Vital Parts (31 page)

“I see,” Reinhart said, feeling the pain fizz away as he moved his shoulders—but how could gas get way up there? “He told you the whole story himself. That figures. The whole thing makes beautiful sense. I predict that you and Gen will even make your peace one of these days.” Reinhart lifted himself up. “But what I will never understand is why you all hate me so much. I am really a likable guy. In every other case on record, people have been fond of the man who never gets anywhere, especially if he's fat.”

Maw said: “The world is changing, Carlo, and you haven't kept up. The young kids are taking over from your kind. They don't know you don't have anything to take over. They just see you are big and in your forties.”

“Aw, not you too, Maw!” Reinhart sighed cavernously and sank his hands into the droopy pockets of the wash-and-wear jacket. “You won't believe a word of this, but I'm going to say the truth if it kills me. Not me, but my saintly son Blaine got that girl pregnant, and he will use your five grand not to get married on but to buy marijuana and gasoline for Molotov cocktails with which to burn down Western civilization. And in the name of what? I can understand what makes Communists in Latin America and Asia and Black Assassins here—and it's not poverty, incidentally, but pride—even when I don't agree with it and would shoot back if shot at. I get the point, that is. Violence and lawlessness, even downright anarchy, have their attractions sometimes. Who doesn't get enraged at the way things are? I always loved the Marx Brothers for that reason. But to live life like the cast of
Horsefeathers
, to accomplish nothing but to harass everybody who has—”

“Which certainly isn't you,” said Maw. “I shouldn't wonder if it was pride with Blainey, also. He don't have any in you.”

Reinhart struck a dramatic stance. “Maw,” he said, looking down at her, “you are hardly one to get morally sanctimonious, when you skinned the Mainwarings on the sale of the house.”

Maw laughed till her eyes were wet behind her spectacles. “I sure did, Carlo. The best way to make anybody equal is to rub their nose in the facts of life. I set a certain price and would have sold it to anyone who coughed up the loot, including a little green Martian with aerials on his head. It so happened those colored people were the only ones who would meet it. I bet the neighbors could kill me.”

That had the ring of truth, which of course has many clappers to its bell. Maw was right, Captain Storm was right, and so were the neighbors whose property was devalued: hardworking stiffs who had no other assets. Would it help, Reinhart wondered, if I nail myself to a cross and absorb everybody's interpretation?

He said quietly to his mother: “We have reached a crisis. I am afraid, Maw, that unless you reject this vile accusation against me, I shall not be able to see you again.”

“It's real twisted when you think of it, Carlo. To this coming child you will be both father and grandad.” Maw yawned. “Time for my nap now. Kindly close the door gently when you leave.” Her eyes closed and her head fell slowly towards her lap.

A goat, of all things, was tethered outside the laboratory. The goat was a favorite animal of the comic strips, and frequently shown devouring tin cans, then butting fat people in the ass, which impact projected them high in the air, and they might be seen in the last frame hanging helplessly aloft, the spike of a church steeple through their pants seat. Reinhart had lived most of his life no farther than ten miles from genuine farmland, yet this was all he had heard about goats: lies, lies.

This goat had not been provided with anything to eat, and no natural foodstuffs grew on the hard unsodded earth, alternating with the asphalt driveway, that constituted the approach or yard of the lab. The animal gave Reinhart a brief, seemingly indifferent glance as he unloaded himself from the car, then swung around its lean buttocks in exchange for its wispy beard.

Reinhart sniffed and opened the door. Inside it was cold and dark after the sun, and Streckfuss, emerging from a chilly shadow, advanced on him with an enormous hunting knife.

“
En garde!
” cried the diminutive scientist, crisscrossing the air with vigorous slices.

Reinhart shrank aside, as well as a fat man could manage, and Streckfuss passed into the outdoors with a derisive laugh that suggested a cloved-hoofed, medium-size animal with horns or perhaps a certain satanic quality of his own.

Sweet, standing near a laboratory table, wore a long white coat to match Streckfuss'. He looked professional to the point of bogusness, rather like one of those pseudo-doctors of the early days of TV, who showed graphs and quoted statistics in support of some cosmetic, since forbidden by federal ruling to appear in costume.

“Bob,” Reinhart said by way of greeting, “you certainly make a convincing doc.”

Sweet pointed. “Get yourself a coat and mask from the autoclave.” His own surgical mask was slung loosely from his neck.

“Me?” asked Reinhart. “Is this a joke? I'm at a loss when it comes to science, and think I might get sick to the stomach if I have to watch you prepare to freeze that goat.” He understood suddenly the significance of the captive outside.

“Nonsense. You're talking like a schoolgirl, Carl.” Sweet also wore rubber gloves. He was lining up a rank of steel instruments on an enamel stand.

“Are you always Hans's assistant in these things?” Reinhart asked. Certainly not with AMA approval, he thought, and then remembered animals, not persons, had been specimens thus far. Yet it might be an indication of quackery to come. They were preparing, after all, for the freezing of Splendor Mainwaring. “Isn't that unorthodox?”

Sweet nodded. “Naturally. Unorthodoxy is Hans's great strength. Orthodox medicine abandons the patient at time of clinical death.”

“But surely we have to clear the way legally, with a death certificate from a licensed physician, and don't you have to get something from or through an undertaker? I mean, I don't think we can spirit away a body—”

“For a goat?” asked Bob. “Not even the ASPCA would go that far. Don't worry, my lawyers are all set for the moment we get a human body.”

Overhead was a battery of lights, real surgery equipment. Bob's hands cast no shadows. Reinhart noted that, just as Sweet added: “If we ever do.”

“What do you mean?” asked Reinhart. He hated this lab: no place to sit, and he hesitated to lean on anything. Then he lost his need for support, receiving an access of energy from a sudden suspicion that he had, at long last, caught Sweet out. “Is Splendor Mainwaring not human? Must we wait for a lily-white corpse?”

Now that he thought about it, all the local undertaking establishments were Jim Crow. Another old schoolmate, a mortician, had once assured Reinhart that if an attempt were made by a Negro cabal to impose a colored corpse upon him, he intended to evade it by professing his inability to work with exotic cosmetics. For all Reinhart knew that was authentic; you can't argue with a professional in his own field. But it was morally unpleasant. However, Reinhart was in no position to make waves. Also, though cremation was his wish for his own disposal, officious survivors might well have his remains trundled into the rear door of Schmutzig & Sons Mortuary, where, remembering the argument, the undertaker might vengefully make him up like a piece of waxed fruit—which he would in fact do anyway, Dad's reason for choosing fire for himself.

At that point Streckfuss came in, dragging the goat on its neck rope, its hard heels sliding on the concrete floor. Even without traction it was a strong and stubborn beast and all the small scientist could manage.

He shouted to Reinhart for help. The goat had braced its behind against a metal tableleg now, the line went slack, and the animal lowered its head almost to the floor. Reinhart never took his eyes off it. True, it looked half-grown with but stub-horns, but the nastiest bite he had ever sustained was from the tiny fangs of a Pekinese with its rotten little pushed-in face. He mistrusted everything small and young, hit it off well with aged St. Bernards of the sorrowful countenance.

Streckfuss thrust the rope-end at him, not the friendly frayed hemp of yore but hardly more than a thread of smooth, cold, slimy white nylon. A wonder that the loop at the other end had not cut the animal's throat. In sympathy for the creature, Reinhart took the line gingerly.

The goat's charge ripped it from his hands, and missed Streckfuss, if indeed he had been its aim. In panic it opted for the impasse of the corner with the sinks rather than the long westward run of the lab, relatively open, except for the freezer capsule, in the final quarter.

Then, as Reinhart approached reluctantly, slowed and yet made inexorable by his usual moral decision—that whether or not he caught the goat, someone would, and put it to death, and freeze it, and he, Reinhart, might at least be gentler—the animal feint-nodded to the left, then ran into Streckfuss' quarters, the door of which was ajar.

Reinhart pushed in after, and saw a bedroom as remarkable for its asceticism, for which Sweet had prepared him, as for its filth: twisted yellow sheets on the unmade bed, a greasy sock underfoot, sheets of paper widely disseminated, some whole, some in fragments, and others balled. Reinhart's nose-hairs erected at the sour odor—though that might have been the goat.

The animal had galloped beyond into the open bathroom, a claustral place indeed, windowless, and with one of those ceiling exhaust fans activated by the switch which worked the lights, as in a Holiday Inn. Nature at bay: a goat in a bathroom. Streaked gray shaggy creature, snuffling over a Fu Manchu chin. Its natural set of mouth was a thin, mocking smile.

The washbowl was slimy. Soap scum had dried to powder on the chromium taps, and flecks of toothpaste bespattered the mirror. Streckfuss was unsanitary for a scientist. Toilet lid and seat were in the up position. So he would not have to look within even by accident, Reinhart kicked them down. The crash was registered by the goat's flaring ears, but its body did not move.

“I'm sorry,” said Reinhart. “What it comes down to is that we are superior to you in force. There's no answer to that, believe me.”

A young animal, with half-grown horns. He himself was an old goat to young girls. The experience with Eunice was too recent to be digested into any kind of self-esteem. Where had goats acquired a reputation for lust?

He bent and reached for the trailing rope, the end of which terminated a casual S-loop under the basin. An insouciant movement of the goat's head flicked it away from his grasping fingers. Another effort similarly thwarted suggested that the animal not only was efficacious, albeit crudely, in the basic physical laws governing motion and stasis, but demonstrated them with deliberate malice. That it also seemed amused was probably the sentimental anthropomorphism of a poetaster: nature, raining, did not weep at funerals or, shining, smile on young love, and its fauna, unless corrupted by domesticity like obsequious dogs, had no sense of humor.

Reinhart however, a long way from his ancestor simians, felt at this juncture a certain sense of comedy—even with the classic significance, that in which Dante called his poem comic because it had a happy ending though few laughs on the way there: this goat, alone among his breed, was to have eternal life imposed upon it. His tormentors were his saviors—ever the claim of the tyrant in the past, but now, by the miracle of modern science, salvation was no longer a false promise.

Reinhart pursued the goat with greater ardor. Amazing how nimble it was within such a strait enclosure. With scarecrowing arms Reinhart could almost touch both walls of the bathroom, yet could not lay a hand on the animal, which by almost casual movements involving only its hairy neck eluded him.

The stink was formidable, but again Reinhart hesitated to lay it altogether at the goat's door. Streckfuss' little temple of sanitation was quite a sty, the bathtub filled with dirty laundry, a yellow looped brush, loathsomely stained, standing in the corner behind the toilet. The overhead fan, set above the tub, made more noise than ventilation, roaring like a rocket engine while the room stank, and to put it off one must needs extinguish the light.

The goat was getting Reinhart's. The latter took a breather, hands akimboed on the spare truck tire circumventing his waist in reaction to the belt.

“Well,” he said, “you're certainly getting my,” etc., and the goat pantomimed butting him in the testicles but actually moved only an inch in that direction, then threw up its narrow snout and, beard dangling, uttered a horse- or goat-laugh.

Sweet said from the doorway: “What the hell are you doing in there, Carl?”

Always a sexual tinge to this question when asked of someone in a bathroom. Reinhart felt a ghost of his old childhood apprehension, dating from even before he had begun to dabble in self-abuse.

Bob said: “Just grab the rope and bring the goat out. That should be simple enough.”

And was. The animal docilely watched Reinhart pick up the nylon line, and followed its tension as he trudged back into the lab. In observance of a code of honor, Reinhart did not turn once to determine whether he might be butted at this eleventh hour, but marched on, following Bob to the prepared table, where Streckfuss waited impatiently. Upon delivery Reinhart intended to make himself scarce.

There was a time in his life when bubbling blood, by reason of surgery or accident, did not provide horror. But without prior notice this strong stomach had weakened through the years, and he did not now, interesting as it might be, wish to watch the goat's blood exchanged for gelatine, preceded, one trusted, by some type of anesthetization. Streckfuss would never try to hold down a goat while pouring ether onto a muslin cone covering its nose and mouth—which had been done to Reinhart prior to his tonsillectomy in 1931 and it took three persons to restrain him.

The Swiss however was holding a bladed instrument. Under his direction Bob lifted the animal's hindquarters, and Reinhart took the shoulders. In this intimate relationship, the hairy head against his chest, Reinhart could affirm that the goat indeed stank in its own right, but in a ripe animal way like the cowpie into which your shoe has trod while wandering spring meadows.