‘Wise guy. Take off your clothes.’
‘Yeah. Maybe he got dirty tattoos.’
They paw over his body probing his ass for contraband and examine it for evidence of sodomy. They dunk his hair and send the water out to be analyzed. ‘Maybe he’s got dope in his hair.’
Finally, they impound his suitcase; and he staggers out of the shed with a fifty pound bale of documents.
A dozen or so Recordites sit on the Old Court House steps of rotten wood. They watch his approach with pale blue eyes, turning their heads slow on wrinkled necks (the wrinkles full of dust) to follow his body up the steps and through the door. Inside, dust hangs in the air like fog, sifting down from the ceiling, rising in clouds from the floor as he walks. He mounts a perilous staircase – condemned in 1929. Once his foot goes through, and the dry splinters tear into the flesh of his leg. The staircase ends in a painter’s scaffold, attached with frayed rope and pullies to a beam almost invisible in dusty distance. He pulls himself up cautiously to a ferris wheel cabin. His weight sets in motion hydraulic machinery (sound of running water). The wheel moves smooth and silent to stop by a rusty iron balcony, worn through here and there like an old shoe sole. He walks down a long corridor lined with doors, most of them nailed or boarded shut. In one office, Near East Exquisitries on a green brass plaque, the Mugwump is catching termites with his long black tongue. The door of the County Clerk’s office is open. The County Clerk sits inside gumming snuff, surrounded by six assistants. Lee stands in the doorway. The County Clerk goes on talking without looking up.
‘I run into Ted Spigot the other day … a good old boy, too. Not a finer man in the Zone than Ted Spigot.… Now it was a Friday I happen to remember because the Old Lady was down with the menstral cramps and I went to Doc Parker’s drugstore on Dalton Street, just opposite Ma Green’s Ethical Massage Parlor, where Jed’s old livery stable used to be.… Now, Jed, I’ll remember his second name directly, had a cast in the left eye and his wife came from some place out East, Algiers I believe it was, and after Jed died she married up again, and she married one of the Hoot boys, Clem Hoot if my memory serves, a good old boy too, now Hoot was around fifty-four fifty-five year old at the time.… So I says to Doc Parker: “My old lady is down bad with the menstral cramps. Sell me two ounces of paregoric.”
‘So Doc says, “Well, Arch, you gotta sign the book. Name, address and date of purchase. It’s the law.”
‘So I asked Doc what the day was, and he said, “Friday the 12th.”
‘So I said, “I guess I already had mine.”
‘“Well,” Doc says, “there was a feller in here this morning. City feller. Dressed kinda flashy. So he’s got him a RX for a mason jar of morphine.… Kinda funny looking prescription writ out on toilet paper.… And I told him straight out: ‘Mister, I suspect you to be a dope fiend.’
‘“‘I got the ingrowing toe nails, Pop. I’m in agony,’ he says.
‘“‘Well,’ I says, ‘I gotta be careful. But so long as you got a legitimate condition and an RX from a certified bona feedy M.D., I’m honored to serve you.’
‘“‘That croaker’s really certified,’ he say.… Well, I guess one hand didn’t know what the other was doing when I give him ajar of Saniflush by error.… So I reckon he’s had his too.”
‘“Just the thing to clean a man’s blood.”
‘“You know, that very thing occurred to me. Should be a sight better than sulphur and molasses.… Now, Arch, don’t think I’m nosey; but a man don’t have no secrets from God and his druggist I always say.… Is you still humping the Old Gray Mare?”
‘“Why, Doc Parker … I’ll have you know I’m a family man and an Elder in the First Denominational Nonsextarian Church and I ain’t had a piecea hoss ass since we was kids together.”
‘“Them was the days, Arch. Remember the time I got the goose grease mixed up with the mustard? Always was a one to grab the wrong jar, feller say. They could have heard you squealing over in Cunt Lick County, just a squealing like a stoat with his stones cut off.”
‘“You’re in the wrong hole, Doc. It was you took the mustard and me as had to wait till you cooled off.”
‘“Wistful thinking, Arch. I read about it one time inna magazin settin’ in that green out house behind the station.… Now what I meant awhile back, Arch, you didn’t rightly understand me.… I was referring to your wife as the Old Gray Mare.… I mean she ain’t what she used to be what with all them carbuncles and cataracts and chilblains and hemorrhoids and aftosa.”
‘“Yas, Doc, Liz is right sickly. Never was the same after her eleventh miscarriaging.… There was something right strange about that Doc Ferris he told me straight, he said: ‘Arch, ‘tain’t fitting you should see that critter.’ And he gives me a long look made my flesh crawl.… Well, you sure said it right. Doc. She ain’t what she used to be. And your medicines don’t seem to ease her none. In fact, she ain’t been able to tell night from day since using them eye drops you sold her last month.… But, Doc, you oughta know I wouldn’t be humping Liz, the old cow, meaning no disrespect to the mother of my dead monsters. Not when I got that sweet little ol’ fifteen year old thing.… You know that yaller girl used to work in Marylou’s Hair Straightening and Skin Bleach Parlor over in Nigga town.”
‘“Getting that dark chicken meat, Arch? Gettin’ that coon pone?”
‘“Gettin’ it steady, Doc. Gettin’ it steady. Well, feller say duty is goosing me. Gotta get back to the old crank case.”
‘“I’ll bet she needs a grease job worst way.”
‘“Doc, she sure is a dry hole.… Well, thanks for the paregoric.”
‘“And thanks for the trade. Arch.… He he he … Say, Archy boy, some night when you get caught short with a rusty load drop around and have a drink of Yohimbiny with me.”
‘“I’ll do that, Doc, I sure will. It’ll be just like old times.”
‘So I went on back to my place and heated up some water and mixed up some paregoric and cloves and cinnamon and sassyfrass and give it to Liz, and it eased her some I reckon. Leastwise she let up aggravatin’ me.… Well, later on I went down to Doc Parker’s again to get me a rubber … and just as I was leaving I run into Roy Bane, a good ol’ boy too. There’s not a finer man in this Zone than Roy Bane.… So he said to me he says, “Arch, you see that ol’ nigger over there in that vacant lot? Well, sure as shit and taxes, he comes there every night just as regular you can set your watch by him. See him behind them nettles? Every night round about eight thirty he goes over into that lot yonder and pulls himself off with steel wool.… Preachin’ Nigger, they tell me.”
‘So that’s how I come to know the hour more or less on Friday the 13th and it couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes half an hour after that, I’d took some Spanish Fly in Doc’s store and it was jest beginning to work on me down by Grennel Bog on my way to Nigger town.… Well the bog makes a bend, used to be nigger shack there.… They burned that ol’ nigger over in Cunt Lick. Nigger had the aftosa and it left him stone blind.… So this white girl down from Texarkana screeches out:
‘“Roy, that ol’ nigger is looking at me so nasty. Land’s sake I feel just dirty all over.”
‘“Now, Sweet Thing, don’t you fret yourself. Me an’ the boys will burn him.”
‘“Do it slow, Honey Face. Do it slow. He’s give me a sick headache.”
‘So they burned the nigger and that ol’ boy took his wife and went back up to Texarkana without paying for the gasoline and old Whispering Lou runs the service station couldn’t talk about nothing else all Fall: “These city fellers come down here and burn a nigger and don’t even settle up for the gasoline.”
‘Well, Chester Hoot tore that nigger shack down and rebuilt it just back of his house up in Bled Valley. Covered up all the windows with black cloth, and what goes on in there ain’t fittin’ to speak of.… Now Chester he’s got some right strange ways.… Well it was just where the nigger shack used to be, right across from the Old Bro
oks place floods out every Spring, only it wasn’t the Brooks place then … belonged to a feller name of Scranton. Now that piece of land was surveyed back in 1919.… I reckon you know the man did the job too.… Feller name of Hump Clarence used to witch out wells on the side.… Good ol’ boy too, not a finer man in this Zone than Hump Clarence.… Well it was just around about in there I come on Ted Spigot a-screwin’ a mud puppy.’
Lee cleared his throat. The Clerk looked up over his glasses. ‘Now if you’ll take care, young feller, till I finish what I’m asaying, I’ll tend to your business.’
And he plunged into an anecdote about a nigra got the hydrophobia from a cow.
‘So my pappy says to me: “Finish up your chores, son, and let’s go see the mad nigger.…” They had that nigger chained to the bed, and he was bawling like a cow.… I soon got enough of that ol’nigger. Well, if you all will excuse me I got business in the Privy Council. He he he!’
Lee listened in horror. The County Clerk often spent weeks in the privy living on scorpions and Montgomery Ward catalogues. On several occasions his assistants had forced the door and carried him out in an advanced state of malnutrition. Lee decided to play his last card.
‘Mr. Anker,’ he said, ‘I’m appealing to you as one Razor Back to another,’ and he pulled out his Razor Back card, a memo of his lush-rolling youth.
The Clerk looked at the card suspiciously: ‘You don’t look like a bone feed mast-fed Razor Back to me.… What you think about the Jeeeeews.…?’
‘Well, Mr. Anker, you know yourself all a Jew wants to do is doodle a Christian girl.… One of these days we’ll cut the rest of it off.’
‘Well, you talk right sensible for a city feller.… Find out what he wants and take care of him.… He’s a good ol’boy.’
Interzone
The only native in Interzone who is neither queer nor available is Andrew Keif’s chauffeur, which is not affectation or perversity on Keif’s part, but a useful pretext to break off relations with anyone he doesn’t want to see: ‘You made a pass at Aracknid last night. I can’t have you to the house again.’ People are always blacking out in the Zone, whether they drink or not, and no one can say for sure he didn’t make a pass at Aracknid’s unappetizing person.
Aracknid is a worthless chauffeur, barely able to drive. On one occasion he ran down a pregnant woman in from the mountains with a load of charcoal on her back, and she miscarriaged a bloody, dead baby in the street, and Keif got out and sat on the curb stirring the blood with a stick while the police questioned Aracknid and finally arrested the woman for a violation of the Sanitary Code.
Aracknid is a grimly unattractive young man with a long face of a strange, slate-blue color. He has a big nose and great yellow teeth like a horse. Anybody can find an attractive chauffeur, but only Andrew Keif could have found Aracknid; Keif the brilliant, decadent young novelist who lives in a remodeled pissoir in the red light district of the Native Quarter.
The Zone is a single, vast building. The rooms are made of a plastic cement that bulges to accommodate people, but when too many crowd into one room there is a soft plop and someone squeezes through the wall right into the next house, the next bed that is, since the rooms are mostly bed where the business of the Zone is transacted. A hum of sex and commerce shakes the Zone like a vast hive:
‘Two thirds of one percent. I won’t budge from that figure; not even for my bumpkins.’
‘But where are the bills of lading, lover?’
‘Not where you’re looking, pet. That’s too obvious.’
‘A bale of levies with built-in falsie baskets. Made in Hollywood.’
‘Hollywood, Siam.’
‘Well American style.’
‘What’s the commission? … The commission.… The Commission.’
‘Yes, nugget, a shipload of K.Y. made of genuine whale dreck in the South Atlantic at present quarantined by the Board of Health in Tierra del Fuego. The commission, my dear! If we can pull this off we’ll be in clover.’ (Whale dreck is reject material that accumulates in the process of cutting up a whale and cooking it down. A horrible, fishy mess you can smell for miles. No one has found any use for it.)
Interzone Imports Unlimited, which consists of Marvie and Leif The Unlucky, had latches onto the K.Y. deal. In fact they specialize in pharmaceuticals and run a 24-hour Pro station, six ways coverage fore and aft, as a side line. (Six separate venereal diseases have been identified to date.)
They plunge into the deal. They form unmentionable services for a spastic Greek shipping agent, and one entire shift of Customs inspectors. The two partners fall out and finally denounce each other in the Embassy where they are referred to the We Don’t Want To Hear About It Department, and eased out a back door into a shit-strewn vacant lot, where vultures fight over fish heads. They flail at each other hysterically.
‘You’re trying to fuck me out of my commission!’
‘Your commission! Who smelled out this good thing in the first place?’
‘But I have the bill of lading.’
‘Monster! But the check will be made out in my name.’
‘Bawstard! You’ll never see the bill of lading until my cut is deposited in escrow.’
‘Well, might as well kiss and make up. There’s nothing mean or petty about me.’
They shake hands without enthusiasm and peck each other on the cheek. The deal drags on for months. They engage the services of an Expeditor. Finally Marvie emerges with a check for 42 Turkestan kurds drawn on an anonymous bank in South America, to clear through Amsterdam, a procedure that will take eleven months more or less.
Now we can relax in the cafés of The Plaza. He shows a photostatic copy of the check. He would never show the original of course, lest some envious citizen spit ink eradicator on the signature or otherwise mutilate the check.
Everyone asks him to buy drinks and celebrate, but he laughs jovially and says, ‘Fact is I can’t afford to buy myself a drink. I already spent every kurd of it buying Penstrep for Ali’s clap. He’s down with it fore and aft again. I came near kicking the little bastard right through the wall into the next bed. But you all know what a sentimental old thing I am.’
Marvie does buy himself a shot glass of beer, squeezing a blackened coin out of his fly onto the table. ‘Keep the change.’ The waiter sweeps the coin into a dust pan, he spits on the table and walks away.
‘Sore head! He’s envious of my check.’
Marvie had been in Interzone since ‘the year before one’ as he put it. He had been retired from some unspecified position in the State Dept. ‘for the good of the service.’ Obviously he had once been very good looking in a crew-cut, college boy way, but his face had sagged and formed lumps under the chin like melting paraffin. He was getting heavy around the hips.
Leif The Unlucky was a tall, thin Norwegian, with a patch over one eye, his face congealed in a permanent, ingratiating smirk. Behind him lay an epic saga of unsuccessful enterprises. He had failed at raising frogs, chinchilla, Siamese fighting fish, rami and culture pearls. He had attempted, variously and without success, to promote a Love Bird Two-in-a-Coffin Cemetery, to corner the condom market during the rubber shortage, to run a mail order whore house, to issue pencillin as a patent medicine. He had followed disastrous betting systems in the casinos of Europe and the race tracks of the U.S. His reverses in business were matched by the incredible mischances of his personal life. His front teeth had been stomped out by bestial American sailors in Brooklyn. Vultures had eaten out an eye when he drank a pint of paregoric and passed out in a Panama City park. He had been trapped between floors in an elevator for five days with an oil-burning junk habit and sustained an attack of D.T.s while stowing away in a foot locker. Then there was the time he collapsed with strangulated intestines, perforated ulcers and peritonitis in Cairo and the hospital was so crowded they bedded him in the latrine, and the Greek surgeon goofed and sewed up a live monkey in him, and he was gang-fucked by the Arab attendants, and one of the orderl
ies stole the penicillin substituting Saniflush; and the time he got clap in his ass and a self-righteous English doctor cured him with an enema of hot, sulphuric acid, and the German practitioner of Technological Medicine who removed his appendix with a rusty can opener and a pair of tin snips (he considered the germ theory ‘a nonsense’). Flushed with success he then began snipping and cutting out everything in sight: ‘The human body is filled up vit unnecessitated parts. You can get by vit von kidney. Vy have two? Yes dot is a kidney … The inside parts should not be so close in together crowded. They need Lebensraum like the Vaterland.’
The Expeditor had not yet been paid, and Marvie was faced by the prospect of stalling him for eleven months until the check cleared. The Expeditor was said to have been born on the Ferry between the Zone and the Island. His profession was to expedite the delivery of merchandise. No one knew for sure whether his services were of any use or not, and to mention his name always precipitated an argument. Cases were cited to prove his miraculous efficiency and utter worthlessness.
The Island was a British Military and Naval station directly opposite the Zone. England holds the Island on yearly rent-free lease, and every year the lease and permit of residence is formally renewed. The entire population turns out, attendance is compulsory, and gathers at the municipal dump. The President of the Island is required by custom to crawl across the garbage on his stomach and deliver the Permit of Residence and Renewal of the Lease, signed by every citizen of the Island, to The Resident Governor who stands resplendent in dress uniform. The Governor takes the permit and shoves it into his coat pocket:
‘Well,’ he says with a tight smile, ‘so you’ve decided to let us stay another year have you? Very good of you. And everyone is happy about it? … Is there anyone who isn’t happy about it?’
Soldiers in jeeps sweep mounted machine-guns back and forth across the crowd with a slow, searching movement.
‘Everbody happy. Well that’s fine.’ He turns jovially to the prostrate President. ‘I’ll keep your papers in case I get caught short. Haw Haw Haw.’ His loud, metallic laugh rings out across the dump, and the crowd laughs with him under the searching guns.