Slob

Leroy and Albert

You know how it is when the table sort of turns to rubber on you, and the windowpanes liquify. Well, that is how it was behind the green door of Dr. Geronimo's HERBS, ROOTS, DREAMS, CANDLES AND . . . POTIONS on the south side. The fat, black buck with feet unstable did not pound on the table for that very reason. When a table gets all rubbery, you can just about do good to hold on to the sucker and that was the case here. Everything was liquifying, rubberizing, moving.

It was either blood pressure, the dropsy, the whim-whams, an evil spell or curse, migraines, incipient tuberculosis, a severe hitch in the gitalong, or one of those cases of spofus sporium you read about. It could be the half tab he'd just done, some old hippy sunshine he'd smoked up somewhere, fuckin' hippies sell you any kind of shit, on top of all the gangster he'd smoked and that good sweet Boone's Farm he'd done put a hurtin' on.

Whatever it was it had Dr. Geronimo all queeeeasy Jesus I'm gonna lose it any minute, he thought as he saw the green door open and a man with spiky Martian-green-and-pink hair come slithering in.

"Oh, no. Lord have mercy omigoodness oh Sweet Jesus in Heaven I'm trippin' out baaaaaaaaaaad."

"Hullo," the Martian said.

"Ommma gowaamba, mumbo-jumbo, bopovauni—" It was the first incantation Dr. Geronimo could think of. Pure nonsense, but hell, maybe the Martian wouldn't know the difference and the fake curse would cause him to flee. "Fepoapalula zawfram paradiddle oomgawa b'wana melloroony," he intoned, waving his hands toward the Martian in the hopes of warding off the Evil Eye, voodoo hoodoo, and whatever bad jazz the Martian might try to lay on him.

"How do?" the man from Mars with the pink-and-green hair said pleasantly, liquifying slightly and waving as he dripped in the rubbery acid manner.

"I warn you extraterrestrial heathen slime, I am a fully ordained witch doctor of the Comanche Indians, licensed to kill by voodoo, and if you come any closer, I will put a curse on the entire planet from whence you come, not to mention any heirs and assigns you may have left on your Martian spaceship. So stay where you are oomala maxamillian shellaroony dilly gilavauni oomashabadoo," still with the hands waving, fingers fluttering through the stale storefront air, warding off Martian badjazz.

"Hell, Dr. Gee, I ain't from Mars. It's only me, Woody." The man with the spiky green-and-pink hair came a couple of steps closer.

"Damn you to creation, you dripping, poisonous, pukeface, I'll put such an incantation on you that your entire family will . . . Woody? Woody who?"

"Whatsa matter, Dr. Gee? J'a break your glasses or sum'thin'?" the man asked him.

"Ummm. Er, ah, hold on now just for a minute." The room was beginning to solidify slightly, and a wave of nausea receded. The man named Dr. Geronimo steadied himself on the hardening rubber table and squinted at the apparition confronting him. A blurry focus sharpened and he could see that it was indeed a man with spiky pink-and-green hair but it was only Woody Woodpecker and not an evil further mucking Martian hit man.

"Woody, my main man. Er—uh, I was jes' jivin' witcha'—how's to it, brother?" he asked amiably, feeling his thumper palpitate with relief.

"Doin' fine, Dr. Geronimo, nothin' to it," he told the man behind the counter, who was approximately the shape and hue of a cannonball. "I need to ask your professional advice."

"Axe away, my man," Geronimo said expansively, as the rubber hardened.

"Well, I got me a girlfriend now. Well. Not a girlfriend exactly. It's May Seebaugh. You know May? From over on Wells?" May was a bag lady.

"I don't think I've had the pleasure."

"A delightful flower. But to the point. Dr. Gee, I know you're a man of the world so that I don't have to feel shame at this admission, but sometimes, at a certain age, a man has problems with—" He trailed off as Dr. Geronimo surreptitiously attempted to glance at his watch, which was no longer dripping from his wrist in a Daliesque meltdown, but was hardening nicely into readable numerals.

"Urinary infections," the good doctor helped him, "prostrate problems, assorted plagues and social disorders, malfunctions, dysfunctions, nonfunctions— "

"I'm having trouble getting it up."

"And an Afro-dizzy-act is in order. Well, Woody, you have, as they say, come to de right place. I have something so fantastic, so incredible, so foolproof, it would stiffen the member of a dead eunuch. It is the most secret, hush-hush Afro-dizz ever invented. It is called Alura."

"How much is it?" Woody Woodpecker was fifty-seven and did in fact have pink-and-green hair. His real name was Albert Sharma.

"It ain't cheap," said Dr. Geronimo, a.k.a. LeRoy Towels.

"Say what?" Woody Woodpecker was reasonably intelligent or had been prior to the pickling of his thinking apparatus in a variety of stimulants and depressants that included but was not limited to vodka, gin, tequila, paregoric, Ripple, pruno, White Tiger, Black Panther, Green Dragon, absinthe, Brut, Sterno, Chaps, Old Spice—the list is long. He had ended up with a partiality toward Mission Sweet Lucy and all he needed was a drink of men's room water and he stayed on a kind of semipermanent buzzer.

"Two hundred a cap," the cannonball-shaped entrepreneur told him.

"Wheeeee," Woody lamented, "shit."

"I know, my friend. But you have to understand, it's not like there was an unlimited supply. When these caps are gone, that is the end of the tune. This was the top-secret discovery of the Sexual Research and Development Unit of the CIA. It is called Alura, the letters standing for Autoerotic Lutenizing Reagent. Only a small amount of this was cooked up, for use by impotent spies so they could seduce women to get information. It'll make your tool so hard you can use it for a cat-scratch post. So two hundred for a cap of this magic is a bargain."

"Wow," said Albert Sharma, trying to figure out how the hell he could boost enough cassettes and shit to come up with two bills. Woody Woodpecker was the name he'd gone by for six, seven years since he'd been known as the Wood Man. But Woody Woodpecker seemed more appropriate, and it had a street rhythm so it stuck. Now he worked to the image, talked funny, told people his pecker was wood, stuff like that. Punks sometimes spiked his hair and the pink-and-green bit was a leftover from a recent Woodpecker do.

He was called the Woodpecker, and Woody, and before that the Wood Man, because he saw men in wood. This is what started Albert Sharma drinking in the first place—years ago. He could not look at a piece of wood without seeing faces. If you're a carpenter by trade, this can become a very unsettling experience, and one thing had led to another, and before long the Wood. Man was down and out, among the street people. So it sometimes goes.

"What say, brother," said Dr. Geronimo, who claimed to have lived with the Comanche tribe for many years learning potions, spells, and miscellaneous divinations and witch doctoring. But who had in fact lived with some stockyard workers in Omaha, from whom he'd picked up a variation on the fortune-teller pitch which he used in his current dreambook emporium. It made a nice little lucrative sideline to the roots-and-herbs thing

"I ain't got the two hundred. But you know Deuce, doncha'?"

"Yeah," he commiserated, "a deuce ain't easy to come up with, but that's the price."

"No, doctor. I say you know the dude calls hisself Deuce? Deuce Younger?"

"Say what?"

"You know, man. The biker dude. Guy runs the Flames?"

"Oh, yeah. I know the man. So?"

"I got something."

"Yeah?"

"I heard he put three hundred on the street for anybody could give him the one that hit Mr. Tree."

"Now, Woody, you're a good old gentleman, and you best be not messin' with them boys."

"Yeah, but I need that stuff. And if he gave me three hundred, I could buy a cap of Alura, and me and May could take a real honeymoon together."

"Uh-huh."

"See." He leaned close to Dr. Geronimo, bathing him in terminal halitosis, Old Spice, and body rot, as he whispered conspiratorially, "I know something."

"Huh?"

"I know where he lives."

"Who, Deuce?"

"No. I know where the one who kills lives."

"Yeah?" he said, feeling suddenly very sober inside. "Where?"

"Under the street," Woody Woodpecker said, proudly, in a cracked voice.

Instinctively Dr. Geronimo knew that Woody was not lying and he was getting a scent of some money here, and he wished he had not purchased that nasty old hippy sunshine and picked today to do that half tab, because he was going to need his wits about him if he was going to get into this particular can of worms.

"Under the street," he said, his eyebrows raised in question.

"Under the street. I know where he goes. And I seen him kill Mr. Tree with a big chain thing. An' I seen him try to get that one called Lester, and then I watched where he went. And me and May watched the hole where he went down and we never seen him come up there but May seen him come up about a block away, just by luck. And then we figured how he hides down there in the water mains and sewers and that. Can you get hold of Deuce Younger and tell him I can show him where the one who kills is?"

"Now, Woody, you're sure about all this, are you? Hey, bro', this is very important. I mean you 'n May didn't get hold of no bad Lucy and trip out on some Phantom of the Opera thing?"

"Huh? Fat man of the opera? No, this guy's down in the manholes, ya' know. I can take Deuce right to him. But I gotta' have my money like I heard they put on him. The three hundred. Okay?"

"Hey. Fine with me, my man. But I'll have to call around for ya. I mean, I don't know where Deuce is just like dat." He tried to snap his fingers and missed. "But yeah, I'll try to run him down. Thing is, I'd have to have a small finder's fee for that. Say thirty-three percent of recovery?"

"What's that mean?"

"If you get three hundred I get one hundred. It's only fair, Woody. That way you get your cap of precious dick-stiffener, and I get a hundred-dollar bill for helpin' get you together with the Flames. What do you say?"

"Uh, yeah, I guess that's okay."

"All right. Now Mistah Woody, we need to be abso-posi-lutely 101 percent on this, dig?"

"Yeah?"

"You can go find the guy that kills people. He's still there. Under the street, I mean."

"Yeah."

"You sure because I don't want Deuce Younger and a half-dozen biker maniacs upside my head cause you made a mistake, ya' know?"

"No mistake, Dr. Gee. I seen 'm go down 'n come up. Not always the same rabbit hole but I know he's down here. I know where he stays," Woody Woodpecker whispered, "but I want the money first." The doctor nodded, and another strange alliance came to pass.

And the cannonball-shaped black man scratched his head and thought for a minute, looked closely into the wacky countenance of the Wood Man, and asked again, "No mistakes about this?"

"Huh-uh, Dr. Geronimo. I know where the big man who kills people stays underground. How fast does that stuff act anyway?"

"Yeah, um-hmm," the man told him, reaching for the big directory.

"Dr. Gee."

"Huh," he said, leafing through the pages looking for the Wathena Salvage Yard. "Yeah."

"That Alura. I mean, how fast does it act?"

"Instantly," LeRoy Towels told the wino, not without a degree of impatience as he picked up the telephone and paused one last time while he considered whether or not to dial.

"Instantly?" Woody asked incredulously.

"You do a little of this baby"—he nodded vaguely as he stuck his finger in the dial—"you be ready to fuck a junkyard dog."