"BILL will you begin. By telling the court in your own words how you first conceived and then supported this chimera, the illusion of your potential greatness. By means of which you have managed to assume the leadership and retain it, despite tonsof evidence of total incompetence, the most recent instance being your hurlment of two six-packs of Miller High Life, in a brown-paper bag, through the windscreen of a blue Volkswagen operated by I. Fondue and H. Maeght. Two utter and absolute strangers, so far as we know." "Strangers to you perhaps. But not to me." "Well strangers is not the immediate question. Will you respond to the immediate question. How did you first conceive and then sustain --" "The conception I have explained more or less. I wanted to make, of my life, a powerful statement etc. etc. How this wrinkle was first planted in my sensorium I know not. But I can tell you how it is sustained." "How." "I tell myself things." "What." "Bill you are the greatest. Bill you did that very nicely. Bill there is something about you. Bill you have style. Bill you are macho." "But despite this blizzard of self-gratulation --" "A fear remained." "A fear of?" "The black horse." "Who is this black horse." "I have not yet met it. It was described to me." "By?" "Fondue and Maeght." "Those two who were at the controls of the Volkswagen when you hurled the brown-paper bag." "That is correct." "You cherished then for these two, Fondue and Maeght, a hate." "More of a miff, your worship." "Of what standing, in the time dimension, is this miff?" "Matter of lets see sixteen years I would say." "The miff had its genesis in mentionment to you by them of the great black horse." "That is correct." "How old were you exactly. At that time." "Twelve years." "Something said to you about a horse sixteen years ago triggered, then, the hurlment." "That is correct." "Let us make sure we understand the circumstances of the hurlment. Can you disbosom yourself very briefly of the event as seen from your point of view." "It was about four oclock in the afternoon." "What is your authority." "The cathouse clock." "Proceed." "I was on my way from the coin-operated laundry to the Door Store." "With what in view." "I had in mind the purchasement of a slab of massif oak, 48" by 60", and a set of carved Byzantine legs, for the construction of a cocktail table, to support cocktails." "Could you describe the relation of the High Life to the project, construction of cocktail table." "I had in mind engorgement of the High Life whilst sanding, screwing, gluing and so forth." "And what had you in mind further. The court is interested in the array or disarray of your mind." "I had in mind the making of a burgoo, for my supper. Snow White as you know being reluctant in these days to --" "As we know. There was, then, in the brown-paper bag, material --" "There was in the brown-paper bag, along with the High Life, a flatfish." "The flatfish perished in the hurlment we take it." "The flatfish had perished some time previously. Murthered on the altar of commerce, according to the best information available." "Proceed." "I then apprehended, at the corner of Eleventh and Meat, the blue Volkswagen containing Fondue and Maeght." "You descried them through the windscreen." "That is correct." "The windscreen was in motion?" "The entire vehicle." "Making what speed." "It was effecting a stop." "You were crossing in front of it." "That is correct." "What then." "I recognized at the controls, Fondue and Maeght." "This after the slipping away of sixteen years." "The impression was indelible." "What then." "I lifted my eyes." "To heaven?" "To the cathouse clock. It registered hard upon four." "What then." "The hurlment." "You hurled said bag through said windscreen." "Yes." "And?" "The windscreen shattered. Ha ha." "Did the court hear you aright. Did you say ha ha." "Ha ha." "Outburst will be dealt with. You have been warned. Let us continue. The windscreen glass was then imploded upon the passengers." "Ha ha." "Cutaneous injurement resulted in facial areas a b c and d." "That is correct. Ha ha." "Fondue sustained a woundment in the vicinity of the inner canthus." "That is correct." "Could you locate that for the court." "The junction of the upper and lower lids, on the inside." " Inside meaning, we assume, the most noseward part." "Exactly." "A hair from which, the ball itself would have been compromised." "Fatally." "You then danced a jig on --" "Objection!" "And what might the objection be?" "Our client, your honesties, did not dance a jig. A certain shufflement of the feet might have been observed, product of a perfectly plausible nervous tension, such as all are subject to on special occasions, weddings, births, deaths, etc. But nothing that, in all charity, might be described as a gigue, with its connotations of gaiety, carefreeness --" "He was observed dancing a jig by Shield 333, midst the broken glass and blood." "Could we have Shield 333." "Shield 333 to the stand! "Come along, fellow, come along. Do you swear to tell the truth, or some of it, or most of it, so long as we both may live?" "I do." "Now then, Shield 333, you are Shield 333?" "I are." "It was you who was officiating at the corner of Eleventh and Meat, on the night of January sixteenth?" "It were." "And your mission?" "Prevention of enmanglement of school-children by galloping pantechnicons." "And the weather?" "There was you might say a mizzle. I was wearing me plastic cap cover." "Did you observe that man over there, known as Bill, dancing a jig midstthe blood and glass, after the hurlment?" "Well now, Im nae sae gud on th dances, yer amplitude. Im not sure it were a jig. Coulda been a jag. Coulda been what do they call it, th lap. Hae coulda been lappin. Im nae dancer meself. Hem from the Tenth Precinct. Th Tenth dont dance." "Thank you, Shield 333, for this inconclusive evidence of the worst sort. You may step down. Now, Bill, to return to your entanglement of former times with Fondue and Maeght, in what relation to you did they stand, in those times." "They stood to me in the relation, scoutmasters." "They were your scoutmasters. Entrusted with your schoolment in certain dimensions of lore." "Yes. The duty of the scoutmasters was to reveal the scoutmysteries." "And what was the nature of the latter?" "The scoutmysteries included such things as the mystique of rope, the mistake of one animal for another, and the miseries of the open air." "Yes. Now, was this matter of the great black horse included under the rubric, scoutmysteries." "No. It was in the nature of a threat, a punishment. I had infracted a rule." "What rule?" "A rule of thumb having to do with pots. You were supposed to scour the pots with mud, to clean them. I used Ajax." "That was a scoutmystery, how to scour a pot with mud?" "Indeed." "The infraction was then, resistance to scoutmysteries?" "Stated in the most general terms, that would be it." "And what was the response of Fondue and Maeght." "They told me that there was a great black horse, and that it had in mind, eating me." "They did?" "It would come by night, they said. I lay awake waiting." "Did it present itself? The horse?" "No. But I awaited it. I await it still." "One more question: is it true that you allowed the fires under the vats to go out, on the night of January sixteenth, while pursuing this private vendetta?" "It is true." "Vatricide. That crime of crimes. Well it doesnt look good for you, Bill. It doesnt look at all good for you."
THERE was no place for our anger and frustration to go, then, so we went out and hit a dog. It was a big dog, so it was all right. It was fair. The gargantuan iron dog nineteen feet high commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of the invention of meat. . . "Have a care," Kevin said. It was a brisk day, more brisk than some of the others weve had. The girls were wrapping their heads in cloths again, bright-colored cotton going around the top and the back part and tied at the bottom of the back part, where the sweet neck begins. A few derelicts and bums were lying around in front of the house, staining the sidewalk pretty well. Bill looked tired. I gave his face some additional looks. Then some other people came up and said they were actors. "What sort of actors?" "Do you mean good or bad?" "I didnt mean that but what is the answer?" "Bad, Im afraid," the chief actor said, and we turned away. That wasnt what wed wanted to hear. Everything was complex and netlike. The stain was still there filtering through the water supply and the pipes and carried in suitcases too. The old waiters brown suit had ponyskin lapels. That was depressing. Hogo has announced that Paul is standing in the middle of his, Hogos, Lebensraum. That has an ominous sound. I dont like the sound of that at all. We had a few more Laughing Marys and radishes. Hogo was sharpening his kris. The whirling grindstone ground the steel. There was a noise, you know it perhaps. Hogo tested the kris against his thumb. A red drop of blood. The kris was functioning correctly. After Hogo finished sharpening his kris he began sharpening his bolo. Then he sharpened his parang and his machete and his dirk. "I like to keep everything sharp."
PAUL HAS NEVER BEFORE REALLY
"NOW I have been left sucking the mop again," Jane blurted out in the rare-poison room of her mothers magnificent duplex apartment on a tree-lined street in a desirable location. "I have been left sucking the mop in a big way. Hogo de Bergerac no longer holds me in the highest esteem. His highest esteem has shifted to another, and now he holds her in it, and I am alone with my malice at last. Face to face with it. For the first time in my history, I have no lover to temper my malice with healing balsam-scented older love. Now there is nothing but malice." Jane regarded the floor-to-ceiling Early American spice racks with their neatly labeled jars of various sorts of bane including dayshade, scumlock, hyoscine, azote, hurtwort and milkleg. "Now I must witch someone, for that is my role, and to flee ones role, as Gimbal tells us, is in the final analysis bootless. But the question is, what form shall my malice take, on this occasion? This braw February day? Something in the area of interpersonal relations would be interesting. Whose interpersonal relations shall I poison, with the tasteful savagery of my abundant imagination and talent for concoction? I think I will go around to Snow Whites house, where she cohabits with the seven men in a mocksome travesty of approved behavior, and see what is stirring there. If something is stirring, perhaps I can arrange a sleep for it -- in the corner of a churchyard, for example."
SEEN SNOW WHITE AS A WOMAN.
HOGO pushed Paul away from the bloody tree. "You are a slime sir, looking through that open window at that apparently naked girl there, the most beautiful and attractive I have ever seen, in all my life. You are a dishonor to the robes you wear. That you stand here without shame gazing at that incredible beauty, at her snowy buttocks and so forth, at that natural majesty I perceive so well, through the window, is endlessly reprehensible, in our society. I have seen some vileness in my time, but your action in spying upon this beautiful unknown beauty, whom I already love with all my heart until the end of time, is the most vile thing that the mind of man ever broached. I am going to set a rat chewing at your anus, false monk, for if there is anything this world affords, it is punishment." "You have a good line, fellow," Paul said coolly. "Perhaps next you would care to make a few remarks about unearned pessimism as original sin." "It is true that I am generally in favor of earned pessimism, Paul," Hogo said. "And I have earned mine. Yet at the same time I seem to feel a new vigor, optimism and hope, simply through the medium of pouring my eyes through this window." "It is strong medicine, this," Paul said, and they put their arms around each others shoulders to look some more, but Hogo was thinking about how he could get rid of Paul, once and for all, permanently.
HOGO began to make a plan. It was to be a large plan, a plan as big as a map. Make no small plans, as Pott has said. The object of the plan was to get inside the house when no one was there. No one but Snow White. Hogo played Polish music on his player. Then he stuck pins in his plan marking points of entry and points of ejection. Pins of red, blue, violet, green, yellow, black and white bespattered the plan. The plan oozed out over the floor of the living room into the dining room. Then it ran into the kitchen, bedroom and hall. Plant life from the bursting nature outside came to regard the plan. A green finger of plant life lay down on top of the plan. Jane entered trailing a shopping cart filled with shopping. "What is all this paper on the floor?" Hogo lay atop the plan, and atop the plant life, attempting to conceal them. "Its nothing. Some work I brought home from the office." "Why then are you making those swimming motions ontop of it?" "I was taking a nap." "It doesnt look like a nap to me." Hogo regarded Jane. He noticed that she had her graceful cello shape, still. "This cello-shaped girl still has some life in her," Hogo reflected. "Why dont I spend more time looking at her and drinking in her seasoned beauty." But then he thought of the viola da gamba-shaped Snow White. "Why is it that we always require more, " Hogo wondered. "Why is it that we can never be satisfied. It is almost as if we were designed that way. As if that were part of the cosmic design." Hogo gathered up the plan and packed it away in the special planning humidor, constructed especially to keep the plan fresh and exciting. "Maybe I should make cigar wrappers of this plan, to conceal it from its enemies. The cigars to be smoked in a particular order, and in the clouds of smoke arising, the first faint dim blue outlines of the plan. I wonder what the chemistry and physics of that would be." Hogo regarded the packed plan, in its humidor. "It seems to have weak spots. The possibility of resistance from those within." Hogo imagined the resistance leader in his black turtleneck sweater. "Ill wager I never get into that house clandestinely, the resistance will be so stiff. For people who have a treasure, guard it with their lives. What a wonk I am, planning-wise! I will have to think up a new abnegation to punish myself for thinking up a plan this poor -- playing the accordion, possibly." "What are you thinking about?" Jane asked holding tensely to the handle of the shopping cart. "Playing the accordion," Hogo said.
THE President looked out of his window again. It was another night like that night we described previously and he was looking out of the same window. The Dow-Jones index was still falling. The folk were still in tatters. The President turned his mind for a millisecond to us, here. "Great balls of river mud," the President said. "Is nothing going to go right?" I dont blame him for feeling that way. Everything is falling apart. A lot of things are happening. "I love her, Jane," Hogo said. "Whoever she is, she is mine, and I am hers, virtually if not actually, forever. I feel I have to tell you this, because after all I do owe you something for having been the butt of my unpleasantness for so long. For these years." "The poet must be reassured and threatened," Henry said. "In the same way, Bill must be brought to justice for his bungling. This latest bit is the last straw absolutely. I see the trial as a kind of analysis really, more a therapeutic than a judicial procedure. We must discover the reason, for what he did. When he threw those two six-packs of Miller High Life through the windscreen of that blue Volkswagen --" Paul inspected Snow Whites window from his underground installation. "A lucky hit! the idea of installing this underground installation not far from the house. Now I can keep her under constant surveillance, through this system of mirrors and trained dogs. One of my trained dogs is even now investigating that overly handsome delivery boy from the meat market, who lingered far too long at the door. I should have a complete report by first light. My God but I had to spend a lot of money on their training. An estimated two thousand dollars per dog. Well, one assumes that it is money well spent. If I undertook this project with undertrained dogs, there is a good chance that everything would go glimmering. Now at least I can rely on the dog aspect of things." Snow White was in the kitchen, scoring the meat. "Oh why does fate give us alternatives to annoy and frustrate ourselves with? Why for instance do I have the option of going out of the house, through the window, and sleeping with Paul in his pit? Luckily that alternative is not a very attractive one. Pauls princeliness has somehow fallen away, and the naked Paul, without his aura, is just another complacent bourgeois. And I thought I saw, over his shoulder, a dark and vilely compelling figure not known to me, as I looked out of my window, in the mirror. Who is that? Compared to that unknown figure, the figure of Paul is about as attractive as a mustard plaster. I would never go to his pit, now. Still, as a possible move, it clutters up the board, obscuring perhaps a more exciting one."
