Hayduke Lives! Page 6

Whatever became of my life? Twenty-nine years old* and where have all my days gone? I could have been a doctor too, I had the brains, I knew the tricks, was always good at biology, Latin, hydrovascular epidermiology, not so hot at math. But that’s okay, nobody with any sense likes math. A litmus test: if he likes math drop him. Like a cold potato. Because that’s what you’ve got, a cold potato in your hands. Never knew a decent man who liked mathematics.

  Such simple creatures. No subtlety, no suave, no savoir faire, most of them no savoir vivre either, only one thing on their minds, all the time. When you’re fifteen they start looking at you. When you’re seventeen they’re staring at you, drooling, tongue out, pressing up against you in crowds, trying to see down the top of your blouse or up under your skirt, following you up stairways, escalators, steep hills, that awful dumb sad pleading look in their eyes, like starving beggars, always watching, be careful how you cross your legs, they’re watching, keep your knees together when you sit because that’s where they’re always looking, right up between your knees, be careful how you bend over at drinking fountains if you’re wearing something short, bend your knees instead, they’re always staring at that one place, you’d think they thought you had some kind of very valuable precious jewel there, rubies maybe — hah! — a kind of gold mine, and never look them in the eyes they think that means a come-on, don’t smile don’t talk don’t show you even know they’re there, they’ll take it for an invitation, all they want is do is grab you, fold you over the back of a couch or the tailgate of a pickup truck and plant their slimy little seeds in you, that’s all most of them really care about. Plant a baby in you and then run. On to the next one. And the next and the next, just like a rooster in a chickenyard or a bull in a cow pasture, they’re all that way, all the same, those horny pimple-faced adolescents, those young men in their new suits and BMWs that think they’re such hotdogs, those smug fat middleaged men with wives and children and too much money that should know better, even those old wrinkled gray-haired codgers like my Doc, looking at the girls all the time, pretending not to, they’re all basically the same. Animals.

  And then you’re twenty-two and they’re still interested. Only maybe not quite so much. And then you’re twenty-five and over the hill and you notice they’re looking past your shoulder a lot. And then you’re thirty and you’re invisible, you’re not there, they don’t see you, and a woman’s supposed to spend her next twenty years trying to look nineteen again. They want you to stay nineteen forever. To be nineteen. To be a girl. Or get out of the way. An actual grown-up woman they can’t handle. A woman with some experience who really likes sex and by the time she’s thirty or thirty-five probably can’t get enough of it, at least if it’s with the right man, I mean her man, a real man, a woman like that who knows what she’s doing and what a man likes and still has her looks it’s not good enough for them, it scares them. Scares them off. Panting after you all those years and then when you want it they don’t.

  And then what’re you supposed to do? Raise children, I guess, if you’re lucky enough to have a man who’ll stick with you and support you. More likely he’s gone and you have to go to work in some godforsaken huge office with fluorescent lights buzzing on the ceiling and a little green video screen glaring in your eyes all day giving you headaches and cramps and your poor kid dumped at a day-care for eight nine hours with a mob of sick brats with infectious diseases and two or three lesbian deviants and faggoty child molesters running the place and you don’t see your kid again until evening. Quality time. Some quality. The quality of bullshit if you ask me. Women’s liberation, the women’s movement, feminism, they didn’t change a thing except make things worse. You can’t stop progress.

  So what do you do? Avoid trouble, marry an old man with some property and a good steady income who’ll be grateful just to be allowed to get into the same bed with you every night even if he can’t get his tool up anymore or keep it up or keep it in or get it off, he’ll be grateful to you anyway and even if he’s silly enough to play around a little on the sly he’s not so likely to run off with some scheming little baby-faced sexpot named Cheri or Teri or Kristi or Misti. Or Bonnie? Like he did before. And if he does you’ve got his money and his house and his ski chalet and cabin cruiser and even his lawyer’s on your side. So he probably won’t.

  So he dies instead. Of a horrible smelly expensive disease.

  And you’re a widow at thirty-nine. Then what?

  And then you’re a grandmother and hell really begins. And then suddenly you’re dead. Then what?

  Poor little Reuben, look at him there, sleeping away as if the world was a good safe kindly place where everybody loves you like Mummy and Daddy and everything you need you get and nothing can ever hurt you. It’s enough to make you weep.

  If I were a man I’d cry. Right now.

  There’s got to be something more. Doc says we should be happy with what we have and stop whining for life after death or before death but he’s not, he’s not happy, not always, not very often, not really, look at him tired all the time, that mournful look in his eyes, and why not believe in another realm of existence? Maybe even right now, that other realm, waiting for you, like changing planes or buses or trains or men, you step off one step on another, now and then, for the adventure of it if nothing else and anyway there’s got to be something better or at least different after death. Why? Because. And before birth too, reincarnation means preincarnation and if we tried hard enough we’d all remember that former existence. Sometimes I think I do. I was a lioness on the African savannah. I was a Commanche princess racing my pony across the Plains of San Augustine. Once I was an Egyptian queen named Cleopatra, this simple jerk Mark Antony hanging around all the time (but handsome, strong, knew his job) and that potbellied asshole Julius Caesar. The hairy one. Water skiing with Mark behind my golden barge, boy did we make those big black Nubian bastards row! Good for them. Good exercise. But things ended badly. Like they usually do. Bit on the ass by an asp. But croaking like a queen, by God, beautiful slaves bawling around me, the ones I hadn’t already poisoned I mean, and my little darling Charmian weeping her heart out. Those were the days. Those were the days, my friend, when would they ever end, those were the days, thank God that’s over.

  But really. Easy to make fun of it but there really is something more to life than just merely living and dying. I can feel it. I know it. There’s a world of spirit beyond this crude materialistic world, a realm of beautiful spirits floating like little golden Fourth of July sparklers through a kind of heavenly rose-colored circle of clouds spiraling around a great sacred pure blue eye or like little innocent fireflies on a summer evening glowing off and on in the dark as they circle closer and closer to the beautiful blue light of God.

  Jews don’t believe in that crap, Abbzug. Some Jews do, look at Saul Bellow. You look at him, God if I had a face like that I’d believe in life after death too. I’d prefer it.

  Reuben, my little darling, sleep my darling, sleep and sleep, scrunch up your pretty little eyes and close your sticky little fingers and wiggle your toes and sleep my lamb, my baby, my sexy little sexless little androgyne, really neither boy or girl, you lucky kid, just a sweet lovable perfect little firefly of a bug. Thank God you don’t know what’s coming. If anything. You won’t be jealous, will you? We’ll love you just as much as ever and you’ll be so happy to have a little sister, a nice little sister named Debbie with diapers full of yellow babyshit and her little mouth latched like a leech to Mummy’s breast, you won’t mind, will you? Of course he’ll mind, he’ll hate it. Well … tough. Tough titty, any kid of mine he’s got to grow up, I refuse to be another Jewish mother even if I am a Jewish mother.

  Where is that Doc?

  Why do they keep watching our house? Day and night they’re out there right this minute watching and waiting, Doc thinks I’m imagining it but I know, I mean like man I know, I feel them out there, somebody out there in the dark watching this house, watching this very window, waiting. Waitin
g for who? You know who. Him, that’s who. Doc says he’s gone, dead, dead as a doorknob, but what does Doc know, Doc reads the papers, watches the TV news, anybody does that will believe anything. Him dead? — not bloody likely. I can feel him, I know he’s around somewhere, and I know he’s coming right here. Coming again. Yes, he coming, I can feel it, I can feel it deep inside, I can’t believe it but I feel it, yes he’s coming again, that ugly squat hairy evil grinning son of a bitch — yes! oh God! — he’s coming, he’s coming, he’s coming again —!

  Doc …

  Dear sweet Doc of mine. Please hurry home. Baby needs you. Bonnie needs you.

  * Thirty-two in point of fact.

  8

  J. Oral Hatch, R.M.

  Four men sat in a darkened, gloomy motel room — Little America — smoking cigarettes. Drapes drawn close, night-time anyway, only one light on, the blue smoke hung waist high above the floor, flat planes of smoke hovering at various levels on the overheated air. The television set was turned on but silent, its screen depicting what appeared to be a perpetual snowstorm. An electronic snowstorm, a blithering whirligig of mesons, photons, neutrons and neutrinos, a lacy fleecy blizzard of queerish quanta, the dance of the woolly masters.

  The four men were formed in two groups, one group of three and a somewhat smaller group of one. The one, whose name was J. Oral Hatch, sat in a hard chair confronted by the one light, a floor lamp with the beam of its three high-wattage bulbs aimed directly into his face. Hatch was a young man, no more than twenty-five years, which is very young indeed for a man, an American Mormon man in the city of Salt Lake in the state of Deseret. He was dressed, quite uncomfortably, sweating, in the black shoes, black suit, white shirt and red tie of an R.M., i.e., Returned Missionary. (Appointed to the slender pendant barely tumescent damned Gentile nation of Norway, he awoke one night, near the end of his mission, to find himself nude, strapped to his boardinghouse bed, body under physical assault. Two girls, nearly naked, giggling like children, were coaxing his virgin penis into a state of manly rigor. Birgit and Erika, chambermaid and sea-captain’s daughter, he thought he knew them well, he’d converted them both to Mormonism only a month before. Now Birgit straddled his loins, waiting to advance, while the other, very busy, head toward Birgit, seemed to be clasping Oral’s ears with the inner side of her calves. It was painful on the lobes. “Oral,” explained Erika later, a twinkle in her big startling sea-green eyes, “ven effer I see your darlink face I tink, Erika, always you haff place to sit.”

  He did not report the rape but departed the country soon after, Erika’s farewell in his ringing ears: “I alvays haff chob for you, Oral, if effer you come again in Norge.” They waved as he boarded the train for Oslo. “Gott bless Council of Twelve,” they shouted, “also E. Power Bricks and Z. Norman Tabernacle.” Their cheery rosy faces and the depot glided backward, out of vision; against a dark glassy background of fir and spruce his own face stared at him, frightened, pale, with haggard eyes, his mission impossible, a failure, and his intromission involuntary, all too brief. Perhaps he should grow a mustache.

  The other three men sat or lounged behind the lamp, obscured by shadow, nearly invisible to young Hatch. Although a free man, a fellow agent, in official status an equal to two of the three, he felt like a subject under criminal investigation.

  “Then what’d he say?” inquired a faceless voice, harsh from too many cigarettes, too much whisky.

  “He said come here, Oral, I got a job for you.”

  “What did he mean by that?” asked a second, equally harsh.

  “Would you fellas mind not smoking? The smell makes me sick.” Hatch removed his eyeglasses, looked at them, put them back on his nose.

  A moment of silence. A third voice, a senior type of voice, smoother, well modulated, suggesting higher rank, a better education and superior intelligence, spoke softly from the shadows on the king-size bed. “Be good to Lieutenant Hatch. Put out your rotten Marlboros. This is his town.”

  Grunts of assent. The smoke cloud rose, after a moment, to slightly higher elevation, lesser density. “For Lieutenant Hatch,” said the first voice, “and Mr. Moroni.” A smothered laugh.

  “And please don’t make fun of my religion.”

  “Don’t make fun of his religion.”

  “Yes sir.” Another pause. “Now Oral, to get back to the question. What do you suppose he meant by that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think maybe it was an offer of employment?”

  “I didn’t like the tone of it.”

  “So what’d you do?”

  This was better. Young Hatch relaxed a bit, permitting himself a tiny close-lipped smile. “Gave him a chop on the neck. Then — “

  “A job?”

  “A chop. Karate chop. Searched him.”

  “And found?”

  “He was queer all right. Had chicken entrails in both front pockets.”

  “What else?”

  “What?” Young Hatch sat up straight. “I tell you he had chicken entrails in his front pockets and you ask me what else?”

  “How do you know they were chicken entrails?”

  The young man sighed. “I know my entrails.”

  “You must get pretty personal with chickens.”

  Hatch frowned. “I was born and raised on a farm. I used to kill and clean a chicken every week. Gee whiz, fellas.”

  Lieutenant Hatch was a large young fellow but looked small. A two-hundred-pound six-footer with wide shoulders, deep chest, flat stomach, narrow hips, pale-haired, Nordic and jut-jawed as a store window mannikin, he nonetheless looked somehow oddly undersized. Perhaps it was his head; his shoulders too broad, his frame too big for the head. Not that his head was small either; his head was of average size; but the hairline came down within an inch of the eyebrows, giving his brow a flattened, compressed dimension, as if, when a boy, he might — in normal boyish curiosity — have put his head in a trash compactor and flipped the switch. Whatever the cause, no damage was done; young Hatch was equipped with perfectly normal intelligence. His intelligence quotient, in fact, as tested by the agency, proved out to be precisely 100.00, a numerical value that matches, interestingly, is indeed identical to and with, the American national average. Few Americans have an average I.Q., an alarming piece of data when fully considered, because it implies that half the brain power in our nation must fall below the average, half rise above, excepting of course the statistical sliver, like the brain of young J. Oral Hatch, which corresponds exactly to the average. Only the average, he himself liked to point out, are truly exceptional. Furthermore —

  “Forget the chicken entrails,” the senior voice said, interrupting a resumption of that discussion. “Who did in the BLM bulldozer, Oral? Federal property. Who dumped the sludge in Syn-Fuels’ boardroom? Interstate commerce. Who reset the survey stakes at Radium Canyon? Forming a spiral that crossed state lines. Who’s behind that Earth First! crowd? Terrorism.”

  “Yes sir.” Lieutenant Hatch tried to see beyond the bright light flaring in his eyes, looking for the face of the Colonel. “Well sir, those were all misdemeanors.”

  “But who was involved? How many? Conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor, Lieutenant Hatch, is a felony. Did you know that?”

  “No sir. I mean I knew it, of course, but so far as I can find out there’s only one person involved.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know his name.”

  A pause.

  The first interrogatory voice, coughing, broke the awkward silence. “You know his sex? Man or woman? Old or young or in between?” Pause. Hatch shrugged: no answer. “So who was this guy in the BLM comfort station?”

  “Just a bum. No I.D. on him, no car keys, no money, nothing. Just another old pervert, I mean gay, just another old gay pervert using our public facilities for a private shelter. Maybe a child molester. Anybody with chicken entrails in his pocket, God knows what he was looking for.” Again Hatch removed his glasses, wiped off the steam,
put them back. “But that detail doesn’t interest you, does it.”

  “Maybe he was waiting in there for a chicken. What’d it say on the door? Hens? Roosters? Maybe he was a chicken molester. I hear they’re the worst of all. Catch a live chicken, jam its head under a toilet seat, whip out the old whangdoodle, they say there’s nothing like it.”

  Silence. Smothered sniggers. “Chicken toilet …”

  “Christ, Oral, didn’t you even talk to the man?”

  “He wasn’t conscious.”

  “Chopped him pretty good, eh? You kill him?”

  “No, no, he was all right, he was breathing normally, I checked his pulse. There was this glass eyeball on the tiles.”

  “You checked his pulse to see if he was breathing. Good technique. What color eyeball?”

  “What color? What kind of a question is that? Sometimes I wonder if you guys are serious. Don’t you even want to know where this god — this darn glass eyeball came from?”

  “It popped out of his eyesocket when you chopped him. So you left him there?”

  Hatch sighed, patiently. “I had work to do. There was this danged old gray horse outside in the parking lot, making a mess on my right front fender.”

  “Horses, chickens, glass eyeballs,” the coughing voice continued, “we’re getting nowhere, Oral. You’re paid to watch people, not this funny farm. You must have some idea who reset those stakes.”

  “Not for sure.”

  “Who pulled the linkage pins out of that bulldozer so it runs right off its own tracks.”

  “Not for certain.”

  “Your job’s to watch certain people, Hatch. Where were you?”

  “I was there, like I told you. Had my eye on Doc and Bonnie and Smith and Susan and Kathy all the time. All we did was play poker.”

  “Seems like that’s all you ever do, Hatch. No wonder you run up such a big expense account. Don’t you — “

  “Pardon me,” the senior voice, that of the Colonel, interjected. “Tell me a bit about these people, Lieutenant. You have tapes on all of them, I understand.”