If All Else Fails (5 page)

"Where is the
aliens? Where is the freaks? Where is Frank?" she say, sputtering like outboard motor, put put
put.

"Where is ...
?"

She is starting
again and Stonecloud, by god, fed up with whole donkey. No where is said he got to feel like
inside of doughnut for two sets of tourist. He jumps at her and leers at her and waves gun in her
face, and she look at him like she in a hurry and he is double-parked in her space.

She ignore him
complete as she hears husband or maybe wild hog with stomach gas yelling for film somewhere off
somewhere. She spin off and leave Stonecloud feeling like phallic cannon in civil-war exhibit,
erected no less.

Then alien come out
of machine, she all shiny like fuzz on
newborn peach. She smell like ghost of a chance in the sec­ond race before the man with
the shovel comes out on the track. She look like second honeymoon making same old
mistakes.

Machine burp her
and she stand up and step out of ma­chine. She walk over to him, reaching into her shoulder
pouch. She open mouth, she smile, show sharp-pointed teeth. This is gratitude.

"It was beautiful!
It was wonderful!" she say.

Stonecloud smile
like carnival employee winning teddy bear just next door. He not know what to say. He never
know.

"The savagery, the
pain! Exquisite!" she said, and she shake with pleasure like flagellating blender and hug herself
like wraparound sunglasses.

Stonecloud hold out
his hand. This is the best part in no way dimmed by Philadelphia wherever it is. He always had it
in for ...

"You wonderful,
marvelous beast! You are so beautiful! So deliciously animal! I squirm at the thought!" She take
a handful of credits out of shoulder bag. She push them at him and he take, joy all
overed.

He turn to go but
she stop him with her hand. She very curious tourist. She so curious she don't know electric
chair is clinical definition of tourist shock, which is worse being than culture shock as tourist
is shocker and object touristed against is shockee. But what did she know?

"Don't you feel
bad?" she ask. "Don't you feel bad about killing? Doesn't anything in your beastly state bother
you? It's so refreshing!"

He want no chatter.
Is time to bounce shoes, to eat before art replace life and he become artistic symmetry of
skele-tonhood, apprenticeship not so wanted, art being every­body. Also he worry art replace life
so quickly, all best res­taurants be snapped up fore he get there.

So he just shrug
like camel with consumption.

"How can you do it?
I don't understand? How do you do it?" She let go of his arm as she see he want to go.

He guess the
obvious and say, "With a gun." And he walk away.

He never understand
tourist. Like uncranking self-taught virgin. He put money into pants and it makes hot spot which
is only way tourist can be understood. Hot spot so hot it steam him up so cold rain of outside
not even bother him.

He aim like highway
divider for restaurant, to go eat like stupidness. He come by shoe store. He thinking of it all
time too. Thinking of it like hunger. He see the robot clerk sitting in same place as before. He
go into store and get his old shoes. He wipe new shoes and put back. He put on old shoes and
punch switch on robot clerk.

The robot clerk
come awake like traffic jam and make proper polite noises. Stonecloud, he look around like
com­plete stranger. He say, "So many shoes. Ten times my fingers and double my toes. I think I
will just take them ones," and he point at the pair of shoes he just bring back.

Robot clerk ask if
he want to try them on. Stonecloud just wave grandly, detail too small for bothering
with.

"Wrap em up," say
Stonecloud.

The robot clerk
hand package to him and offer change.

"Keep change,"
Stonecloud say bighearted as he go out door.

Stonecloud go down
street, flap, slosh, with new shoes under arm. He feel so good. He going to eat to stupidness. He
going to drink to stupidness. He going to dance to stu­pidness.

Yes, dance; he not
be ashamed to dance now. He had paid for his shoes.

In the nightclub
there, he smiled at her in the key of G. Maybe he wouldn't have smiled if he had known she was
once the smallest thing in the known universe. Maybe. She kept leaning over the end of the piano,
staring at him from the bottom of a mixed drink. The slightest breeze would tip her over. She was
smashed, trainwrecked, and dizzy on the end that blows bubbles and pops the champagne corks. Her
eyebrows were surprised-looking, arched like something Roman, maybe architectural.

Bent over like
that, with the top half of her top draped on the edge of the piano and with that kind of dress,
the bar­tender was getting ready to come out from behind the bar and grab her by the shoulder and
tell her that they didn't have a license for that kind of thing. It was that kind of thing, too,
if she didn't stop vibrating.

No matter how much
of her fell out the front of her dress, she was shrinking. Her feet barely touched the floor. So
it goes, when you're on the way to becoming the smallest thing in the known universe
again.

And in the eyes of
those around her, she was small. Get­ting smaller all the time. Just like Alice. Even birds would
now mistake her for something to eat. She was small be­cause she had had days when you could buy
her like a sou­venir, so tacky and tourist cheap you'd be afraid to take it home. She came out of
a long line of souvenirs. Her parents were two holes in the night out of which she tumbled
genet­ically. Her inheritance consisted of unprinted instructions
on how to live on air. Genetically blue eyes like industrial
diamonds and a high-school scrapbook that hated her so much for being the daughter of nobody, it
didn't choose her as the girl most likely.

She leans on the
piano, like a featured attraction without a body, only architecture and bust lessons by
corre­spondence. She's got a double smile of lipstick on a full mouth that has always been a
little too empty. Her heart is made out of gold because it doesn't have any calories. She
stretches herself, leaning way over, trying to touch her lover's ribs, and says, somewhat
sarcastically, "You come in like a giant and go out like a dwarf."

That kind of
statement could be a curtain raiser, but here she says it casually because she is casual about
life in the deadened way that comes naturally to one who has lived. If death was a sexual
experience, she'd greet it with a fresh pot of coffee and clean sheets. Nothing more, nothing
less.

He pounds the piano
nightly. He is like a prayer kneeling in the snow, combing musical notes out of a blank space in
his life. He knows one thing. When you sing, your mouth speaks and your mind doesn't have to. He
tries to ignore her, singing lightly to the bar stools. To the floor.

He sings and his
song says, "I found this empty thing and I emptied it." It is like a comment.

She is like a
reply. She says without words, "I will smile at you with irrepressible hormones." Several parts
of her body are carefully arranged for smiling. Live ammunition is the only thing she knows how
to handle. She knows he knows that too.

He is terrified in
a dull way. He senses she is about to give out with one big breath to blow out all the candles of
his night. He'd met her once before, in the worst way. He swal­lows the inside of his throat and
misses a chord, musical. If he doesn't sense impending disaster, his fingers do. They sense that
she will make a scene and, because of it, the
fingers will do something they will regret. They will become unemployed and that is what
they will regret.

If she speaks
again, it is going to be a conversation, and she does and it is. "I know you're old enough to be
rubbery but are you old enough to stretch to the required length?" After that jab, she smiles
with the last lilac of the evening dangling out of her mouth like a tongue depressor. She bounces
her top emphatically on the edge of the piano, posed there like a left-handed glove on a
right-handed ball­player. If the words weren't getting through to him, she knew the bounces
would.

Something gets
through to him. His smile takes on a fro­zen-fish look and his fingers become more mindlessly
me­chanical. He is losing control of himself and his audience. This was not part of the program.
Drinking wore away the first half of his strength. His ex-wife, who thought highly of herself,
considered herself entitled to waste the second half. He did his life's work with the rest. This
woman on the edge of the piano with the face of mistreated lover was breaking the rules. First
you break a window and then you become one. Nothing else exists. Nothing else can touch
you.

There is a soft,
sexual twilight of revenge on her face. A deserted oasis beside her in her bed one night had
prepared her for this moment. He had left her once, sneaking silently away into the night. The
note beside the bed said, "I WAS GLAD TO GET IT FREE BUT THE IDEA OF MAR­RIAGE IS TOO GROSS TO BE
ADEQUATELY CONSID­ERED." It took her six months to find him again.

He has stopped
singing even though his fingers continue to move across the keyboard. She unloosened one strap of
her gown, pushing it down off her shoulder. More of her fell out of the front of her dress. The
bartender wiped his hands nervously and began his journey around the edge of the bar. Under his
breath, he was using her gown to wipe the beer glasses clean, but duty was duty.

"My life is a box
in which I have been packed and out of which I took myself," she said, and she pulled the other
strap loose and began undressing.

The gown fell away
in a heap at her feet. She wore noth­ing beneath' it.

But.

But her body was
covered with feathers. Her breasts ended in two exaggerated plumes. A ruff of feathers covered
the front of her lap.

Silence spreads
through the nightclub and even the piano falls prey to it. She leaps free of her clothes, a
pioneer mo­ment. She spreads her arms in a taking-flight motion and turns to face the shocked
patrons of the nightclub. The feathers look like they grew there naturally.

The bartender,
halted in mid-stride, points a silent accu­sation at her and just stands there, overwhelmed with
some­thing. The nightclub manager, alarmed by the sudden si­lence, stuck his head out of his
office door. He sniffed suspiciously for the telltale tear-gas odor of police protec­tion. His
gaze took in the bartender and the piano player and then came to rest on the piano bird. He
snorted with disgust, ducked his head back inside, and slammed the door with a vicious bang. He
vowed to fire them both if the police became involved. He didn't have a license for that kind of
thing. Only the police had a license for that.

Some of the looks
she was getting were pretty hot but it was cold in the nightclub, even with feathers.

''You asked for
it!" she screamed. "Go ahead! Pluck me!"

The piano bird.
They came and took her away.

The piano bird. She
screamed, "Pluck me!"

But a certain
militancy about the feathers scared them all away.

When she tells the
cop with stomach distress who books her downtown that she is probably not innocent, he
ignores
her. He is grimly efficient, so
bored with routine, the feathers she wears go by him without drawing a comment.

She is here because
she is a sentimental eagle. As a spe­cies, she is on the endangered list. She returns all the
letters her mother back in Minneapolis, Minnesota, sends, marked RETURN TO SENDER BECAUSE OF TOO
MANY CON­TENTS.

The cop applies the
ink, gestures, "Now the thumb in this block here."

She lets him place
her thumb firmly against the finger­print ID card. She says, "I never had much carnal knowl­edge,
but I did send a heat wave from the coast." She seems wistful. If dimpled cheeks can be called a
performance, she is smiling.

"Press your thumb
evenly but firmly in the second block, too," he says, thinking of the Alka-Seltzer in his
desk.

"Aren't you going
to ask me why I did it?" she asks, notic­ing that there are no ripcords on the window blinds in
the police station. No one ever bails out here.

For that statement,
she gets a fisheye from the cop. All the nuts come out at night. He could have been a
mailman.

"Now the index
finger. Firmly but evenly."

She was giving him
this stare, so he shrugged. "Ok, sure. Why did you do it?" He could care less.

"I opened the lid,
I peered into the pot of my life, and the menu flew up my nose. I saw all the places where I ate
breakfast, lunch, and dinner. My life had been a varicose-veined waitress who worked too hard for
her money. Life had shown me, ultimately, only the space between my legs."

"Oh, Jesus!" said
the cop. "They always come out on my shift! If that's a reason, then I'm a ..."

"But it is. Because
you taught me to, taught me it was the only thing I could do."

"Huh?" muttered the
cop, shaking his head. "Lady, I
didn't
teach you nothing! I don't even know ya, fa chris-sakes!"