Even Crainpool gets the benefit of my colorful rhythms. This is what is distasteful, not the high hand and the strong arm. The rhetoric. To be laconic, taciturn, the quiet type. To speak modestly and thank my clients for their custom. Nothing can make up for this, not the viciousness or the seamy excitements or my collective, licey knowledge of the world. Boy oh boy, what goes on. My thoughts explode in words. I tell Crainpool.
“Do you know, Mr. Crainpool, the progress of the liver fluke through a cow’s intestine to a human being? That’s a picture. The trematode worm forms itself in shit, is discharged in a cow’s stool. It can’t crawl, it can’t fly. All its mobility is concentrated toward one end, the act of boring. So, good nature’s corkscrew that it is, it infiltrates the foundation of a blade of grass. Everything else in the cow pat dies off — every microbe, every virus. Just the flatworm, rising out of its matrix of shit like a befouled Phoenix to nest in the basement of a single blade of grass, only that survives. Even the cow moves on, wants distance between its manure and its lunch. Well, the rains come, the sun shines, the grass grows. The fluke hasn’t hurt it; it’s only along for the ride. Till finally it’s at the top, which is the only part of the grass that the sheep will touch — his heart of artichoke and palm. A connoisseur, the sheep. And that’s all that that trematode has been waiting for, some nasty radar in him that Reveres his logy instincts and tells him the sheep are coming, the sheep are coming. Lying in ambush all that time till the grass is high enough to munch. Then the paralyzed little creature goes crazy. It hasn’t stirred its ass all the while it’s been on the grass, mind, but now suddenly it leaps out of its wheelchair and walks, runs, does fucking triples, commandos the sheep’s liver, where it’s wanted to be all along, you see. Swimming the mile, doing the decathlon, dancing, dining, diamonds shining, making right for the liver, riding there like an act of vengeance, like a bronco-buster, spoiling the sheep’s piss, poisoning the ground the sick sheep shits. Only now it’s metamorphosed, now it’s some viper butterfly to sting the heels of the barefoot kid on one of those fucking calendars of ours. Nature’s nasty marathon, its stations of the cross and inside job.
“And the same with people. What the liver fluke can do man can do. The fix is in, takes two to tango, all crime’s a cooperation. This I wanted to see. I’ve seen it, show me something else. Phooey. A Phoenician’s phooey on it all.”
Crainpool listens and nods, but his eyes are glazing. Not much interested in the overview, my Mr. Crainpool, not much feeling for the morphology of our business.
I dreamed of Oyp and Glyp again last night. Perhaps I should tell Crainpool. Would cheer him up. Well, I won’t, don’t. Bother Crainpool’s moods. I’ll be his Nature as Nature is mine. Ah, Nature, who can send us so many dreams, which do you choose? Do we dream of feasts? Three-star Michelin picnics on a checkered cloth on soft, spongy zoysia, wicker work baskets with wine in linen and gorgeous chicken sandwiches on a windless day? Of beautiful women yielding to us in lovely water, or riding behind us bareback on horses in splendid country? Do we hear wit in our sleep, or does Nature deposit millions in our account or furnish our houses as we would wish them? Does She show us new colors or sound new notes or whisper good news? Would She grant us a view of the stars close up, or entertain us with the contemplation of beasts? Where is there to be found in dreams new masterpieces to study or even the slow motion of the ordinary cinema? No. She is too niggardly, gives us rag-shop, rubbish, engineers trivial enigma we forget on rising. Better altogether to leave us dreamless — but no, not Nature. She sends us Oyp and Glyp. I can’t really remember where they were in my dream, but it was someplace high, I think, mountains (though the view was not spectacular), above Nature’s three-mile limit, smug, warm behind their beards — they do not have beards in life; they’d grown them there, though these were matted ice and hair, an awful aspic. I saw them from below. (I was not even with them.) Such heights no place for a Phoenician; God gave us men to match our mountains. Oyp and Glyp. They’re alive. Alive and loose and flouting my extraditionary will. But there’s my comfort if the dream speaks true. They are still together, and to find one is to find both. It wasn’t so with Evans, it wasn’t so with Stern, it wasn’t so with Trace. The Phoenician’s scattered, his Diaspora’d enemies drifting outward like the universe. It took years to find them. I put them together like a collection.
“Will there be any special instructions for me today, sir?”
“Do your accounts. Update your inventory. Bookkeep me my criminals. Advance the calendars. Mullins has run out of postponements. We can pull off November now.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Destroy it. Don’t just leave it lying about as you did October.”
“No, sir.”
“I want November off my walls and out of here.”
“I’m rather fond,” Crainpool says slyly, “of the angler in hip boots. He looks like my brother.”
“Sure, kid, take it.” I think Crainpool keeps a scrapbook of the pictures on my calendars. That angler doesn’t look like his brother. He has no brother. I think Crainpool associates the pictures with the month’s crimes in some mnemonic way. November would be a rapist and three car thieves, a pair of armed assaults, a little breaking and entering, a dangerous driver and a berk who threw away a suitcase of traffic tickets. Crainpool’s Wanted poster Americana. Perhaps he’s right, perhaps there’s more connection than I’ve thought about between the pictures on those calendars and the life of crime. “It’s all yours, sirrah, a fringe benefit.”
“Yes, sir, thank you.”
“Stay by the phones, it’s a telethon. When that cop calls, tell him I’m at the jail. Have him leave a message with Lou who the guy is I’m supposed to see.”
“Sir?”
“Yes, Mr. Crainpool?”
“Shouldn’t you take the call yourself? The officer might be reluctant to pass on such information through a fellow policeman.”
“Reluctant? You forget the liver fluke, sir. Where would the liver fluke be if he attended the cow’s compunction or the sheep’s scruple? Screw his sensibilities and reluctances. I’m down at the jail.” I take my hat and go out. The little bakery bell tinkles pleasantly and I smile. I have made my joyful noise in the world.
The jailhouse is two miles from municipal court — a big reason for that referendum next year — and I call there regularly. I like the idea of having places to be to conduct my business. I have the route salesman’s heart. It gets me outside. There are many such places: the jail (and its interview rooms where I consult with my clients), the courthouse, police headquarters, various law offices, the chambers of certain judges, even the main post office (one of the best ways to trace a jumper is to keep in touch with the postal authorities; sooner or later some of them send in one of those change-of-address cards requesting that their mail be redirected to a particular P.O. box in a distant city), the homes and apartments of their relatives, and, when I’m on the road tracing these mugs, the world itself. I don’t drive — I know how but I don’t — and always take public transportation (you might spot someone you’re looking for or overhear something you need to know; you can’t do this in a closed car).
The jailhouse is my favorite. It relaxes me to go there. There’s a lot of shit and sycophancy in this business. It’s “Yes, Your Honor” and “No, Your Honor” even when the guy is on your payroll. The lawyers are worse; they think we’re scum. I keep half the town’s lawyers in booze, but have yet to be invited to have a drink with one. I always send a nice present when their kids get married but have never been within goddamn hailing distance of one of those weddings. So the jail relaxes me. It’s all cops there. Cops and robbers. And though I’m as deferential to the guards as I am to the biggest judge or hot-shot pol, somehow I don’t mind so much.