Lucky Alan: And Other Stories

Their Back Pages

Page one, panel one, the island. A dense atoll in a wide barren sea peppered with shark’s fins. Palm trees, sandy shore, pale lagoons, distant smoldering volcano, etc. Interior rain forest cloaking caves, freshwater springs, shrieking inhuman trills, a nest of ferns where bleached skeletons embrace, who can say what else.

Page one, panel two, the plane. A bolted turnip with wings, now aflame.

Page one, panel three, porthole windows of plane. In first class, the Dingbat Clan. Father Theophobe Dingbat, mother Keener Dingbat, son Spark Dingbat, daughter Lisa Dingbat. In coach, Large Silly (a clown), Poacher Junebug (a hunter), C. Phelps Northrup (a theater critic), Murkly Finger (a villain), Peter Rabbit (a rabbit), King Phnudge (King of the Phnudges), C’Krrrarn (a monster). Large Silly and C. Phelps Northrup are in black and white, all others are in color. All gaze downward, terrified, except C’Krrrarn, who plays computer solitaire.

Page one, panel four, splashdown. The plane’s wings curl inward to cover its windshield as it crashes into the lagoon. The wings have fingers, and the doomed pilot and doomed copilot peer from between the fingers like eyeballs.

*

From The Journals of C. Phelps Northrup

July 14

On this fifth day of our desolitude I fear our little compact of necessity has fractured. Mr. and Mrs. Dingbat have refused Poacher Junebug’s sagacious notion that we depart the beach for the caves of the interior, insisting that salvage is imminent and in trepidation of the rumored wolverines and bandicoots roaming the deeper groves. However, despite his intrepitude and riflery, Poacher Junebug has succeeded in bagging nothing, which circumstance neither allays our fears nor stocks our larder. The hunter also continually alludes, in snide asides, to the possible deluxe repast to be made of Peter Rabbit. Hence, much dissension, resulting in parturition of our ranks; Peter Rabbit now savors protection within the circled wagons of the Dingbat Family, on the sand where we first crawled ashore, while Poacher Junebug, Large Silly, King Phnudge, and I have undertaken to conquestify the interior. Murkly Finger has, too, stayed behind and entrenched on the beach, in a fragment of the airplane’s darkened hull, within which he hoards untold provisions. Only King Phnudge has managed penetration of Finger’s lair (King Phnudge has no arms and so perhaps represented no threat to Finger’s cache), but his vocabulary was inadequate for conveying to us any sense of the inventory he’d espied there:

“Creamy dreamy breamy — hip hurdle hoo!”

C’Krrrarn has of course from the first gone his own way. He was sighted again, by the brainy little Dingbat girl, early this morning, posed atop the volcano. Lisa summoned us all to see him there, still as sculpture, foreclaw beckoning to the new sun.

*

PRE-NOSTALGIA CLEARANCE SALE!!!

LIMITED EDITION DINGBAT SODA

REDUCED

FUTURE COLLECTOR’S ITEMS???

T. DINGBAT’S BEER COLA (nonalcoholic)

KEENER’S LITE ICE TEA

LISA DINGBAT’S CHERRY-ROOT BREW

SPARK’S FIZZUM (caffeine-reduced)

GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN???

TWENTY DOLLARS PER CASE

DINGBATS WE MISS U!!!

*

Ten-year-old Spark Dingbat wandered the beach at midday, wearing an inverted bowl of woven palm fronds, a sun hat fashioned by Keener, his mom. Spark had left his family and Peter Rabbit at the campsite they’d improvised, a ring of crappy lean-tos encircling a presumptive fire that his dad, Theophile, had serially failed to light. His sister, Lisa, having forged a twee, cooing alliance with the terrified hare, Spark was left somewhat on the outside. Now, obstinately solo, he strolled at the shell-strewn beach’s exact margin, where the wiper blade of surf just dyed the pinkish sand a wetter hue, where his eight toes were teased by a fringe of bubbles.

Rounding the top of a rocky knoll, a view unfolded below of an inlet sheltered from the harder surf of the surrounding beaches. Two fat figures splashed there. Large Silly and King Phnudge. Spark clambered past the spit of rock and eased down the sand embankment, to stare from the inlet’s grassy ridge. The clown had removed his shoes and clothing, all but his jet-black underwear. His feet were enormous, his white body both fleshy and firm, like the ripest fruit. King Phnudge remained fully dressed, or perhaps he was painted. His crown and beard seemed to flow into his collar, and his collar seemed to be one with his belt and his boots, less accoutrements than fancy outcroppings of his smooth, pudgy whole. Armless, he splashed excitedly side to side in water that came to what should have been his knees, while beside him the clown beat maniacally in the water with a large forked stick, a dowser who’d discovered the sea. The two made a natural pair in Spark’s eyes. Their other strong resemblance was to his father, but Spark suspected no one among the islanders would ever remark it. His father was famous. Large Silly and King Phnudge were nobodies.

“What are you doing?”

Large Silly and King Phnudge wheeled, completely surprised.

“What’s it look like, boy? Poacher said he saw some sea bream in this pool.”

“Fishy splishy wishy hup huzzoo!”

“How are you going to catch them?”

“With nets of vapid questions and sarcasm. In our teeth. With that headgear of yours — hey, there’s a notion. Cough up the fedora, lad.”

“Use the king’s crown.”

“Crowns, if you hadn’t noticed, have a hole in the middle. Besides, I don’t think it comes off.”

“Stuckity pluckity pizzazz — hooble hoo!”

Spark sighed and passed his hat to the eager clown, then watched as it was thrashed to fragments in the hopelessly clumsy attempt at fishing. Spark never saw evidence of a fish. If there had been any, king and clown had certainly frightened them off. Keener’s meticulously woven palm fronds were borne off with the seaweed and foam in the pool’s gentle tide.

*

C’KRRRARN TEARS OFF THE TOP OF A PALM TREE AND FEEDS!!!

C’Krrrarn is staying within himself.

C’KRRRARN TEARS OFF A CORNER OF THE VOLCANO AND FEEDS!!!

C’Krrrarn is staying within himself.

C’KRRRARN TEARS OFF A CHUNK OF THE OCEAN AND DEVOURS IT!!!

C’Krrrarn sits perfectly still and tries to empty his mind.

C’KRRRARN SLURPS THE BLOOD OF THE DINGBATS!!!

Long study has demonstrated to C’Krrrarn that the other person is himself.

C’KRRRARN TEARS OFF A PORTION OF THE HORIZON AND DEVOURS IT!!!

C’Krrrarn gazes into the horizon and the horizon gazes into C’Krrrarn and each is calm and free of desire.

*

From Poacher Junebug, an Index

Island, Accursed, panel 4044

Island, Confounded, panels 3176, 3189, 3204n, 3226, 3564, 3573, 3888, 4002, 4036

Island, Consarn deviltry of, panels 3344–45, 6455, 3988n, 4012

Island, Dadburned critters on, panels 3224, 3656, 3813, 4009

Island, Dingblasted fools on, panels 3208, 3225, 3457, 3800–1, 4009

Island, Durned, panel 4129

Island, Goshforsaken, panels 3185, 3765

Island, Riddiculush, panels 3345, 3679, 4088–89

Island, Terrible, panels 3899, 4034, 4067, 4122

Island, Woeful, panels 3550, 3823, 4129

Island, Wretched be this, panels 3944, 4191

*

From The Journals of C. Phelps Northrup

July 27

Decline sets in. Tempests wreak havoc on our poor dwellings every third day. Between, corrosive sunshine. Despondent over prospects of rescue. We find little and less to eat. Eighteen days and we come to know some of our companions too well, others not at all. Murkly Finger roams the shore at night, cackling. In sunlight he retracts like a rodent to his hole, around which he has erected an array of sharpened sticks dug in pits of sand, disguised with flimsy leaf cover and more sand, and which would collapse inward at a footfall. The clown floats on his back in the spring where we would drink, moaning snatches of merry song, muttering wry punch lines without any jokes to them. He has forsaken his hygiene, enclothed in only his undergarment and a purple island hyacinth, its stem wended in his loopy tufts of hair. His feet are rotting. Poacher Junebug, I now understand, catches nothing, fulminates only. The rabbit is in no danger, except from himself. Like the derelict clown, the hare has abandoned clothing, shedding his red waistcoat and bow tie. He now goes on all fours, heeding some natural call. Lisa Dingbat, that former exemplary tot, follows him everywhere, and she too presently goes au naturel. I tried to confabulate with her one recent afternoon and she only sniffed and nibbled at the air, issuing a rabbity wheezing sigh, perhaps believing herself a sibling to Peter. The other Dingbats remain largely hidden from view. They must be hungry.

One seldom thinks of C’Krrrarn these days.

King Phnudge, unexpectedly, makes good companionship. We freqently embark on foraging walks together, gleaning nothing of consequence or edibility but nonetheless conveying if only to each other a heartening tone of decorum and kinship. King Phnudge alone, besides myself, retains the outward dressing of his former self (I should say: apart from my top hat, which was stolen and presumably devoured by a monkey). He cleaves to good cheer at all times and acts as though bounded, as we all once were, by the strict gutters and panels of decency. Despite his gormless patois, I find myself understanding his highness better and better.

*

Phnudgesong

Fear and rage it shakes my soul

I say only Poorly Moorly — deedle dole!

I want to fuck and eat and strangle you

I say only Starving Carving — hoodle hoo!

Shit hole shit hole shit hole

I’m sick of myself—hup hizzole!

*

“I’m better than this. I’m better than these people. I don’t belong here!”

“Try this on, dear.”

“I don’t want to try anything on. I don’t need another hat. I want my family, nobody’s even listening to me. Where are the children?”

“It’s not a hat. Lisa’s playing with the rabbit, and Spark is out exploring the island.”

“Quit crafting stuff out of palm fronds and frogskins and pond scum, Keener. Nobody needs that shit.”

“Just see if it fits, Theo.”

“How could they send me to a place with monsters and hunters and clowns and theater critics? The clown and the theater critic, they’re not even in color and I want to go home! They make me feel old!”

“Nobody sent you, honey. Our plane crashed.”

“It’s a setup. It’s always a setup. What were we even doing on a plane with those types? What is this, some kind of wicker hockey mask? I can’t breath through this thing.”

“Oh, that looks silly. It’s not for your face. Put it down … there.”

“You wove me a thatched codpiece?!?!?”

“I’m working on breastplates and a helmet. The samurai often wore wicker armor, you know.”

“What good is wicker armor on an island?!?!”

“I’m just trying to get you prepared for a new life, lover.”

“!@&$%#! I don’t want a new life! I want my old life!”

“You’ll eventually have to lead this island, Theo. Nobody else is going to do it. Peter Rabbit isn’t going to do it. The black-and-white characters aren’t suited for it. Poacher Junebug’s discredited himself. King Phnudge, well, he’s just not right. And Murkly is a villain.”

“That’s another thing, I don’t want to go around there anymore, I don’t like the way he looks at you!”

“He can’t help himself, Theo. I just wanted to bring him a sun hat.”

“Did he let you into his little hiding place?”

“Yes, we sat and had a very nice talk.”

“I don’t want you to have a very nice talk!!!!”

“Yes, dear. I won’t in the future.”

“How can I lead the island when I can’t even keep tabs on the Dingbats?!?!?!”

*

Spark Dingbat ascended the volcano easily. It had steps. Near the top he passed a small pyramid of skulls in various shapes and sizes — a skull duck with giant ovoid eyes, a skull robot with antenna ears, a skull pig with a tiny bone beret incorporated into its cranium.

C’Krrrarn perched at the rim of the volcano, seeming bigger than he had in the plane, looming like an outcropping of the rock itself. As the tiny beret was to the pig’s skull, so C’Krrrarn was to the volcano. Beyond C’Krrrarn, Spark saw trickles of steam seeping from between burnt-umber rocks, the undersides of which glowed orangely, like enormous briquettes. Seagulls massed on C’Krrrarn’s brow and shoulders, their dried liquid droppings striping him in the manner of a jailbird character, perhaps some crow or weasel standing before a parole board of bulldogs.

“I hope I’m not bothering you.”

C’Krrrarn did not speak.

“You didn’t look like you were doing anything.”

C’Krrrarn did not speak.

“Are you waiting for something?”

C’Krrrarn did not speak.

“My mom says you could just probably swim off this island any time you wanted, or else maybe walk along the ocean floor, but then where would you go, because it’s not like you have a home somewhere, and maybe in a way this island is as much like a home as you’ve ever known, and maybe we even crashed here because you were sort of attracted to the island from the airplane, like you felt some kind of geomagnetic tropism or maybe you glanced down and it reminded you of your mom and dad, do you think that might be right?”

C’Krrrarn did not speak.

“Are you going to kill us all? Just kidding.”

C.D.N.S.

“How can you sit like that in the same position for so long? Don’t your legs or your butt fall asleep?”

C.D.N.S.

“My mom is weaving you a tatami mat out of all this crud from the beach. Do you know what a tatami mat is? She said you would.”

C.D.N.S.

“Do you mind if I sit here for a minute?”

*

Note to artist: Everywhere along the bottom gutters of the pages now, muddy footprints, rabbit droppings, and Dingbat spoor (ed.: What does that look like?), forming an abject trail of smeary pictograms spelling out an unknown future.

*

Page forty-two, panel one, King Phnudge, alone in the woods. The island’s sole monkey has approached him from underneath a fern. The monkey carries a hand-cranked music organ and wears a top hat. King Phnudge raises his eyebrows in delighted surprise.

Page forty-two, panel two, a campfire in a clearing. Large Silly and Poacher Junebug and King Phnudge and C. Phelps Northrup devour shreds of the monkey, whose scorched remains still hang from a spit over the fire. The monkey’s carcass still clutches the organ. Northrup wears the top hat.

Page forty-two, panel three, in the brush at one side of the clearing, Peter Rabbit and Lisa Dingbat stared wide-eyed at clown, hunter, king, and critic as they eat the monkey. The rabbit and the girl are unseen by the others.

Page forty-two, panel four, moving on all fours, the rabbit and the girl silently slip into the woods, where they resume nibbling on ferns.

Page forty-two, panel five, night, the campfire, now abandoned by the others. Theophobe Dingbat tiptoes up to the extinguished fire, where he locates a charred monkey rib. He sucks at it thoughtfully.

Page forty-two, panel six, Murkly Finger. He crouches in his cavernous shard of airplane hull, reading a comic book, which is opened to a splash page showing C’Krrrarn towering over an alpine village.

*

From where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat could see into the island whole, as if he sat within a camera obscura. He saw his mother, now outfitting Poacher Junebug and King Phnudge and C. Phelps Northrup in thatched armor, adjusting the palm-frond breastplates over their torsos while they stood at awkward attention, trying not to disappoint.

He saw Large Silly covered in baked mud, with dried grasses stuck to his arms and legs, sitting beside the creek masturbating.

He saw his sister and the rabbit hiding in the grass watching Large Silly.

He saw his father standing on the beach angrily punching his agent’s number into a wicker cell phone and listening for a signal.

As though with X-ray vision he saw, too, into Murkly Finger’s lair. Murkly Finger sat surrounded by suitcases from the wrecked plane. Alongside the clothing Murkly Finger had laid out as a pallet on the ground was a neat row of reading materials. Among them was Spark’s own collection of Dingbat Family Cavalcade and Dingbat Collectibles Catalog. Murkly Finger also had a set of limited-edition clothbound Tennyson Trolley Sunday Pages, taken from C. Phelps Northrup’s luggage, a Dover paperback of The Seventh Voyage of the Phnudges, a copy of The Oxford Treasury of Comic Strips, and a stack of HORRENDOUS TALES OF C’KRRRARN!, issues number one through thirteen, sealed in plastic sleeves.

He saw the grave his sister and the rabbit had dug for the blackened skeleton of the monkey.

He saw the island’s birds and bugs.

He saw himself, too, seated beside C’Krrrarn on the rim of the volcano.

Spark Dingbat saw the island whole.

*

Poem

Say, Keener Dingbat, I wrote you a poem

On a funny old island where much has gone wrong

Sit right back and you’ll hear of my love

For your coiled scribbled hair and your spidery legs

Not so spidery though as the giant spider I killed

To protect you my love but should I have let it eat

Your husband and kids and that wretched vile clown?

Oh, Keener Dingbat, you’re haunting my days

I seek you in the pale lagoon and at the hidden spring

I seek you like a sheriff hunting a walnut oh shit

I stole that line, I can’t help myself, I steal everything, I am

Your Villain,

Murkly

*

From The Journal of C. Phelps Northrup

August 12

Rustling in our armor like a flock of pigeons we stormed Murkly Finger’s lair at dawn. We all partookipated — I mean, all able-bodied adultish manlike characters, even the dissolute clown, with the sole exception of Theophobe Dingbat, who declined command of our sally, leaving that to his spouse. The scoundrel Finger proffered no resistance — rather, welcomed us inside, so it was we at last unearthed his secret: not the yearned-for stockpile of nourishing provisions but the histories of our earlier selves, the panels and pages of our lives precursive to banishment on this island. Each of us retreated initially to various corners of the island, to mull on that from which we’d been distranded. Before he secreted it from my meanderish eyes, I glimpsed a sample of the earliest appearances of Poacher Junebug, in Frontier Follies—once a much less squat and feral figure, Poacher at his first flush had the stature and equipoise of a young Dan’l Boone. And how King Phnudge must miss his Queen and Phnudglings! I myself mourned an earlier self, the dapper gadabout wit who’d mercilessly shuttered theatrical kerfuffles with his encaustic pen.

By evening we’d received the first reports of the clown’s escape. It was the female Dingbat child who alerted us, the first we’d heard her speak aloud in weeks. We searched the isle from stem to stern but found no sign of him. With Poacher I even ascended the terrifying volcano, where C’Krrrarn and Spark Dingbat keep their enigmatical watch. They refused our questions with resounding silence, but it was plain enough there was no sign of clown there, unless he’d disintegrated in the bubbling melt. It was not until the following morn that he reappeared, on the pebble beach, contentedly munching a word balloon.

Large Silly seemed happy enough to show us what he’d done: clambered backward into his own panels, using the gutters as rungs on a ladder into the past. A trick, the clown told us, that he’d learned from a duck. With practice, he implicated, we might learn it too.

*

Page eighty-eight, panel one, the cove. A large pile of antique black-and-white furniture from Tennyson Trolley is afire. Poacher Junebug and C. Phelps Northrup turn a spit on which five word balloons have been impaled. The edges of the balloons are gently browned. Junebug and Northrup both salivate greedily, their eyes like full moons.

*

def. flotsam: flot-sam noun

1. wreckage, debris, or refuse from another character’s panels, found abandoned on the beach or floating in the water

See also jetsam

2. characters who live on the margins of cartoon lore, such as clowns, hunters, critics, monsters, children, or animals (considered offensive in some contexts)

def. jetsam: jet-sam noun

1. cargo or equipment that either sinks or is washed ashore after being thrown overboard to lighten the load of a cartoon in distress

See also flotsam

2. cartoons that have been discarded as useless or unwanted

*

“… and then, as shown on pages five through seven in issue forty-seven, Keener failed to make me a ham-and-egg breakfast in the manner to which I have become accustomed, on the morning before I was supposed to go onstage with the Rolling Stones, causing me to eat Pop-Tarts and therefore to completely fnargle the gig — hey, are you getting this down?!?!”

“Sorry, yes, if you could just go a little slower, Mr. Dingbat.”

“I’m paying you twenty-five clamshells a day to take dictation on my memoirs, critic, not to surreptitiously nibble on those crispy word balloons you’ve got ineptly hidden in your palm-frond satchel!!”

“Most sorry, Mr. Dingbat, but you really should taste this one, Poacher acquired it in C’Krrrarn, issue number seven, The Caverns of Despond, it has something of the dank savor of a truffle mushroom—”

“Give me that!!! Mmmm, crunch, slurp, crunch, slurp …”

“Now, try this one, it was spoken by a fair lass from, ahem, my own adventures, and makes a perfect tonic, if I may be so bold, a counterpoint to the first … it has the bite and tangicity of a Vermont apple, perhaps a Pink Lady or a Red Delirious …”

“Ahhh, crunch, munch, glug, glug … ah, this is hopeless, we’re never going to write my memoirs!!!”

*

From his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat saw his sister running in the woods with the rabbit. His sister had grown fur and a small tail.

From his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat saw his father swimming joyfully with the clown and the critic in the surf. Their three pudgy bodies resembled dolphins and it was hard to tell one from the other.

From his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat saw his mother in a tower she’d painstakingly constructed out of plywood made from the woven-together heat and stink and motion lines salvaged from the panels of the other characters. She was in the upper room of the tower, humping Murkly Finger, who still wore his cape and hood.

From his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat saw King Phnudge commanding his army of slave Phnudges as they carried his castle forward, brick by brick (bricks balanced on their miserable heads because they had no arms) and reassembled it on the far side of the island.

From his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat saw Poacher Junebug with his bamboo spear and his wicker sack full of word balloons, returning from another successful expedition.

From his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn, Spark Dingbat saw Spark Dingbat in his place where he sat beside C’Krrrarn. They sat on two tatami mats, a large and a small, woven specially by Spark’s mom. Each subsisted, for the time being, on thought balloons, which they swallowed as soon as they arose, without opening their mouths. It was enough.