The Free-Lance Pallbearers (13 page)

In Soulsville the busted microphones resounded with the oratory of live ghosts protesting the mystery of the missing children.

Finally, midway through our journey the public-address system announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, the infamous Black Bay.” Huge yellow lights from the battleship aimed their beams on the nefarious waters. As far as the eye could see, long serpentine tentacles oscillated in the bay and what appeared to be white arms reached from beneath its surface. The silhouettes of peculiar-shaped animals leaped into the air-sometimes many feet high. It was a staggering sight.

People poured from the stateroom, eager to get a better view. Two well-tailored men stood next to me. The men removed field glasses from cases and looked in fascination upon the waters-writhing with odd life. They spoke. “I've always had a strange attraction to it, Waldo,” the first man said. “It's been the subject of a ten-thousand-page report by the International Geophysical Expedition and the Royal Academy of Sciences. Fleets of oceanographers, a special group called the Black Bay Authorities, have examined it.”

“How did it get thataway, Matthew?” responded the other man. (Both of whom looked like the grim sabled brothers on the famous cough-drop box.)

“It's become a veritable Madagascar of the sea, yielding animals not to be found anywhere else in the world. It seems that in the bad old days the sea was saturated with chemicals coming from the rows of cereal factories that lined the banks. There was no cause for alarm until one day a man was peacefully fishing when a bird rose from the waters and carried away his head in its beak. When the British Museum caught the bird-burning its wings with napalm from a supersonic jet-they dissected it and found it to be full of old Manhattan telephone numbers and skulls. An investigation was immediately launched by Congress. You remember the celebrated bird hearings of the fifties. It was decided that it was merely a crowd delusion. The chairman-a dwarf named Eberett Whimplewopper-did such a fine job that he gained a judgeship in HARRY SAM.

“Science had the last say, however. Science took samples from the bay and put them under microscopes. We had decided that crowd delusions were for the more backward unsophisticated part of the world and that we as hardheaded empiricists could never indulge anything that was not amenable to sensory investigation. Since SAM went up there about thirty years ago and took up residence in the er … er … er … way station, the material that flushes into the bay from those huge lips has stirred even stranger forms of life. That sickness he has must be HORRIBLE. Now it's only safe to cross the thing in a battleship.”

No sooner had he said that when a giant tentacle attacked the ship, tilting it to an angle. An ever-ready gun, one of four massive ones on the ship, swung into action and blasted the tentacle to bits. Chunks of quivering blob rained down on some of the passengers. The two men plucked some of the trembling membrane-like substance from their clothes where it had fastened itself, and calmly walked back into the stateroom.

Heavy kats, I thought. The battleship docked at a wharf that stood at the bottom of the great stone wall which surrounded the entire island. The bottom of the wall seemed to disappear into the very depths of the insidious Black Bay. Holding a flashlight, the two men, Waldo and Matthew, led the guests down the ramp.

Suddenly Matthew trained his light on a tentacle lying across the wharf like a lazy boa constrictor with suction holes for scales. Matthew removed a bottle from his pocket and poured its contents on the tentacle. A great groan was heard from the bottom and the passengers held each other to avoid falling from the rocking wharf. The tentacle slunk back into the dreadful waters.

Some steps led from the wharf to the top of the wall where a path began and wound to the summit of the mountain where the motel stood. At the top of the steps a woman waited. She seemed to be dressed in the traditional habit of a nun. I was the last passenger to walk down the ramp and onto the wharf. To the right of me the pounding and crashing of the ugly effervescence of a sickly yellow color could be heard pouring into the bay from the stony mouth of the nineteenth President of the United States.

At the top of the steps the woman greeted us, that is, greeted all of us save Waldo and Matthew, who strode past her with their noses upturned.

“Glad to make your acquaintanceship, I'm sure,” she said to the rest of us in authentic Flatbush. “My name is Lenore and I'm the official hostess and cook up here at SAM's. If you'll just walk up this path …,” she said, pointing to a cobblestoned path that disappeared around the bend where a gnarled tree stood, its limbs lit up with yellow eyes.

She stood to the side as the guests filed past her on the path. I was the last to walk by the place where she stood. “Did you say your name was Lenore?” I asked.

“That's right,” she said. “The same.”

“Do you know an old man named Alfred who spends his time at the Seventeen Nation Disarmament Conference Bar cutting out articles from the old
Harper's Brothers Weekly?
”

“Yes, Alfred is my ex-old man,” she said. “You see those creeps walking ahead of everybody else, looking so proper and all? They ruined it.”

“Ruined what?” I asked.

“They ruined my romance with Alfred. Prying and sticking their noses into our business. They were all on the rowing team together, Harvard, eighty-nine, and used to carouse about ‘wenching,' as they called it, in some of the bars in the dilapidated section of BAWSTON.

“You should have seen Alfred with his features of classical cut, his brow so trim-and his mouth so precise. See I was working behind the BAWR and he'd flirt with me; calling me stuff like the second Helen of Troy and names of dames that guys use to fight those dragons over. Well, Matthew and Waldo, those unalterable bores, had to put their two cents in. Those flat moralistic cough drops. They didn't approve of me and they kicked him off the rowing team and stopped inviting him to the cockfights. When we got hitched the Anglican Church refused to perform the wedding. It was very lonely playing whist every night and when he bumped into his friends on the street—those that would talk to him—spoke in French. Well, Alfred and I became bored with each other after a while but I didn't want to leave him because he was so helpless. Sometimes he would go out into the streets with nothing but a boiled vest and tall hat and carrying a pocket watch that stopped on August 6, 1945. I didn't mind the perms he used to read me but I was young and wanted to do a little boo-ga-loo so I asked him to buy me some harpsichord lessons. On the pretense of taking the harpsichord lessons, I went down into the Village and met the black man named Jr. Bug and we did the boo-ga-loo for days. Finally Waldo and Matthew who were in a café on Greenwich Avenue doing strange recipes spotted me even though I was wearing shades.

“They told Alfred and he took me to court. We appeared before Judge Whimplewopper, a little fellow so high who combs his hair in public with a two-foot-long comb.”

“Yes, I've had dealings with him,” I said, interrupting her.

“Well, anyway, the Civil Liberties Committee warned him that the decision would make American justice a laughingstock around the world but he went ahead and did it.”

“Did what?” I asked impatiently.

“He admitted all the precedents from the Salem witch trials where these teeny boppers were burned at the stake for going out into the woods to meet black men. I was due to be burned at the stake too.

“The villagers were led by J. Lapp Swine, jazz critic from the
Deformed Demokrat,
who romped about rousing the mob with a small torchlight between his toes. Being a double-jointed freak, he was capable of all kinds of odd contortions.

“Suddenly a man in a black limousine, with the symbol of the Great Commode on its license plates, pulled up. It was Judge Whimplewopper. He intervened and said, ‘Instead of burning this tomato at the stake, we're going to send her up to SAM's place in exile, where she will be condemned to deliver up cruel and strange recipes for the Chief.'”

“What recipes?” I asked.

“That's classified,” she replied. “The funny thing is,” she said as we rounded the last bend before the top of the mountain, “one night I found those Catholic rejects Matthew and Waldo up here doing the same thing I'm doing, with all their might.”

“Cooking strange recipes?” I asked.

“You might put it that way,” she smiled.

What stood before us at the summit of the mountain was one magnificent sight. The Harry Sam Motel rose so high that it pushed the clouds aside. The helicopters whirred above, dipping in and out. They were marked with the symbol of the Great Commode. It was a giant Victorian house with gables and bay windows. It stood there harsh and forbidding in the moonlight.

Inside the ballroom the guests continued their stomp. On the walls were giant black hoopla hoops. Some women had engaged me in a conversation about BECOMINGS. Standing there with a cocktail in my hand, I had just gotten to the part “trees lifting their leafy arms to pray” when someone tapped me on the shoulder.

It was the tiny man in the white smock. “Are you Bukka Doopeyduk?” he asked in a strident voice.

“The same,” I said, glancing at the women who were giving me streaks of white teeth.

“Follow me,” the little man said, “the boss wants to see you.” The women began to gabble anxiously as the man glided from the room as if on wheels.

“Just a minute, sir. I have to pick up my attaché case chock full of notes.”

The man twirled about and flicking some ashes from the big cigar said, “Okay, but quit stallin'. I ain't got all day. Whaddaya think this is, Fredrichsbach or some joint?”

We were joined in the hall by two Screws in those long black capes. They escorted me into a splendid library where the two Screws sat on a sofa and the little man beckoned me to sit at a great garish maple table in the center of the room.

“Would you like some likker?”

“Don't mind if I have a little taste of brandy,” I said, relaxing in a black leather club chair with my fingers inside my suspenders.

He went to a bookshelf as I lit up a Picayune cigarette. On the other side of the bookshelf was a bar. After removing some implements from the shelves he began to shake a mixer vigorously. I suddenly felt dizzy.

“Hey, what's going on here?” I asked.

“Relax,” the tiny man said, stirring the drink. “We're taking you for a little ride.”

THE LIBRARY WAS MOVING! I could not determine from sensation whether it was moving up or down. It seemed to be speeding through the universe like some demon missile. I took a taste of brandy and before long dozed off. It seemed like centuries before the elevator came to a halt. The Screws and the little man put on gas masks. Then the little man-after providing me with one-walked to bookshelves which covered an entire wall. He pressed a button and the shelves began to move from left to right. I could not believe what I beheld when the shelves finally disappeared into the side wall.

Before me, in a high black wheelchair flanked on each side by seven little men dressed like my escort, sat a man with a blanket over his knees. Behind him stood the Chief of Screws, the Chief of the Nazarene Bishops, Nancy Spellman, the Chief Theoretician of the Party and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (known by the ancients as SNATANACHIA, AGALIAREPT, FLEUTEREETY, AND SAGATANAS). Behind them was a high toilet booth with a diamond-studded knob on its door of carved griffins and gargoyles. It was surrounded on each side by seven smaller black and more austere little booths. Everybody wore gas masks and stood at attention except for the man in the wheelchair who held the neck of a bottle in the opening of his gas mask.

“Bukka Doopeyduk,” the little man said, putting the
Buck
magazine under his arm. “MEET SAM.”

“PUT ER DERE BUKKA GLAD TO MEET YOUSE.”

I dropped to my knees between the two elite Screws standing at attention. It can't be, I thought. The great dictator, former Polish used-car salesman and barn burner.

“Gimme some skin dere, kid.” The little man returned to an empty place in line.

“Thanks for bringing the lad, you little Rapunzel, you,” twitted Nancy, Chief Nazarene Bishop.

The little man turned around suddenly and whipped out a .45, aiming it right into the Bishop's face. “Another crack like that and I'll lob you right back into MARBLE COLLEGIATE CHURCH.”

“CUT IT OUT, YOU GUYS,” said the opening in the gas mask. “Can't you see I'm trying to speak to this sturdy young lad about what's going down in ME. So quiet before I blast both of youse.”

“All right, boss, but next time I'm going to give it to him.”

“Shake hands, my boy,” SAM said in a raspy froggy-the-gremlin voice.

I extended my trembling hand to his and then pulled it away, leaving a stringy wad of goo between our fingers. He wiped his hand on his shirt.

“Excuse me, my boy, you see I have this weird ravaging illness which causes it to melt on my hands and in my mouth too. Causes it to melt in my mouth and on my hands too,” he laughed spastically, turning to the men standing behind him, giving the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a poke in the ribs.

“Gee, boss, that's real funny,” the men in the room said in chorus.

I finally managed to speak. “HARRY SAM, my leader, O what I gonna do? I'm so very overwhelmed.”

“Call me SAM, kid, dish the formalities. You're just as good as me or even better. Just for being such a gent, I'm going to give you one of my ball-point pens,” he said, removing one of twelve from his shirt pocket and giving it to me.

“Gee, I don't know what to say, SAM,” I said, looking at the boots which rested on the wheelchair's footboards below the blanket. One boot appeared to be larger than the other.

“He's got real class, ain't he, boys?”

“Like somethin' out of the Knickerbocker Follies,” SAM's mouthpieces chimed.

“You know, Bukka,” he said, “just because I've been up here evacuating for thirty years from the really way-out bringdown illness doesn't mean that I don't know what's going on down in ME. Why, I look through my binoculars and see everything flying over there in NOTHING which is ME. NOTHING escapes my eyes. I like the way you operate. Here, have one of the pauses what refreshes, har, har, har, har,” he said, jamming the bottle's neck into my mouth.

He belched, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then continued. “Now there's a lot of clammering and beefing going on down there. Some of those dropouts are griping about me not coming out of the John to hold them in my lap. A man in my position can't be exposing himself in public. I'm not nice to be near.”

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff winked at the Chief Nazarene Bishop through his goggles, nodding in agreement, pinched his nozzle and pointed to the back of SAM's bald head.

“YOU GUYS TRYING TO BE FUNNY OR SOMETHING? I TOLE YOU NOTHIN' ESCAPES MY EYES. YOU REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED TO THOSE JOKERS WHAT WAS TRYING TO JAM UP THE PLUMBING WITH DEM CHICKEN FEATHERS? YOU WANT SOME OF THE SAME MEDICINE?” he said, bringing out a German luger from beneath the blanket.

“We was only greeing with youse, boss,” said the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, his face livid with fear.

“WHEN I WANT YOU TO AGREES OR DISAGREES WIT ME, I'M DA ONE GIVES DA ORDERS, UNNERSTAND?”

“We gotcha boss,” the four replied, mopping their brows with their hands and wringing the sweat to the tile floor.

“You gotta watch these eggheads,” he said, again turning to me. “The only thing they're good for is handin' out honorary degrees to my generals and Screws, on commencement day at all the Harry Sam Universities. You should see these shirkers. Why, one of dem guys is pushing a ball of shit all over the world by the tip of his nose.”

“The paper is called ‘The Egyptian Dung Beetle in Kafka's “Metamorphosis,”'” added the little man whose head was now buried in the daily racing form.

“Yeah, somethin' like that,” answered SAM. “See, they push them little mega-morphosis all over the world for me and I give um peanuts and then they start signing petitions and debatin' them white papers what me and the boys hustle up once in a while to keep peace and harmony down there and cut out all the yakkity-yak. That's why I had to send them gray ladies down there that time.”

“One time we developed a thing what would put down all them smart-aleck spicks acting up called … ‘The Counter Insurgency Foundation,'” said the little man, biting into an apple.

“Yeah, and this foundation came up wit some weapon what would crush them spicks and had them yellow dwarfs with pocketknives running around giggling and hopping around, har, har, har, har. You shoulda seen them running with their clothes all on fire, har, har, har, har,” said HARRY SAM, slapping his knees. “What was that weapon called, Rapunzel?” asked SAM of the little man.

“I think we called it a beneficent incapacitor.”

“Well, them guys was applying for that foundation in droves, then they got the noive to get up there in their hats and gowns singing ‘Blow-he ain't much eager to' at the top of their lungs.”

“Gaudeamus igitur,” corrected the little man.

“There's one of them guys what a famous 'tomic scientist. Little fellow with ice-cold blue eyes over at Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies. You shoulda seen him at Yukka Flats that morning with his clammy hands all over my detonator. Why, he wouldn't even let my generals get
their
cookies he was carrying on so, quotin' perms and stuff. See, they laugh at me because on the newsreels, my shorts don't fit too good.”

“We think they fit fine, boss. You look like Rock Hudson,” the chorus said.

“No, you're wrong, boys,” SAM said. “Gravity has gotten the best of me and I'm a little flabby and sick and not pleasant to be near, but them guys go around posing all day, talking about ethical … ethical …”

“Ethical neutrality,” my little escort said. But before he could continue the Chief Nazarene Bishop started for the little man's throat and soon they were rolling about the tile floor, fighting. The other little men and the remaining chiefs encircled them, rooting for their favorite.

Finally SAM said, “STOP IT! STOP IT! WHAT'S COME OVER YOU GUYS? GET UP OFF DAT FLOOR!” The men rushed back to their places in line, except for the little man who was slowly brushing off his smock and staring at the Chief Bishop evilly.

“Next time you do that, I'm going to drown you in the Black Bay-preacher or no preacher,” the annoyed little man threatened.

“Shaddup both of youse. One more crack and I'll plug you,” SAM said. “Now, what's the matter wit youse, preacher?”

“Well, sniff, sniff,” answered the Bishop Nancy Spellman, “you said I could be the one allatime comment on ethics but each time I try to say somethin', he's always puttin' his two cents in.”

“Look, preacher, do you want to go back to Marble Collegiate and sell mustard seeds to a bunch of sexless Sunoco Oil widows?”

“No, SAM. I'm very happy up here giving up strange and exotic recipes,” the Bishop replied.

“That's more like it,” said Sam. “Now where was I?” he said, turning once again to me.

“You were talking about ethical neutrality,” I answered.

“My philosophy,” SAM said, smashing his fist into his open palm, “is when they act up or give you some lip, bomb the fuken daylights out of um. When my ol man's roosters give him some cackle, that would fix um every time. That's the only thing they understand. And that goes for spicks and gooks and all the rest what ain't like us. Why, it would be no skin off my nose if all the Chinamen in the world got stuck in a dumbwaiter. Saving face and fulfilling your commitments, making alliances with da Arabs and all dem other baggy pants you can trust is okay. But if you don't stop the others where they are, before ya know it, they'll be surrounding NOTHIN' which is ME like a bunch of Free-Lance Pallbearers.

“Step up here and feel that muscle, Bukka.” He rolled up his sleeve and revealed a lump nudging the crease at his elbow. I was a bit nervous but SAM assured me. I put my hand on the lump. It was as hard as a rock. “Gee SAM, that's sure powerful,” I said.

“Every night when we go to bed, we is thankful for that lump, boss,” the chorus said.

“That is what you call ‘intestinal fortitude' as we use to say down in the Republican Club in the perfumed stockade. But it won't last. You see, I'm getting old, Bukka. Maybe forty years from now you can have the job. The top-secret specialty what keeps me alive is bound to run out but as long as I'm dictator of ME …” his voice rising and pounding his thumb into his chest so hard that the gas mask shuddered, “elected in free and democratic elections, I'll do my best to improve NOTHING.

“Now I been looking out these glasses at Soulsville and I'm not happy with what I see. The people seem to have a lot of FRUSTRATION, ANXIETY and DESPAIR down there. I know all about that; I read
the ny whine
every day. But this stuff is taken a nasty turn. Last week some hoodlums attacked my friend Eclair Porkchop and I had to bring him up here until the heat was off. They nearly kilt the preacher. He's been on the phone upstairs trying to get Miles Davis to translate the Bible. But I don't think that's going to save his neck. Back in the old days he use to go out in the snow rounding up votes for old SAM. He use to spellbound them colored people saying ‘Glory' and stuff-even taught me to say it-GLORY, GLORY, GLORY, GLORY, GLORY, JEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSUUUUUUSSSSSSSSUSSSSS. I SEE DAT OLE WHEEL TURNING IN THE SKY,” SAM said, waving his arms.

“LET THE CHURCH SAY AMEN AND HELP ME LAWDY,” said the chorus.

“But now I think he's lost his drive, that certain spark. Seems a little gumless and stick-to-itiveness without. I want you to take that job. Go down there in Soulsville and tell them IT'S GOIN' BE ALL RIGHT, BY AND BY IN THE SKY.”

“Say it again, SAM,” I said, not wanting to jumble my first assignment as Nazarene Bishop. I was overjoyed!

“Now we want you to have breakfast with us tomorrow and we can discuss the details. After which Lenore the maid will show you the grounds. Show him to a room,” SAM said to one of the Screws standing next to me.

I rose and said, “Thank you, HARRY SAM, former Polish used-car salesman and barn burner.”

“Don't mention it, Bukka. I like your spunk. You remind me of myself. Why, I sit here all day readin' Ernest Hemingway and practicing strange out-of-the-way dishes.”

“Thanks again, SAM,” I said, following the Screws into the mobile library.

“Don't take no wooden nickels and if you do, name him after me, har, har, har, har, har, har, har …” was the last thing HARRY SAM said as the bookshelf moved from the side of the wall.

“Honest to Pete, boss. You're a regular summer festival,” said the chorus.