Doctor Sax (3 page)

The children in the court pay no attention to me, either that or because I am a ghost they dont see me.

Pawtucketville rattles in my haunted head …

IT IS A RAINY NIGHT
, on the Moody Street Bridge there’s poor old millhand Joe Plouffe. The night he was headed for Mill Pond mills with a lunch that he suddenly heaved far up into the night sky– G.J. and Lousy and I were sitting in the Friday evening park grass, behind the fence, and like a million times there goes Joe with lunchpail beneath brown auras of corner lamp with its illumination of every pebble and puddlehole in the street–only tonight we hear a strange yell, and see him throw lunch with a floosh-up of his arms and walk off, as lunch lands, he’s going to the bars of wild whiskey instead of the mills of drudgery–the only time we saw Joe Plouffe excited, the other time was in a suppertime basketball game, Joe on my side, Gene Plouffe on G.J.’s, the two brothers start hipping each other, whack, unobtrusive grinning use of hips packing great power that can knock you down and when littler Gene (5:01) gave him a good one bigger Joe (5:02) got red-in-face and slammed him a surreptitious
hip that had Gene momentarily stunned and red, what a duel, G.J. and I were trapped pale among the titans, it was a great game–Joe’s lunch in fact landed about 20 feet from that very basketball bucket in the tree–

But now it’s a rainy night and Joe Plouffe, resigned, huddled, hurries home at midnight (no more buses running) bent against cold March rainwinds–and he looks across the wide dark towards Snake Hill behind the wet shrouds–nothing, a wall of darkness, not even a dull brown lamp.—Joe goes home, stops for a hamburger in Textile Lunch, maybe he ducked in our wrinkly tar doorway to light his butt– Then turned down Gershom in the corner rain and went home (as tragic roses bloom in rainy backyards of midnight with lost marbles in the mud). As Joe Plouffe lifts his heel from the last wood plank of the bridge, suddenly you see a faint brown light come on far in the night of the river–just about on Snake Hill– and beneath the bridge, slouching, dark, emitting a high laugh, “Mwee hee ha ha ha,” fading, choking, mad, maniac, caped, green-faced (a disease of the night, Visagus Nightsoil) glides Doctor Sax–along by the rocks, the roars–along the steep dump bank, hurrying–flapping, flying, floating, sweeping to the reedy flats of Rosemont, in one movement removing the rubber boat from his slouched hat and blowing it up into a little rowboat–goes rowing with rubber paddles, red-eyed, anxious, serious, in the gloom of rains and bat-spans and roar hush mist-masts—real river–keeping an eye on the Castle–as over the basin of that Merrimac with eager petite birdy wings bat-boned
little Count Condu the Vampire hastens to his baggy dusty crumbled old girl in the unspeakable brown of the Castle door, O ghosts.

COUNT CONDU CAME FROM
Budapest–he wanted good Hungarian earth to lie still in during the long dull afternoons of the Europe void–so he flew to America by rainy night, by day slept in his six-foot sand box aboard an N.M.U. ship–came to Lowell to feast on the citizens of Merrimac … a vampire, flying in the rainy night river from the old dump along back Textile field to the shores of Centralville … flying to the door of the Castle which was located on top of the dreaming meadow near Bridge and 18th. Upon the top of this hill, located symmetrically with the old stone castle-house on Lakeview Avenue near Lupine Road (and the long lost French Canadian hoogah names of my infancy) there stands a Castle, high in the air, the king surveyor of the Lowell monarchial roofs and stanchion-chimneys (O tall red chimneys of the Cotton Mills of Lowell, tall redbrick goof of Boott, swaying in the terminus clouds of the wild hoorah day and dreambell afternoon—)

Count Condu wanted his chickens plucked just right–He came to Lowell as part of a great general movement of evil–to the secret Castle– The Count was tall, thin, hawk-nosed, caped, whitegloved, glint eyed, sardonic, the hero of Doctor Sax whose shaggy eyebrows made him so blind
he could hardly see what he was doing hopping over the dump at night– Condu was sibilant, sharp-tongued, aristocratic, snappy, mawk-mouthed like a bloodless simp, mowurpy with his mush-lips swelled inbent and dommer-fall as if with a little hanging Mandarin mustache which he didn’t have– Doctor Sax was old, his strength of hawk-shaw jowls was used on age, sagged a bit (looked a little like Carl Sandburg but shaped with a shroud, tall and thin in a shadow on the wall, not Minnesota road walking open air curly Gawd-damn glad in saintliness days and Peace–) (Carl Sandburg disguised with a dark hat I saw one night in the Jamaica Long Island Negro neighborhood, the Down Stud district, back of Sutphin, walking a long tragic lit up boulevard of islands and mortuaries not far from Long Island railroad tracks, just come in off a Montana freight train)–

The bat dissolved from the air and materialized at the door of the Castle a Vampire Count in evening cape. La Contessa de Franziano, a descendant of Welsh bwerps who fell off a trireme off the coast of Leghorn when it still had its Medieval wall guards, but claiming to be a pure Franconi of the old Medici heirs, came to the door gilt in rapid declining old lace with cobwebs joining threads and dust caking when she bent her back, with a pendant pearl and spider sleeping on it, her eyes all how-low, her voice all verbalisms in a reverberatory vat–
“Dearest
Count, you’ve come!” — she aims for the door with sobbing arms, opens it to the rainy night and few dull lights of Lowell ’cross the basin–but Condu stands firm, severe, prim, unemotional, Nazi-like, removing a glove–draws
breath with a slight poof of the lips and a sniff-up–rattles–

“My dear, unemotional as I allegedly may be I’m sure the antics of the gnome girls don’t rival yours when old Sugar Pudding comes home.”

“Why Count,” tinkles Odessa the slave girl (Contessa in a camp) “how you
do
manage to be vivacious before evening blood–Raoul’s only now mixing the Divers—” (Divers of Odds & Ends).

“Is he with his old Toff in the belfry, meaning of course Mrs. Wizard Nittlingen damn blast her thorny old frap.”

“I
guess
so—”

“Has my box arrived from Budapest?” queries the Count (a mile away Joe Plouffe makes the Riverside corner before a gust of rain).

“… bureaucratic difficulties, Count, have prevented any likelihood of your box arriving before the Twelve-month.”

“Pash!”—slapping his gloves—”I can see this is going to be another abortive mission to find a fart for old fart face–scrawny-necked individual–who else is here?”

“Blook. Splaf his assistant goon loon. Mrawf the gone duck with his crab head—”

“And?”

“The Cardinal of Acre … has come to offer his saraband brooch to the skin of the Snake–if he can have a piece of it cut… for his brooch …”

“Tell you,” smirks the Vamp Count, “they’ll be roody well surprised when the peasantry gets a … sauce of that snake.”

“You think it will live?”

“Who’s going to loll it to revive it?”

“Who’ll want to kill it to survive?”

“The Parisacs and Priests–find them something they have to contend with face to face with the possibility of horror and bloodshed and they’ll be satisfied with wooden crosses and go home.”

“But old Wizard wants to live.”

“In that last form he took I wouldn’t bother—”

“Who is Doctor Sax?”

“They told me in Budapest he’s just a crazy old fool. No harm will come from him.”

“Is he here?”

“Is–presumably.”

‘Well–and did you have a good journey?” (moderate) “Of course for now I have a box of good American earth for you to sleep in–Espiritu dug it up for you–at a fee– it’ll be charged upstairs–and the B equivalent (because he’ll never see the money so the only thing he wants is blood) you can leave with me when you get some, and I’ll pay him–he’s been bitching and bitching—”

“I have some B right now.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“A young girl in Boston when I got off the ship at dusk, around 7, snow swirls on Milk Street, but then the rain started, all Boston was slushy, I pushed her in an alley and got her just below the ear lobe and sucked up a good pint half of which I saved in my gold jar for nightcap at dawn.”

“Lucky boy–I found myself a sweet sixteen-year-old boy in his mother’s window, counting birds at aftersupper
blue dusk (the sun just sank in westerly) and I caught him right by the Adam’s apple and ate up half his blood he was so sweet–last week it was a—”

“Enough, Contessa, you’ve convinced me I did excruciatingly the right thing coming here– The Convention won’t last long–the Castle will undoubtedly rattle-but (yawn) I want to move on–unless of course the Snake
does
pop up in which case I’ll certainly stay to see the horrible spectacle with my own eyes–from a good distance in the air-”

“It’ll have to happen at night then, dear Count.”

“If you see Mater tell her I’ll come in to see her in the morning.”

“She’s busy at cards with Old Hatchet Craw in the Blue Belfry–entertaining Flamboy the Ambassador so large … he just got in from Cravistaw where he stole a polo pony and had it flown to the Maharajah of Larkspur, who sent congratulations– They found a new Dove in the Bengali mountains you know. Supposed to be the Spirit of Gandhi.”

This ‘dove’ business has gone out of hand,” frowned the Count.
“Dovists
… serious? … are they? I like my religion practical–blood is good, blood is life, they can act up with their ashes and urns and oily incense … bloodless theosophists of the moonlight–excalibur dull bottards in a frantic hinch, cock-waddlers on pones and pothosts, rattle-bead bonehead splentiginous bollyongs, cast-offs, bah, flap-slaves and blackbearded bungy doodle frummers of lug and lard. Fat. Dry. Dull. Dead. Spew!—” he spat— “But I’ll do anything the High Command wants, of course.
—Have we anything striking for my box design?”

“Oh,” gushed the night eyed Contessa dripping an eave from her shoulder s dust, “a fabulous green jade monstrosity of a buckle or belch or insignia of some kind held firmly, well welded, but the main box a gorgeous 12th-century masterpiece, I believe one of Della Quercia’s last—”

“Della Quercia!—Ah!”—the Count danced, kiss-a-finger, “let it not be said”—he danced with himself around the decaying foyer all dripping with dust and here and there a bat watching, with hanging African vines of cobwebs in the great center of the hall—”that the Count Condu goes to his well-deserved rest in the fresh and dewy morn (after night times of not ill-considered debauch), goes to his—”

“—quiet spew—”

“—without ostentation, without charm and dignity.”

“It’s all a matter of taste.”

“And money, my dear, money in the blood bank.”

THE DOOR OF THE GREAT CASTLE
is closed on the night. Only supernatural eyes now can see the figure in the rainy capes paddling across the river (reconnoitering those blown shrouds of fogs,—so sincere). The leaves of the shrubs and trees in the yard of the Castle glint in the rain. The leaves of Pawtucketville glint in the rain at night–the iron picket fences of Textile, the posts of Moody, all glint–the thickets of Merrimac, pebbly shores, trees and bushes in my wet and fragrant sandbanks glint in the rainy night–a maniacal
laugh rises from the marshes, Doctor Sax comes striding with his stick, blowing snot out of his nose, casting gleeful crazy glances at frogs in mud puddles … old Doctor Sax here he comes. Rain glints on his nose as well as on the black slouch hat.

He’s made his investigations for tonight–somewhere in the woods of Dracut he lifts his door out of the earth and goes in to sleep … for a moment we see red fires of forges glowing to the pine tops–a rank, rich, mud-raw wind blows across the moon– Clouds follow rain and race the fevered Dame in her moony rush, she comes meditating hysterical thoughts in the thin air–then the trapdoor is closed on the secrets of Doctor Sax, he rumbles below.

He remotes below in his own huge fantasies about the end of the world. “The end of the world,” he says, “is Coming …” He writes it on the walls of his underground house. “Ah me Marva,” he sighs… They put Marva in a madhouse, Doctor Sax is a widower … a bachelor … a crazy Lord of all the mud he surveys. He tramped the reeds of March midnight in the fields of Dracut, leering at the Moon as she raced the angry marl clouds (that blow from the mouth of the Merrimac River, Marblehead, Nor’West) —he was a big fool forever looking for the golden perfect solution, he went around having himself a ball searching mysterious humps of earth around the world for a reason so fantastic–for the boiling point of evil (which, in his—, was a volcanic thing … like a boil)—in South America, in North America, Doctor Sax had labored to find the enigma of the New World–the snake of evil whose home is in the deeps of Ecuador and the Amazonian jungle—
where he lived a considerable time searching for the perfect dove … a white jungle variety as delicate as a little white bat, an Albino bat really, but a dove with a snaky beak, and habitating close to Snake Head… Doctor Sax deduced from this perfect Dove, which flew to Tibet for him at will (returning with a brace of herbs strapped to its leg by the Hero Monks of the World North) (H.M.W.N., a Post-Fellaheen organization later acknowledged by the Pope as barbaric) (and by his scholars as primitive) … deduced that the Snake had part of its body in the jungle … Came grooking from the Snow North mountains Doctor Sax, educated in a panel of ice and a panel of snow, taught by Fires, in the strangest Monastery in the World, where Sax Saw the Snake

and the Snake saw Sax-

He came hobbling down from the mountain with a broken leg, a cane, a pack, wounds, a beard, red eyes, yellow teeth, but just like an old Montana hobo in the long blue sky streets of Waco–passing thru. And in fact when Doctor Sax did get back to Butte, where he’s really from, he settled back to longnight poker games with Old Bull Balloon the wildest gambler in town … (some say, W.C. Fields’ ghost returned he’s so much like him, twin to him, unbelievably except for the—) Sax & Bull got into (of course Sax had a Butte name) —into a tremendous game of pool watched by one hundred Butteans in the dark beyond the table lamps and its bright, central green. SAX (won the break, breaks) (Crash) (the balls spin all over)