Authors: Stanley Elkin
Bale looked about the game room at their half-dozen surviving charges.
It was late in the afternoon. The children still wore the dressy clothes they’d worn to the service in the chapel. Except for Noah’s tie, which the child had undone, and the collar he’d unbuttoned and the shirttails that had come out of his pants, and the pants themselves, partially unzipped and hanging from his waist at an askew angle, and the unhealthy, excited flush on his face, the children seemed calm, almost staid.
“Is that one going to be all right?” Eddy asked. “His eyes, his eyes seem too bright to me.” Except for himself and the hotel’s caricaturist, no one seemed interested.
Colin was still recounting the exploits of the afternoon.
It seems the woman had broken down in tears when she’d had to explain the carriers’ policies regarding the shipment of Rena’s body. The domestic carrier had agreed to accept Rena’s passenger ticket as payment in full for her shipment as freight to Miami. They didn’t have to, they said, but it was an unwritten rule and they would. On the other hand, the overseas airline required an additional $2.63 a pound overage. The casket was 220 pounds. Rena was 95 pounds. It would come to $828.45. “But the unwritten rule,” Colin objected. Overseas airlines were bound by international agreements, the travel agent had said. There were no unwritten rules.
“He seems awfully excited,” Bale said.
“She was still on the phone when I took it from her,” Colin told them. “‘What about her baggage allowance?’ I demanded of the agent on the other end of the line.”
The man told him that the first 62 pounds were free but that they must pay an additional $2.63 for each pound above that.
“‘It never does,’ I said. The fellow didn’t know what I was talking about. ‘Her luggage,’ I said. ‘It can’t weigh more than thirty or thirty-five pounds at the outside. We’ll be wanting a credit on the difference, mate, or we’re going to fucking sue you all over the goddamn sky!’ He still hadn’t a clue what I was on about. ‘I told you,’ I said. ‘The kid’s bags weigh maybe thirty- five pounds, the kid ninety-five pounds. You’re charging her for a seat, so according to the international agreements she’s entitled to her full baggage allowance. She’s got twenty-seven pounds coming to her. At two sixty-three a pound that’s seventy-one dollars and a penny. From eight twenty-eight forty-five. That’s seven fifty-seven forty-four. The name’s Bible,’ I told him. ‘Colin
B-I-B-L-E
. I’ll see you tomorrow at the weigh-in! Oh, and mister,’ I says. ‘What’s that?’ he asks me. ‘They’ll
always
be an England!’ I tell him and hang up.”
“Now you know how
I
feel,” Moorhead said, when Colin had told them all this under his breath.
“What?” Colin Bible asked the physician.
“I said now you know how I feel.”
“How’s that?”
“The son of a bitch,” Moorhead said. “‘Well, at least she’ll get a Florida death certificate out of it.’ Imagine the son of a bitch saying a thing like that to me. ‘At least she’ll get a Florida death certificate out of it.’ The son of a bitch.” He was talking about the doctor who’d signed Rena’s death certificate. Moorhead, who wasn’t licensed to practice in Florida, hadn’t been permitted to sign the document.
Bale was watching Noah, who’d been rarely to shops and who didn’t know where he would get money for the big-ticket items, who couldn’t read well or do his maths. He was watching Noah, who would not live to make money.
When Rena died, the little boy demanded that Moorhead turn over the rest of the hundred dollars he’d been holding for him. The doctor had heard about the incident in the shops but had given him his eighty dollars without a fuss.
Now all of them were watching Noah, who’d been changing five dollars at a time and taking his quarters to play each game, to play skee ball and air hockey, to play Asteroids and Space Invaders, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. He did not seem even to be conscious of his scores but cared only about how many games he could play. But it was taking too long. Now he was depositing his money in as many machines as he could, pressing whichever button activated the first ball or the first sorties of invading terror craft, the initial extraterrestrial overflights, but without waiting long enough to use his joy stick before going on to whatever machine happened to be unoccupied. Soon children who were not even part of their group were watching him. Nedra Carp watched with her arm lightly about Janet Order’s shoulders. The caricaturist made rapid charcoal sketches on sheet after sheet of paper. Noah turned to the spectators and indicated with a gesture that they come forward and play on his quarters. He put money in the soda machines but didn’t bother to retrieve his drinks, in the gum and candy machines but, seeing he’d run out of change, went to get more before returning to the vending machines, and only then after making another deliberate sweep of the room. He pumped quarters into machines that were still activated and invited kids to come up and take the soda and candy and gum, as he’d invited them to play out his time on the arcade games.
“Noah,” Nedra Carp called. “Noah? Noah, dear.”
“Don’t you think we ought to stop him?” Eddy asked Mr. Moorhead.
“No,” the doctor said, “I shouldn’t think so.”
Bale looked at Colin.
“He’s on a roll, mate,” Colin said softly.
“Now
that
was a shopping spree!” Benny Maxine told the little boy when he was all out of money.
“Wasn’t it just?” Noah said, beaming.
“You’re de bloke wot broke de bank at Monte Carlo.”
“Aren’t I just?”
Bale left the arcade and stepped into an elevator. A guest turned to him.
“Floor?”
“Eight, please,” Bale said.
He thought he could smell her strange, strong cigarettes in the hallway. “May I come in?” he asked.
Mary Cottle shrugged and stepped aside to let him pass.
He sat down on a chair by the table.
“They cleaned
this
place up.”
“They offered me a different room,” she said. “I didn’t want it.”
“No.”
“Too many swell memories.”
“Yeah.”
She sat on the edge of the bed, facing him.
“So?” she said.
He repeated what Colin had told them about the casket, about the $2.63 a pound overage the airline was charging.
“He made them apply twenty-seven pounds of her own body weight toward the cost of the overage? Jesus!”
He told her about Noah and the machines, about the sketches the caricaturist had made.
“The kid hired someone to draw him spending money?”
“No,” Eddy said, “Colin commissioned them,” and explained Bible’s scheme for getting effigies of the children into Madame Tussaud’s.
“What I don’t know doesn’t hurt me,” Mary said.
“Sure it does.”
She shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “I guess.”
“Could I have one of those?”
“You said you thought they were too harsh.”
“Not by half.”
“No,” she said.
“I can’t have one?”
“Sure,” she said. “I mean, you’re right. They’re not too harsh. Not by half. Not by two thirds. Five eighths, nine tenths.”
He leaned forward to take a light off Mary Cottle’s cigarette. “Cheers,” he said.
“Cheers,” she said. They touched the tips of their cigarettes.
“This time tomorrow,” he said.
“We’ll be on our way home.”
“We’ll be standing in a queue. We’ll be showing our passports and explaining about Rena and mopping our brows. We’ll be extricating our underwear from the cheeks of our ass.”
“Look,” she said, “is that snow? Is it snowing?” She pointed her cigarette past his head but Bale didn’t turn around.
“You’re not so tough.”
“It’s that same freak weather.”
“Funny,” he said. “I don’t feel the least bit purified.”
“Me neither,” she said. “Not the least bit. Purified.”
“Why are you crying?”
“I’m not so tough.”
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“Oh, Bale,” she said, “we lost one.”
“It’s not as if she had a life expectancy,” he comforted.
“My God,” she said, “we were gone a week. We lost one.”
“I’m making my move,” he said, and left his chair and got up to sit beside her on the bed. He stroked her face.
“Do you have anything with you?”
“What, a condom, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“No,” he said. “What about you? Aren’t you on the pill?”
“No,” she said.
“An IUD?”
“No,” she said.
“A diaphragm? Foam?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“Oh,” he said, and started to move away.
She pulled him toward her. She undid his shirt, his belt, the button on his trousers. She raised her dress, she lowered her underpants.
“Will it be all right? Neither of us is protected.”
“We lost one,” she repeated, and Eddy helped her the rest of the way out of her dress. He undid her bra and held her breasts. He sucked her nipples. She placed a hand in his shorts and withdrew his penis. She held it between her palms and rubbed. “This is how you start a fire without matches,” she whispered. Bale growled softly. “Easy,” she said, “take it easy.” She wanted him huge, immense, colossal. She wet her little finger and slipped it into his anus.
“Oh,” he gasped.
“Easy,” she said.
“Oh.”
“Has it been long?”
“Yes,” he said, “yes.”
“Yes,” she said, “take it easy.”
She wanted him prodigious, vast, whopping, stupendous. She wanted his cock engorged, his balls filled with come. She wanted her tubes to dilate, her pudendum to run with grease. “Take it easy,” she murmured, “ease off, take it easy, take it easy.”
Then, at what instinctively she felt was exactly the propitious biological moment, she reached out and seized him, she reached out and brought him to her. She raised him on top of her and guided him into her body. She wrapped her legs about his buttocks and alternately squeezed, released, and squeezed, pressing his body deeper inside her own with each contraction, rocking him, inching him along her clitoris, easing him through the zones of her flesh and up the boneless scaffold of her sex, thinking, who’d not lain with men in years, who’d held them off with their activating poisons, the white agency of her soiled, provoked chemistry, all the radical synergistics of their deadly, complice, conspired force, who’d used mechanics, gadgets, gravity, vibrators, even her moistened fingers like so many machines, who’d explored her own almost articulated nerve endings till she knew them like the strings that raised and lowered the joints of puppets, thinking Now! Now!
Now!
Thinking of monstrosities, freaks, ogres, and demons, conjuring werewolves, vampires, harpies, and hellhounds, conjecturing maneaters, eyesores, humpbacks, and clubfoots. Thinking
Now now now now now
and inviting all cock-eyed, crook-backed, tortuous bandy deformity out of the bottle, calling forth fiends, calling forth bogies, rabid, raw-head bloody-bones.
Now,
she thinks,
now!
And positions herself to take Bale’s semen, to mix it with her own ruined and injured eggs and juices to make a troll, a goblin, broken imps and lurching oafs, felons of a nightmare blood, fallen pediatric angels, lemures, gorgons, cyclopes, Calibans, God’s ugly, punished customers, his obscene and frail and lubberly, his gargoyle, flyblown hideosities and blemished, poky mutants, all his throwbacks, all his scurf, his doomed, disfigured invalids, his human slums and eldritch seconds, the poor relation and the second-best, watered, bungled being, flied ointment, weak link, chipped rift, crack and fault and snag and flaw, his maimed, his handicapped, his disabled, his crippled, his afflicted, delicate cachexies with their provisional, fragile, makeshift tolerances. Invoking the sapped, the unsound, the impaired, the unfit. Invoking the milksop, the doormat, the played-out and burnt-out, the used-up, the null and the void. Adjuring their spirits in the names of Mudd-Gaddis, of Tony Word and Lydia Conscience, of Janet Order and Benny Maxine, of Noah Cloth, spending his money like a drunken sailor, and Rena Morgan, spent. On behalf of dead Liam and her own unnamed stillborn kids. Thinking, Not gone a week and we’ve lost one. Thinking, Now, now, goddamn it,
now!
And accepting infection from him, contagion, the septic climate of their noxious genes. Dreaming of complications down the road, of bad bouts and thick medical histories, of wasting neurological diseases, of blood and pulmonary scourges, of blows to the glands and organs, of pathogens climbing the digestive tract, invading the heart and bone marrow, erupting the skin and clouding the cough.
Now, now, now, now, now, now, now, she thinks, and calls upon the famous misfits, upon centaurs and satyrs and chimeras, upon dragons and griffins and hydras and wyverns. Upon the basilisk, the salamander, and the infrequent unicorn.
And upon, at last, a lame and tainted Mickey Mouse.
Stanley Elkin (1930–1995) was an award-winning and critically acclaimed novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He was celebrated for his wit, elegant prose, and poignant fiction that often satirized American culture.
Born in the Bronx, New York, Elkin moved to Chicago at the age of three. Throughout his childhood, he spent his summers with his family in a bungalow community on New Jersey’s Ramapo River. The community provided many families an escape from the city heat, and some of Elkin’s later writing, including
The Rabbi of Lud
(1987), was influenced by the time he spent there.
Elkin attended undergraduate and graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received his bachelor’s degree in English in 1952 and his PhD in 1961. His dissertation centered around William Faulkner, whose writing style Elkin admitted echoing unintentionally until the 1961 completion of his short story “On a Field, Rampant,” which was included in the book
Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers
(1966). Elkin would later say that story marked the creation of his personal writing style. While in school, Elkin participated in radio dramas on the campus radio station, a hobby that would later inform his novel
The Dick Gibson Show
(1971), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1972.