I opened the door and shut it behind me. “If anyone follows me, I’ll blast them to bits,” I shouted.
I ran up the steps to the middle ranges and hid in the shadows hoping that the stampede of footsteps now descending upon the bottoms would pass right by me. IT WORKED. Five hundred marines, five hundred navy personnel, five hundred coast guard and five hundred Green Berets plus one Arab, one Nationalist Chinese, one Rhodesian, one Peruvian and one Aussie sped by the middle range. It was a regular U.N. peace-keeping force.
I headed up the steps until I came to the main floor. I ran to the third door marked “classified” and opened it, thinking of the door as a possible exit. Hundreds of tiny skulls poured out and knocked me off my feet. Skulls rolled through the halls and stacked against the walls to pile up slowly. A tide of gore was rising all around me. I heard the sound of tingly music coming from outside the house. I plodded through the skulls-still bouncing and rushing from the third room — and toward a window where the merry-go-round, connected to the cab of a big Mack truck, was winding around the path. Behind the merry-go-round were the rolling waters of the bay licking the top of the wall like black tongues. In the distance I could see another battleship head back toward HARRY SAM.
HUNDREDS OF FOOTSTEPS WERE COMING FROM THE BOTTOMS. IT ALL BECAME CLEAR TO ME! THE LAST ONE ON THE BLOCK TO KNOW. I puked and fainted into the heap of bones, dead weight.
When I awoke I found myself being carried down the path. I looked up into the face of my rescuer, Eclair Porkchop.
“Man, you weigh as much as lead,” said the preacher, running down the path toward the high wall. We had passed the gnarled tree standing in the middle of the road when voices of the mob could be heard pouring out of the motel. The helicopters dipped and started toward us.
“What are you doing rescuing me? You’re with them.”
“No time to talk now. You have to get away from here,” he replied.
We finally reached the Black Bay which had hungrily rose above Rutherford Birchard Hayes’s head and now was on level with the top of the wall.
Suddenly two Screws came from out of the darkness.
“JUMP, BOY, JUMP!” the preacher said.
“But the Latin roots, those terrible man-eating plants and who knows what else,” I pleaded.
He whispered into my ear and gave me a small bottle, just as two Screws grabbed him by the arms, then aimed two lugers at me. Pouring the bottle’s contents into the water before me, I dove into the Black Bay, which now showed crystal-clear, with brilliant-colored vegetation and fancy fish swimming at the bottom. Some distance out I turned over and began a backstroke. I could see the motel at the top of the mountain, its “EATS” sign blinking rapidly.
On the oak tree which stood on the last bend of the pathway near the wall, a flaming figure swung back and forth. A mob had gathered below. They were playing dogbones and kazoos and blowing into jugs the popular American song “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” I wept; tears pouring down my cheeks and into the water, but having business to take care of I could not pause — I turned around and kept on swimming.
I clutched the branch of a tree which drooped into the Black Bay. The ol men in the Emperor Franz Joseph Park scooped up arms full of film and slammed shut the bound copies of Harper’s Brothers Weekly. They sent clouds of dust and the musty smell of pulp up from the park.
They said, “Whoopie, yeserie,” and jogging erlong, swapped “do-si-dos” and “I told you so’s” and they zigzagged, reeled and rocked in file all around the park until meeting two-by-two and side-by-side they marched into the tree-lined street of ol brownstones where an ol man was dropped at every stoop until there was only the bony-kneed soul with the bass drum — he boomed with a ragged soupbone — and then soon he too was gone as wheelbarrows of dentures, toupees, elevator shoes and sloppily laid corpses stood before each ol man’s home. [Da efficient widow executioners had raised dem black-checkered flags right on time, baby. And dat was all she wrote cause da pencil broke for those fuked-up souls — rest in peace for 1931–1939.]
I saw an object atop the fragments of dead clippings. I waded up to my knees through the grassy film and the phlegm-covered flags and picked up an ivory music box. On the cover done in mother-of-pearl was a picture of Lenore in her Bickford’s uniform. I opened the music box and heard the tape of the familiar voice:
ROGER YOUNG IN THE FIRST AT SARATOGA
ROGER YOUNG IN THE NINTH AT CHURCHILL DOWNS
ROGER YOUNG IN THE FOURTH AT BATAVIA
ROGER YOUNG IN THE FIFTH AT AQUEDUCT
ANNOUNCED BY RAPUNZEL
Why those sneaky old bastards in the Seventeen Nation Disarmament gin mill, I chuckled, putting us on for all these years — pretending to be Nazarene patriots, but actually bettin’ on the nags!
My shirt was wringing wet and barracudas wiggled from under my pants cuffs. I looked at my pocket watch. It had stopped at 3:00 A.M., August 6, 1945—when the skulls pressing against my thighs had crushed its glass plate.
THROUGH THE PARK TOWARD SOULSVILLE I RAN, MY FEET SLAPPING (PING-PING) THE PAVEMENT AS I RAN TOWARD THE “FOUR CORNERS” INTERSECTION IN THE MIDDLE OF SAM WHERE VIOLENT WHIRLPOOLS OF PEOPLE SEEMED TO BE HEADING PELL-MELL INTO THE CROSSROADS. I RAN ACROSS THE STREET JUST AS A T-MODEL FORD COMING FROM AN OPPOSITE DIRECTION SWERVED TO AVOID HITTING ME.
I HAD NOT CHANCED TO LOOK BACK UPON THE RESULTING EXPLOSION WHICH SENT SCREWS AND A PRIZE DOG, AN OL WOMAN, A FORMER MOVIE STAR, A SLUM LORD AND ASSISTANT, HANDICAPPED VETERANS, AKESTRA OF MEN IN WHITE FORMALS AND A TOP GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL AND WIFE FLOATING UP FROM THE STREET HALOED AND WHITE-ROBED AND STRUMMING HARPS.
When I reached the projects the lights of the auditorium located in the community center was ablaze. Outside the center a sign announced the reason:
COMMUNITY MEETING WHERE ARE OUR CHILDREN?
speakers discussions committees
symposiums Kool-Aid & lemonade
I stood in the back of the auditorium. M/Neighbor was speaking to the audience from a lectern which stood on the stage.
“Folks, Nosetrouble be back directly from his gotiating with SAM — but in the meantime how about a few frank pranks?” He began to slap his thighs and fuss with his trousers as he performed a mean hambone.
“Aw man, quit shuking,” said one man, raising himself from a cot in the middle of the auditorium. “We’ve been waiting here for two weeks now and the kat hasn’t come back and all you do is throw a whole lot of empty lemonade at people. Now if he doesn’t come back soon we’re going to take things into our own hands.”
“Have patience, my friends,” M/Neighbor said. “I tell you what I’m going to do. How would you like to meet a real live ghost? A man who spooked Rutherford Birchard Hayes’s biography and is gung ho about the lawd.”
“Awwwwwwww ain’t that commendable,” said some of the ol sisters. The water pitcher rattled as the first poltergeist to integrate Cornpone University walked toward the lectern. But having no time for a matinee I ran down the aisle and jumped to the platform, wresting the microphone from his hand.
Never one good at diplomacy, I blurted, “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, SAM’S EATING YOUR CHILDREN.” The audience gasped. “I mean, I mean …” (thinking of how brutal the language was), “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, SAM HAS A RARE DELICACY YOU OUGHT TO KNOW ABOUT.”
“Man, what are you talking about? Babbling like that,” M/Neighbor said. “You’re supposed to be dead. Look at what this says,” he said, removing a ny tooth from his pocket.
ACTOR MEETS QUEER DEATH IN BLACK BAY
NOSETROUBLE STILL NEGOTIATIN’ MISSING CHILDREN