Maybe Siggie, maybe Frankie, anyway, one against
many. Maybe Billy, maybe Maxie: back to back they shoot their way out of the trap. Quadriune thoughts unite the four of them — the victorious four. They caress the loneliness that goes with superiority. They despise the crowd. Their indolent, self-assured gait. For in thoughts they're always quicker on the draw. They cross the dusty square. Their eyes narrow; the saloon empties at their approach. All four at the bar. That thirsty ride. Weighted down with the saddles of dead horses. The way they shoot the heels off the corrupt sheriff's boots. The way they shoot, period. In any position. Even funny ones. The way Siggie (after a long ride through the alkali desert) sits in the bathtub with soapsuds up to her neck, yet through the towel takes care of the lurking enemy bang bang.
And always there's a milk-faced boy who makes trouble, who's in the way, who stands dreamy-dopey in the field of fire and whom Billy has to rescue, though the Smith Brothers (Frankie and Siggie) have already tightened the noose around the trembling kid's (Maxie's) neck. But in thoughts and films that never tear, the rescued kid always turns into the scrawny, stubborn, and comically angular girl in pants. This comes out in thought and fact when the gunshot wound has to be cauterized, or the arrowhead extracted: small breasts under the gooseflesh. Our Maxie's name is Susanne. But Billy staunchly forgoes a fuck in the bushes. The leave-taking is gruffly affectionate, no more, a good-natured smack on the boy-in-girl's taut ass: "So long, Susie. Take care of yourself."
Then more loneliness in the saddle or walking beside the rickety nag through desert and prairie. Vultures describing smaller and smaller circles. Skeletons all about. Plagued by horseflies or gnats. Gold, money, thinks Frankie. Revenge, thinks Siggie. Only Billy yearns to go straight, not to have to kill kill kill any more, to raise cattle in the wide, billowing pasture land and back home in Kentucky—"You come, too, Maxie!" — and break in horses.
But Frankie jumps out of the film to the shore of the Grunewaldsee, where Father's Day lies dozing, and shoots from the hip with both index fingers: Bang! Bang! "You curs! You wuthless curs!"
But Westerns aren't the whole story. Billy, my Sibylle,
whose life is a movie, stars in other pictures as well. Under the name of Bill, she has gone to sea and hauled codfish to Iceland. A hard life.
And in war films, Billy has taken an active part in several campaigns. In the Thirty Years' War she claims, if not as cook in a Scottish regiment, then as a colonel under the Swedish general Baner (immediately after the Battle of Witt-stock), to have reconquered Silesia, driven out the Catholics, and as Chancellor Oxenstierna's courier gone to Danzig, where she met the poet (and double agent) Opitz, for whom a kitchenmaid cooked diet fare and whose last years she sweetened.
Or in love films: Sibylle Miehlau has at all times been irresistible as a man. She claims to have taken the place of sweet Jesus in the bed of the High Gothic Dorothea of Montau on the first night of the journey to Aachen, when the pilgrims stopped at the Jug in Putzig. A wandering student he was at the time, and they did it over and over and then some. Naturally Maxie has to play the part of the frail Dorothea in ecstasy.
And Billy also has the starring role in a picture called Father's Day, which begins with a hundred thousand men going to the woods and shows how on foot, in carriages, and in cars they go looking for places, make fires, drink beer, piss against trees, cook, chew pieces of meat, rest after lunch, and pursue thoughts that are all filmed.
Suddenly a breeze. The Prussian pines were clearing their throats. Under the ashes of the campfire the coals were beginning to look hopeful. The lake ruffled its forehead. Seven, eleven crows flew up into the air — messengers from the black-leather angels on the far shore. Pine trees stirred elsewhere, by the Schlachtensee, by the Griebnitzsee. The oaks in Spandau Forest and in the mixed forest of Tegel remembered keenly. Smells moved from place to place. Paper napkins bloomed at lakeside cafes. And near the village of Liibars, where the German Democratic Republic marks its border with barbed wire, the breeze — which came from that direction — knew only one Germany. As though the sweet Lord had decided to suspend the noonday peace of this Ascension Day, which in Berlin and elsewhere is celebrated as Father's Day, with a "We-e-ell" more sighed than spoken.
And Billy, Frankie, Siggie, and Maxie were also shaken out of their thoughts and exciting adventure films. They jumped to their feet. Maxie was wearing sandals. Frankie sported paratroopers' boots. Siggie and Billy were wearing plain though sturdy shoes. All four flexed their knees. They shook off tatters of thoughts and prairie dust. They cracked their joints. They hopped about like sparring partners or sprinters before the start.
And on the far shore, as on the shores of faraway lakes, male limbs were picked up, shaken, stretched: Let's see what we can still do. Give the old Adam a chance. We can't just laze in bed all the time, letting sweet dreams melt in our mouths. Hell no! Gotta get back into action. What price the world?
"Hey, Siggie, what's wrong with you today? Hey, Maxie, do something! Put on a show! And what about Frankie? Can this be our good old Frankie? The wagoner and hellhound. The man with the iron claw. Let's go, boys. You, too, Billy. Didn't Billy promise to pull out the stopper? Hell, this is Father's Day, Father's Day!"
And then on all sides the great, the unprecedented male competition began. What made it really worth seeing was that the contestants were amateurs, but professional class. The rules? It's simple: everyone shows what he can do. That's how it's always been, as you can see recorded in Old M.an Homer and Old Man Moses, in the Nibelungenlied or The Struggle for Rome. Not just the young people; Grandpa can join in, too, grabbing hold of a cafe chair by the bottom of one leg and lifting it high into the beech leaves.
Lots of people can chew up beer glasses and swallow them. Anybody who's been in the army can volunteer to do a hundred knee bends while holding a jerrycan of gasoline (only half full) out in front of him. Walking on hands still earns gasps of amazement. And what else?
Wherever men have gathered in dispersed order: Bavarian finger wrestling, all-German tug-of-war, East Asian free-style wrestling. All demonstrate strength, courage, and dexterity. And that's the mark of a man: dead serious about his merry games.
On the far shore, the black-leather motorcycle boys— "Boy, you'd think they'd suffocate!" — were throwing switch-
blade knives at one another, aiming well for a bare miss. The silly fraternity students nearby — they, too, still in full regalia — hadn't been able to think of anything better than bottoms-upping their beer while standing stiff and straight (with increasing difficulty), and snarling Old German and Latin toasts. A bald man in his mid-fifties, his head protected by a handkerchief knotted at the four corners, the eternal loner who always has his own little act, was squatting by the lake shore in the left foreground, fishing leeches out of the Grunewald sludge and placing them on his dismal, old-looking legs.
Why not? Why shouldn't he, too, have his fun? Isn't it a free society? Isn't each one of us free to apply as many leeches as he pleases?
And then, availing herself of her freedom, Maxie decided to climb one of the straight and staunch Prussian pine trees. She tossed off her sandals, stationed herself at some distance, and took her measure of the chosen tree in the midst of the group. But she didn't leap at it; no, she approached with a slow, springy step, playfully spreading and hooking her fingers as the big cats spread and hook their claws, and paused near the tree for a few seconds of meditation, perhaps to say a brief prayer; for Maxie, who had been raised a Catholic, had learned to appeal to Saint Anthony for help in drastic situations, for instance, when about to climb a pale mottled pine tree, because it looks easier from below than halfway up, where Maxie stopped to rest; foot after foot and hand over hand, scraping the skin off the edges of her feet and the palms of her hands, with no other reward for her trouble, danger, and pain than the resinous fragrance of the sticky bark. She was helped by the shouts of her friends Frankie and Siggie, whose jingle—"Stiff and straight, stiff and straight, like a soldier on parade!" — did more than spur her on. At first it only made her sad, but then, just before the knobby-tousled top of the phallic pine tree, it brought on an honest-to-goodness surge of desire, for which reason Maxie, in a state of supreme exaltation, had to pause again and press close to the vibrant wood, until a very natural and decidedly feminine moan came pouring out of her: ahahahah. .