Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (12 page)

Open, he ho. The sweet saliva of retribution.

He lifted out each of Dean Magnolia’s mineralogical specimens, crystal, shale, semiprecious quartz, igneous delights, and laid them all on the rug in the shape of an equilateral triangle.

“What the hell are all those things, Paps?”

“A whole lot of doodley-shit,” from Gnossos, bringing the hammer down ferociously on the first of the stones, smashing it violently into dust and sand.

March came fumbling in like the
Wizard of Oz
lion, winds shifting the surge of their northern force, padding around the horizon, creeping further and further west as the still invisible sun climbed nearer the zenith each day, warmed the gorge-crawling clouds, and loosened the first of the spring rain.

On this damp and leaden morning Gnossos sat in his narrow bed by the recently installed, hermetically sealed window, legs crossed under the monster eiderdown, scanning the editorial page of the Mentor
Daily Sun
. The paper had appeared, as usual, after mysterious, delicate rapping. Whenever it happened, he would tiptoe over the Navajo rug, wait a moment—his fingers poised on Fitzgore’s pewter latch—then pull the door open, hoping to surprise Jimmy Brown the Newsboy or the yawning little toddler from the Fisk tire ads, candle in hand, tire slung over his shoulder. But always there was no one there. The hallway, the front steps, the avenue beyond were empty. On the odd wide-awake mornings, when his brain was clear, or dawns following all-night sessions with polar co-ordinates,
he would crouch against the door, with a hard-boiled breakfast egg in hand, waiting for footsteps, ready for the rapping. But when he waited, the paper never came.

Now he kept his place with a middle finger while glancing through the two-ply glass in the window to see if the rain had stopped. He grunted and continued reading. Fitzgore was snoring on the other bed, perpendicular to the wall at the foot of his own. The apartment looked much the way it had when he’d seen it that first afternoon, with the single, pub-emulating exception of Fitzgore’s pewter, copper hunting horns, and hammered brass plates. The rice-paper globe had been lowered so that it hung not three feet from the floor over a circular piece of black plywood, which rested insecurely on a cinder block from the construction site at Larghetto Lodge. The globe advertised a single, complex Chinese ideogram, inked by Gnossos’ trembling hand while he waited one evening for Beth Blacknesse to fill a paregoric prescription. The character signified that the rucksack was holy and the rucksack was not for sale. Harold Wong, coxy on the Olympic crew, had done the translation.

There were marks on the wall from strips of masking tape, where he’d torn away the landlord’s quaintly familiar Degas, Renoir, Soyer, Utrillo, and Mary Cassatt prints in a narcotized rage. A nail had been driven into the French doors that separated him from the alcoholic Rajamuttus, and on it was hung the rucksack. It emanated a faint odor of month-old rabbits’ feet and Oriental goods from the Greco-Turkish supply company in the Negro section downtown. Two rubber plants stood by the fireplace, still in the dappled, plastic pots he’d meant to disguise with flat-black spray. And spilled textbooks everywhere, notes scrawled in the margins, faces drawn on the covers. All horizontal surfaces were occupied by at least one open beercan stuffed with cigarettes saturated in some reeking liquid. And dominating the entire white-walled living room, hanging over the mantel by the number-fifteen housewire anchored to the molding, was the tapestrylike Blacknesse painting of the man cutting away his own head.

Before turning to the editorials, Gnossos had finished the rear-page release on the demolished stones.
Vandalism
, read the headline.
Still No Leads on Smashed Magnolia Specimens
. The subhead told how Proctor Slug Suspects Drunken Prank, Discounts Psychological Motive. Oh la. In the body of the story there were vague references to the last incident of its kind, the disappearance of imported Italian statues from the Christmas crèche at Hector Ramrod Hall, the amazing springtime recovery of the Virgin Mary’s head, found intact by bathing coeds in Harpy Creek gorge. A miracle.

There came quick, clattering jangles. Gnossos sprang from the bed, pounced on the vibrating alarm clock next to Fitzgore’s ear, muffled the sound, found the switch, then shuffled back to bed. Fitzgore tossing only slightly, altering the pitch of his snore, failing to wake.

Wrapped again in the eiderdown (a gift from Pamela Watson-May), knees against his chest, munching on a chunk of dried-up feta, sipping at the last of the Schweppes she had also left behind, he continued the editorial by Drew Youngblood, a public warning to faculty and students that Susan B. Pankhurst

was merely one personified facet of a cleverly conceived plan on the part of the present administration to shift the responsibility of certain highly significant student affairs into the hands of Minotaur Hall. In addition to the already proposed, and highly speculative, ruling on coeds and Lairville apartments—a ruling certainly improbable, had the faculty committee not been dissolved by the President at the end of its tenure—there has occurred yesterday’s failure to reappoint the Architectural Advisory Committee, an extremely eminent authority, whose permission and advice have hitherto been mandatory before construction
or demolition
of new campus buildings could commence.

Crusades, thought Gnossos. Jehads and holy wars. Youngblood with that unlikely combination of honest expressions folded in his face like stiff-peaked egg whites in a batter. Truthsayer, his white shirt without a buttondown collar, no tie. Sew a cross of Saint George on his back, tie a maiden’s scarf in his sash, point him at the Tigris and Euphrates. It’s somewhere out there, lad, in the hands of the pagan Turks. I know we can count on you.

Still, he may be into something.

Gnossos shifted weight uncomfortably, one aspect of his mind quietly furious at the constipation which continued unrelieved despite cautious doses of mineral water, lemon juice, olive oil, and Carter’s Little Liver Pills. Good for little livers; mine as big as a strawberry shortcake, reconstitutes its spongy self, adding volume each time around the bilious cycle. Me like Prometheus, no bird needed. My spiritual old man, kicking determinism in the head. He turned the page, ignoring “Pogo” (something insipid in political possums) then went carefully through the frames of “Peanuts.” He studied each line of Snoopy’s self-indulgent countenance as the dog lay on top of his little white house, nose up, ears down, gazing fondly at the universe.

He was saying the word “sigh” along with the balloon in the last picture, when the front door opened without a knock and two peculiar-looking men wandered in.

They were making sniffing sounds.

The police?

From recent experience with Pamela, and light in the room, Gnossos realized they could see neither Fitzgore nor him through the bamboo-reed curtain that isolated the beds from the rest of the apartment. But he had no difficulty seeing them. He crouched down into the eiderdown and watched their curious, halting gestures as they nosed about. Something subtly familiar in their manner. He moved his hand under the sheets, searching silently for the hammer he had taken from Blacknesse’s car and kept in bed ever since. Who? Proctor Slug’s men? Impossible, man, they move like potheads. Nudge Fitzgore with toe.

The two strangers paused, one on either side of the table, the rice-paper globe with the Chinese character at thigh height between them. Mutt and Jeff. The little one pudgy with an inch-thick tweed jacket, patches on the sleeves, blue shirt, white bowtie. Carrying a yellow briefcase. His hair like Hitler’s, patch combed forward, plastered on his brow, heavy Kitchener mustache, ends waxed, pointing straight out; little eyes glancing about, mole-nose twitching, the palm of one hand going up and down on his belly. Beside him was a bald man in black from head to toe, a turtleneck jersey covering only a sixteenth of his windowpole throat. Mary, no, not a man, a kid! Gnossos watched him stroke his head, then dangle his fingers in the air, snapping at dust. Seventeen, maybe. Why grinning? Up, Fitzgore, up up, there’s a zombi in the room.

“Eminently casual,” said the mustached man, kissing the end of a Robt. Burns cigarillo and looking at the Blacknesse painting. His hand hesitating on his belly as he realized simultaneously what was occurring on the canvas and that other people were in the room.

Gnossos gripped the handle of the hammer and tested it for balance. Find the temple first, tap swiftly. Wait, though. Maybe seraphim sent to test.

“Pappadopoulis, assuredly,” said the stranger, inching his head around the curtain, his gourami lips parting in a smile that was shy one tooth. The teenager oozed across the distance between him and the shorter man, his feet never seeming to leave the floor, and said, “Wha’s happening, baby?”

Jesus. “Nothing much, man. Who are you?”

A pause.

“You don’t know?” asked the fat man. He turned to the teenager with a resigned gesture: “I knew he wouldn’t mail the letter. What did I tell you before leaving the city, Heap? He wouldn’t mail the letter.”

Nudge Fitzgore with big toe. Wake up, mother, stop snoring. Talk to them. “Was I supposed to get a letter?”

“Aquavitus. You didn’t hear from him? No letter?”

All a morning dream, no correlation between events.

“What letter, man?”

The teenager with the shaved skull shook his head sadly, in slow motion, his left eye opening and closing. Not a wink but a lazy, muscleless drooping of the lid. His fingers kept snapping casually at the air.

“I couldn’t call him an especially close friend,” continued the pudgy one, lighting his cigarillo and offering another to Gnossos, who neither refused nor accepted, “but I visit with him when I’m in the city, have a little sweet-and-sour pork at Hong Fat. You’ve been there, you’re familiar with the place?” The cigarillo going back into his outside pocket.

“How do you know Aquavitus?”

“The Buddha, of course.”

“Check,” said the bald one. “We’re all of a family.”

“From Havana?”

“We have a business deal, an arrangement,” smiling, touching one of the lumpy forefingers to the tip of his waxed mustache, as if testing for a lethal point.

The Cuban connection with an opal in his forehead. Seven-foot spade in silk robes, Motherball once said. No one had ever seen him. These guys, who? The eyes on the kid, like a runt water spaniel, stoned, flying.

Leave Fitzgore alone. “And who are you?”

The two creatures looking at each other as if to find out, the pudgy one turning back slowly and saying, “Mojo,” setting his briefcase down on the floor and unraveling the long swiveled leash that attached it to his wrist. Extending his left hand backward, Gnossos shaking it carefully, his stomach shrinking at the soft, boneless feel. Like a rubber glove stuffed with putty. “Oswald Mojo. This is my assistant, Heap. So old Giacomo didn’t send you the letter? We predicted that, of course. He’s such an in
tense
kind of Sicilian, all work, all, how shall we say, intrigue. But you know that, you realize how he is.”

“I haven’t seen him in two years, I thought he was in Alcatraz.” Heff talking about him recently. Cloak-and-stiletto shit, take this zircon to Foppa. Mo-go. The Victorian house?

“Ha ha,” said Oswald Mojo. “Ha ha ha. No. No, not old Giacomo. That’s why he’s so beautiful, so, how shall we say, ob
scure
. He volunteered for a gout experiment at the Mayo Clinic, got paroled.”

“He’s beautiful, baby,” agreed Heap, his eye drooping. Mojo said: “But you know me anyway, you’ve heard of me? It would have helped for you to realize I was coming, of course, it’s always pleasant to be ex
pect
ed, not to cause surprises.”

“Oh, I like surprises.”

“Mojo,” repeated the man, going into his briefcase, his face flushing, swelling as he leaned over to fish something out. “Oswald Mojo.”

Gnossos shaking his head, not recognizing the name, turning his back to the wall, always cover your flanks. Leave the flanks exposed, they’ll tear right up the middle, nail you with a howitzer or something. What’s he getting, Luger? Stay loose. Aquavitus, man, of all people. Sicily oxshit. Ersatz Mafia Capo coming from South Brooklyn, has eyes for the heavyweight heroin crown, still district distributor for Cuban grass.

“Here,” said Mojo, “some of my work,” tossing a number of political periodicals on the eiderdown. “
Foreign Affairs Quarterly, Partisan Review
, back numbers of
The Reporter, The New Leader
. You probably didn’t know I completed the treatise in
F.A.Q
. when I was twelve. The irony there, you see, the aesthetic injustice, as it were, was that Madame Pandit’s translation achieved so much more fame than my original. But that’s, well, how shall we say . . . ”

“Show business,” supplied Gnossos, flipping through the pages and actually finding a number of essays by Oswald Mojo, the paragraphs laced with Italian and Latin expletives.

“The monographs, baby,” said Heap, smiling, also showing a missing front tooth, the same one in fact, “that’s where it’s all happening.”

“Form, the significant variable. Contains the elocutionary passions.”

“Double-crostics, myself,” said Gnossos, looking one to the other, not getting response, “little haiku now and then, ha ha.” Laying the magazines aside, figuring the geometry of the room, Heap an easy target, too stoned to move quickly. Feel them along: “I’ll read the stuff later, if you don’t mind, classes to go to and all, lecture in twenty minutes. So if you’ll maybe tell me what it is you’d like?”

A pause while Mojo sucked at his cigarillo, nervously twisted the swivel of the leash on his wrist. Looking at Heap. “Your, how shall we call it, repu
ta
tion, Pappadopoulis, being the kind of thing one can’t help noticing, being attracted to—” The man broke off, not satisfied with his start, twisting the leash in the opposite direction. It was then that Gnossos noticed the braiding of the leather leash, thick at one end, tapering away at the other, exactly like, oh wow, a bullwhip.