worked, we could call for help, we could bring in a winch for Basil’s truck. And if the roads hadn’t been washed away like They were saying they might, we could run our friend to the doc’s and throw a celebration. And if the phone didn’t work, well, Super had got here somehow. If he was here, so was his truck.
Fancy ideas, and probable, too, had the phone not been made worthless for good. From the other room, the news warned folks trapped in the storm to remain inside with patience. Mr and Mrs Jones would love this, I thought, free of the flood in their cozy dens. They’d hunker round the tube with their top-shelf booze and gourmet ale to point and exclaim, taken for a time from gluing their models or paging through zines or waking from another nap.
Dinky was hacking so bad my friends couldn’t help but see. They gathered round him now, outrageous. They wouldn’t admit it, not yet, but the sons of bitches were scared. Dinky looked worse than he had in the rain. “What’s wrong, what’s wrong?” Hickory said, and cried.
Pretty soon they got him on the couch, and pretty soon again he set into the lines from some old poem while making gestures no one could stop. “Dinky’s sick,” he said. “He must die — Lord, have mercy on us!” Then he’d cough or burble or whimper or sometimes even laugh. And then the tedium would repeat.
“That’s not funny, Dink,” Basil kept saying. “That’s not funny.”
“It’s no joke,” I said.
“Really?” Lucille said. “Maybe you could tell me what you’re doing with that mannequin then.”
“Not right now,” Basil told her. “Just don’t.”