Continuum 4, page 16
part #4 of Continuum Series
The Curator’s opinion ought to be sound. The little twinned god must be old beyond explaining or comprehending. Prodigiously older than the Holy Murcan Church, which as recently as the last century had enjoyed an undisputed vested interest in eternity.
Before the church rose one of those tall obsolete iron stakes. Why the devil, Patric wondered, did they preserve such objects, as though modern Murcanity saw nothing evil in them? He stepped into the bushes that the church considerately allowed to grow outside the brick wall. He supposed, loosening his loincloth, that you could ask the authorities about it, but you wouldn’t win much light. Certainly not on the question: Does the Church imagine it might one day use the stake again in the traditional manner? It would be more profitable to ask the question of one of the Franklinites, since his vows permitted no answer but a grunt.
Comfortable once more, Patric considered the graffiti on the upper section of the wall. It amounted to a valued message center. Every few days a Franklinite would march out in bitter silence with a mop and bucket to clean away the notices, invitations, self-descriptions, diagrams, wishful fancies, etc., because of the fearful danger that they might be observed by the young (who often had put them there). Thus one could feel sure that any important communication found here wouldn’t be more than three or four days old; the citizens felt a decent gratitude to the fathers for thus keeping the information up to date. Patric gave thoughtful attention to some words that looked fresh: Ask for Thalia at Mam Sola’s house. I found merit in her discourse. The script was literate, the message not the usual tribute to a five-dollar prostitute; Thalia must have pleased someone of exacting taste. Patric sighed, mentally reviewing his wallet. Twelve bucks and small change, payday four days off. One must forgo either eating, or Thalia. At Mam Sola’s, he had heard from rumor, there were drinks to buy and maybe other extras. One would live on peanuts and crackers the rest of the week.
He wandered on to a Mark Street bar named The Whitish Virgin. It was pleasantly lit by the slipper-shaped whale-oil lamps recently come into style. They do smoke worse than lamps with a glass chimney, but they have some charm, if the veiling is vented to carry off fumes. In this hostel they stood on firm shelves, high enough to escape being knocked over in a brawl. The straw and shavings were clean. A nicely painted nude above the bar was doubtless the virgin who gave the place its name. She stood elegantly beside a canopied bed, smiling at the observer like a lemon cream puff.
Patric ordered a beer. The place was quiet at this early hour. Only one other drinker stood at the bar, a slender but muscular young man whose blue shirt carried the hammer insignia of the Construction Workers Guild. He glanced at the black pen design on Patric’s shirt without awe. Members of the Clerical Guild had become almost common in the last thirty years, since the Church had been obliged to eff off with its restrictions on reading and writing. The blue-shirt said pleasantly: “Hot, a’n’t it?”
“Ayah,” said Patric, and smiled, nodding at the hammer insignia. “What branch?”
“Carpenter. As for the heat I figured you’d say that, but you people up here don’t know what heat is. I’ve been down to the colony the last six months. Belltown, that’s the asshole of creation. They needed carpenters and the pay was good. Twenty-six miles south of the Pottymack as the trail runs. Last settlement this side of Misipa, and the worst.”
“There’s been talk in the journals, government may decide to extend the colony all the way to the Misipan Wall.”
“Been a lot of shit too. Meaning no disrespect to the journals — I know you Clericals go big for ’em.”
“Not too big.”
“Well, I call it stupid talk, about extending the colony. We’re better off with a jungle no-man’s-land between us and Misipa. Damned slaveholders. They built the wall, let ’em sweat behind it.”
“Ayah. There’s been mention of scouting parties in the jungle.”
“Bullshit parties. I went on one of those. The jungle beyond the Pottymack is no place for human beings, Mister — never will be. What we did, see, we went off a little way into the big bush, far enough off so that Belltown folks couldn’t see our campfire smoke, and set there with a thumb up. One of the boys had a gittur, and I play the corder, so the time passed nice enough. Then when we figured it was about right, our Clerical wrote up a report saying with a lot of big words that we hadn’t found nothing, and so back to Belltown. By me it was a holiday, but not a real nice one, because that jungle is hell even if you ain’t trying to travel.”
“Ayah?”
“Believe me. Brown tiger’s terrible, for one thing. There was at least two hanging around Belltown, and nobody could wing them — we had some damn good archers too. Lost three men. One was Bill Shawn, a friend of mine. The thing jumped a party he was with and carried him off in the broad day like a cat with a sparrow. You ever seen brown tiger?”
“Nay, never been out of Fil. I work at the Museum.”
“That so? My name’s Chad Snow.”
“Patric Jonz.”
“’Know ya… And the heat down there, man, and the wet, and the lonesomeness. Your moccasins look all right when you take ’em off to go to bed, come morning they’re all over green mold. Scorpions. Centipedes eight inches long — the sons of bitches rattle when they run. You get tired from an amount of work that wouldn’t even get you winded up here. And that ain’t all.”
“Sounds like enough.”
“There are — well, Mr. Jonz, they call you crazy for believing them stories — I don’t know —”
“Call me Patric.”
“’Kay — Patric. Stories about — small people, in the jungle. Little bastards, less than four feet tall. Three feet some say. Supposed to be descended from Misipan mues that were bred for slaves for several generations, and then revolted and took to the jungle. I don’t believe it, but down there, if you get a touch of swamp fever or something, you start seeing things. You know — something just gone out of sight behind a tree bole. I ain’t going back.”
“Bartender — couple more beers, on me.”
“Why, thank you kindly, Patric. It’s great to be home.”
Behind him Patric heard a minatory roar of throat-clearing. “Home,” said Sir Winfield, “has been defined as a man’s castle, where he can get away from everybody but himself. It’s overrated. I myself was married once. Rraaargh. Through no fault of her own, the poor wretch could not abide me. She now runs a genteel seminary for young ladies of the upper social strata, God rest her, at Rasbury Park. Beer, bartender. I have a surpassing thirst.”
Patric felt haunted. Would the Curator have demeaned himself by pursuing his secretary through the streets on some disingenuous errand? The thought was unworthy. However, Patric, maybe because of a spotless conscience, was not in the habit of looking behind him, so it could have happened. This was surely not Dr. Hamlin’s preferred sort of bar. With his baronetcy and his income, he ought to favor high-toned drinking havens like the Penn Fathers Society, or the Art and Letters Club in the lush calm of Bethlum Street.
“Join us, sir,” said Chad to the long old man who had already done so. “We were talking about the colony.”
Patric mumbled introductions, hoping Chad would not be overimpressed by the “sir.” He wasn’t.
“Ah, the colony. An irrelevant political doodah superimposed on a contemptible patch of tropic efflorescence that would have been better left to the indigenous reptiles.”
“I dunno,” said Chad. “We done quite a bit of work.”
“The Federation, in my view, would be better advised to further the liberal arts and allow the desuetudinous hinterland to remain in statu quo.”
“You may have a point there,” said Chad.
“As an arcanum of indifferent hispidulate boscage, it might have its merits. Not that I wish to grind my own double ax, but the matter is self-evident.”
“See what you mean,” said Patric.
“Ain’t he a corker?” said Chad.
“I am. By the term double ax I mean that the history of art must employ procedures of both art and science; thus I stand frequently before the imminent prospect of falling between two schools.”
“Sir —”
“Later, Patric. I loathe being interrupted.” Apologetically, he tapped Patric’s arm. “The boy’s my secretary, Mr. Snow, and besides, age has its privileges. Excellent beer. The fluid they describe as beer at the Penn Fathers Society is, beside this, diluted turtle piss. Your health, gentlemen!”
“How.”
“Pros’t,” said Patric.
“The history of art, Mr. Snow, is my profession — that’s why I drag it in by the ears.”
“Call me Chad.”
“With pleasure, Chad. And art is a wide subject. We must include, I suppose, the odorous mystique of politics, but we compensate for that by including the arts of brewing and distillation — ha! And of course the arts of love. Gentlemen, I give you love.”
“Love,” said Patric.
“Huh? Oh — sure. Love.” Chad drank. “Ain’t he a corker?”
“Yes. I am, it is true, a corker. Let me explain that. Before passing by here and most fortunately chancing to see you, Patric (if I may) I had already paused briefly at another oasis. There, at my very moment of entrance, a cork popped. Without human intervention. Spontaneously, I say, like the flight of a little bird. Rr.”
Patric’s fingers roaming in a pocket encountered the clay image, and he set it on the bar. The beer in the bottle of his brain had become an essential juice of benevolence. If he were to move his head it would slosh with love for all mankind. He did move it and it did slosh. “Let us drink to old gods and new loves.”
“Admirable,” said Dr. Hamlin.
Chad said: “Two arses, two faces, I be a son of a bitch.”
Dr. Hamlin murmured: “And fingernail marks.” A frayed gandyshank silenus, he lounged with intently brooding eyes, as though the sight of the image had swept him clear into the cool country of sobriety. “One may suppose he had no other tool at hand.”
Patric suggested: “Maybe he (if it was he and not she) knew of no other tool?”
The Curator shook his head, in thought and wonderment, not in denial. Chad shook his head too, but nervously, as if at a buzzing fly. “I’d call that carrying marriage too far.”
“You have a point there,” said Patric. “Except I don’t believe the artist was thinking about marriage.”
“You mean he…”
“Don’t know. M’ own philosophy marriage’s very simple. Women. You got to treat ’em right. Love.”
Sir Winfield said: “Patric (if I may) you are drunk.”
“Nothing of the kind, sir. Slight nebriated is all. In vino lots of veritas. That’s a fact.”
“If he was sober,” said Chad, “he’d know you got to treat ’em tough. Only way.”
“No no,” said Patric. “No, I deny that paregorically. Toughness is a weariness to the spirit, like for instance once upon a time said Adam to Eve, ‘For God’s sake! My back is one big solid ache. It ain’t that I mind begetting mankind, but couldn’t we take a short break?’”
“He’s drunk,” said Chad. “You have to treat ’em tough, rough.”
“Tender.”
“Gentlemen, gentlemen!”
Chad asked uneasily: “Who’s the old corker talking to, Patric? You got any idea?”
Dr. Hamlin scratched his neck. “Gentlemen, I feel that your difference of outlook has been expressed in simple and basic terms upon which I cannot improve. Tenderness versus toughness. Rr. It raises a number of shrewd and difficult points; but I would suggest to you that we do, inevitably, approach the proposition solely, and it may be narrowly, from the masculine point of view. Now there is —”
“He’s such a nice little guy,” said Chad. “I hate to think of him being, you know, swallered up in the clutches of some — some —”
“I assure you,” said Patric, “I have always been able to preserve the ’tegrity of a disintellected interest.”
“Especially when he’s drunk, like now.”
The Curator inquired: “Do you boys want to be alone?” Chad didn’t laugh. “I was about to say, there is a remedy for a too exclusively male presentment of our problem, namely the submission of it, accompanied I presume by demonstrations, to a qualified and impartial umpire — but first let me hasten to say that for the independent intelligence of both you gentlemen I have only the highest, the very warmest regard —”
“To you, sir.”
“To you, Sir Winfield. Pros’t.”
“Thank you both, heartily. Now I should respectfully urge that in order to be qualified as a judge of the matter hereinbeforementioned, the umpire must be, as it were, a woman.”
“Hear, hear!” said Patric.
“That statue,” said Chad. “It kind of gets you.”
“Thought you didn’t like it,” Patric said.
“Didn’t at first. You have to get used to it. It gets you.”
“An umpire capable by physical nature, namely a woman —”
“I mean it — gets you. Mind if I pick it up?”
“Not a bit. Go ahead.”
“Balls,” said Sir Winfield.
“No, honest, I was listening,” said Patric. “And Chad here didn’t mean to interrupt. You were talking about women.”
“Well, I was merely trying to direct your thought and that of Mr. Snow to the consideration of a logical outcome, namely, the reference of your basic conflict to a judicially minded member of that profession which for some odd reason is referred to as the oldest. (Actually I believe the skilled design and production of spiked clubs for bashing in the heads of neighbors is a far older profession than prostitution, but for the moment we will let that pass.)”
“What conflict?”
“Tenderness versus toughness. Alcohol seems not to improve the quality of your attentiveness.”
“Oh, that.” Struck by a poignant certainty that one day Chad and he would be old weary men, the Curator dead, and that delightful wench — what was her name? — Thalia — Thalia might no longer have merit in her discourse, Patrick felt darkly inclined to weep; manfully, he did not. “Daresay Chad’s pro’ly right.”
“What! Don’t you stand up for your own views, young man?”
“Oh, I do, by God I do!” Patric struck the bar, accurately, and ordered beer. “Nothing counts with a woman like — like what did I say? Ten’erness. And of course staying power. I do not refer to quantity, a coarse conception. I would not have you think me on a level with Ezekiel Budworthy Gower, who could comfort six quail in one hour with nine minutes for each plus a very short speech explaining his curious power. But it’s ten’erness that counts.”
“Would you bet on it, kid?” Through the haze, Chad looked incoherently annoyed, though maybe not at him.
“Wouldn’t be fair,” said Patric. “Here I am, known as a grandmaster of the erotic art throughout the civilized world —”
“Make it Filadelfia,” said Dr. Hamlin.
“Known throughout Filadelfia as a lover without a peer. When I enter a room, women — you understand I’m zaggerating to make my point, but the principle is sound — when I enter a room — shit, Sir Winfield, what happens when I enter a room?”
“I don’t know. But you are, in fact, willing to lay a wager on your position? I thought Mr. Snow’s offer was eminently fair.”
“What offer?”
“Why, if I properly understood the drift of our discourse, it was proposed that we should attend an establishment of the better sort, and there submit your difference of opinion to the judgment of some judicially inclined hetaera, if such can be found. Mr. Snow then offered to place the matter in the form of a wager. I myself, as a neutral party, am prepared to hold the stakes.”
“Got no stakes,” said Patric. “Pay-day problem.”
“Possibly,” Dr. Hamlin murmured, “some material object other than coin of the realm… As for the tariff at the establishment I mentioned, I am prepared to underwrite it in the interest of science and philosophy.”
Chad burped and laid his knife belt on the bar. He pulled a ten-inch blade from a leather sheath and turned it so that the cold blue spat splendor in the lamplight. “Katskil steel that is. Look at the ivy design along the shaft.”
“Remarkable,” said Dr. Hamlin.
“Antique, too. Man that sold it to me said it was a hundred years old. Good as new, though. Wouldn’t want to get in front of it. I’ve had it five years. If you’re agreeable, Patric, I’ll put it up against that cockeyed statue thing.”
While Dr. Hamlin examined the old knife, Patric suffered a panic that he hoped would prove temporary. After all, his factual experience as a great lover was limited to an episode about a year ago with a doe-eyed waitress named Vickie who amused herself with him for a couple of months before very sensibly marrying somebody else. “Patric,” she had said, “you are a sweet kid but you’ve got no sense. And no prospects.” Well, what the hell — hope for the best. He mumbled: “Statue markable arche-o-logical significance.”
“What?” said Chad.
“Oh, nothing.”
“It’s a deal?”
“Sure.”
“Well, if the Professor’s going to pay for the girls —”
“Girl,” said Sir Winfield. “One of judicial mind. To assess the relative merits of the tough versus the tender approach — as if she didn’t already know.”
“All right. If the Professor’s going to pay for the girl, le’ me buy us a supper. Lead for the pencil.”
“I will trail along,” said Patric sadly, “in my capacity as a specter of gaunt poverty, useful walking comment on the depravity of the Lucullan table, and worth feeding if only for that reason.”
