The Bushwacked Piano

18

Doctor Proctor, manipulant-grandee of the proctoscope, an instrument which brings to the human eye vistas which are possibly forbidden (possibly not), lazed at home watching the Olympic bobsled trials on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. The lush blue carpet cuddled his pink physician’s heels and when he walked across its Middle Eastern richesse, he pretended to himself that it was the guts, tripe and visceral uproar amid which his profession obliged him to live.

Here it was different. Here where the goggle-eyed street urchins of his most valuable canvases stared at one another from the soft contours of his walls, he was inclined to dream of all the things he no longer was. Then, he would find himself a little droopy and all too inclined to pop a couple of amphetamines from his big fat doctor’s stash. And then, when he overdid, as he did tonight, he would be the energetic boy of before, laughing, crying and gouging quickly at his crotch in that little athlete’s gesture of look what we have here.

Tonight, snuffling a trifle with the upshot of his high, Proctor made his way to the darkling trophy room of his Key West home; and, once again, commenced vacuuming the hundreds of dim upright mouths of his trophies with his well-used Hoover. Standing waist-deep among the winged victories and gaping loving cups, he knew, somehow, who he was.

Often, in such a mood, his nurse would appear to his imagination, often up to something freakish which Proctor could not ordinarily have contrived. Recurrently, on the other hand, she would appear nude and aslither atop an immense conduit covered with non-fat vegetable shortening. Such a thought could not have been foreborne without eventual relief; and his little wrist-flicks at himself came to linger for the serious business at hand.

But nothing disruptive, all in all. Proctor functioned. So it was that in the morning hours when most people were asleep, Proctor, who never had slept, headed for the clinic in his green Aston Martin DB-4. Heel-and-toeing to keep his revs up, he brodied and drifted through the damp morning streets of the Island City.

Well, he said to himself, life is a shakedown cruise. Wanna bet? Through housework, pills and orgasms, he had lost eight pounds since nightfall. He hadn’t been on a zombie run like this since the service where, with his usual athletic finesse, he had distinguished himself as a fighter pilot.

He had flown the almost legendary and sinister fireship, the carrier-based F4 Phantom, making night runs and day runs with the same penetrating fanaticism that vanished with very little aging and required the bolstering of pills.

For a while, all the pilot’s bugaboos had haunted him: night landings on a heaving carrier deck in the fierce rocket-laden thirty-eight-thousand-pound flying piano, hoping to hell that on that blackened deck the aircraft would find one of the four arrester wires and keep him from deep-sixing off the bow.

Vertigo: One cloudless night on the South China Sea, Proctor had been practicing his sidewinder runs and barrel rolls and high-performance climbs with the afterburner pouring the last possible thrust beyond Mach II; when suddenly his brain would no longer equilibrate and he couldn’t tell which end was up; somehow he flew pure instrument on the carrier landing, straight on for the Fresnel light on the ship’s stern, catching the fourth wire and snatching up short of a hundred-and-eighty-degree view of the blackened South China Sea. He felt the entire rotation of his brain; all the physical perceptions which were his only moral facts gently rocked into place again; and the next day he started cinching them down with goof-balls.

Soon enough, the younger pilots who had begun to resent his sheepish hand on the stick saw the old fiend was intact after all; and from then on, when he came in from a strike with leftover fuel, he sneaked in around the islands and blew up junks and sank native craft with his shock wave and really made himself felt.

Naturally, the skipper who had been watching this appealing Yankee Doodle and who was alerted to this new panache by the revived Proctor habit of picking his arrester wire on landings — traditional fighter-jock’s machismo caper — called him in and, chuckling, told him to lay off because the gooks were going to load the junks with anti-aircraft equipment and start weeding out those four-million-dollar Phantoms.

Proctor quipped that he didn’t care if they got the plane as long as the seat worked. But the old skipper reminded him that Charlie would find you if you ejected and make a Countess Mara with your tongue. And still Proctor didn’t give a damn, really didn’t give a damn! He boomed, bombed, blasted and killed and sank small craft the same as always except now he did it during bombing halts when he was supposed to have been on reconnaissance.

Into his continuous vile blue yonder, Yankee Doodle Proctor went, high as high could be on various purloinings from the flight surgeon’s old kit bag; still masturbatory as all get out, he sometimes gouged at the crotch of his flight suit in the middle of combat, giggled when flak gently rocked the aircraft or snuffed one of the smaller Skyhawks that always went on strike with the dreamy, invulnerable McDonnell Phantoms.

Sometimes, in over the trees supersonically, he would get glimpses of Migs deployed on jungle runways, some of them scrambling. And once a SAM ground-to-air missile, like a white enamel tree trunk, appeared in the formation and Proctor purposely let it pick him up and follow for a thousand feet before he duped its computer brain into overshooting. Again, he giggled and gouged at his flight suit to imagine that prize gook investment on its pitiful try at killing the sun, which Proctor had substituted for himself by way of a crazy parabolic maneuver that made the pale metal wings of the Phantom lift gently with the force of God knew how many G’s; that made even old giggling Yankee Doodle’s face pull and flow toward his ass; that made the smooth voluptuous curves of Asia, caressed by his shock wave, clog with unimaginable scrollery of trees and detail. He climbed, sonic booms volleying over the country, after-burners pulled to the utmost and cleared out at fifty thousand feet in whorls, volutes, beautiful spirals of vapor.

Three weeks of gouging had made a shiny spot on his flight suit.

How close this all now seemed. And, really, it spoiled his driving; a sports car for God’s sake with its stupid bland instruments that indicated the ridiculous landbound progress of the machine. By the time he was in the staff parking lot, he was cranky. A pharmaceutical supply truck was parked at the loading bay and Proctor, already coming down, imagined eating his way through the truck, stem to stern. Inside the first door, he spotted a gabble of creepy little interns with careful telltale stethoscopes hanging out of their pockets. Proctor told them to break it up and they did. They knew Proctor would besmirch them at staff meetings. In the involuted parlance of the world of interns, Proctor was an “asshole.” But this was unfair to Proctor, an altogether harmlessly overpaid popinjay of the medical profession.

“On the table.”

Payne obeyed. He could see the doctor was not in the mood for chatter. Neither, for that matter, was he. Endless nightmares of the possible violations of his body had left him rather testy.

“How do you mean, doctor?”

“I mean on the table. Right now. Crossways.”

The nurse came in and the doctor looked up. Payne sat across the examining table.

“Where are we with this guy?” the doctor asked. The nurse looked at her board.

“He had the pentobarbital sodium at six this morning. Then the atropine and morphine an hour ago. I—”

“How do you feel?” the doctor asked Payne.

“Okay.”

“Relaxed and ready for the operation?”

“Vaguely.” Proctor looked him over, thought: tough guy with the lightest possible glazing of civilization: two years at the outside in some land-grant diploma mill. “I forget,” the doctor went on to his nurse, “are these external?”

“A little of both.”

“Ah, so. And thrombosed were they not?”

“I should say.”

A wispy man, the dread anesthesiologist, came in wheeling a sort of portable autoclave with his ghastly instruments inside. Through the drugs he had been given that morning, Payne could feel some slow dread arise. As for Proctor, this skillful little creep — Reeves by name — with his hair parted low over his left ear and carefully deployed over his bald head, was an object of interest and admiration. He watched him lay out the materials with some delight and waited for the little man’s eagerness to crest at the last possible moment before saying, “Thank you, Reeves. I think I’d rather.” Reeves darkened and left the room. “Hunch your shoulders, Mister—”

“Payne. Like that?”

“Farther. There you go.”

After his little moment with Reeves, Proctor had second thoughts. He knew the sacral block shouldn’t be taken casually; and he didn’t do them often enough to be really in practice. But what the hell. This guy was preoperatively well prepared; he’d just wind it up.

“Nurse, what kind of lumbar puncture needle did Reeves bring us?”

“A number twenty-two, doctor.”

Proctor chuckled. That Reeves was a real mannerist. A little skinny needle like that; but maybe that’s how they were doing it now. Used to be you had a needle like a rifle barrel and you’d get cerebrospinal fluid running down the clown’s back. It made for a fast job but memorable headaches for the patient afterwards.

Proctor went at it. He pressed the needle into the fourth lumbar interspace well into the subarachnoid region and withdrew two cc’s of spinal fluid which he mixed with a hundred mg’s of novocaine crystals in a hyperbaric solution which he reinjected confident he had Payne’s ass dead to the world for four good hours.

Just for precaution — it was really Reeves’s precaution — he gave Payne fifty mg’s of ephedrine sulfate in the arm. “Keep this man sitting up straight,” Proctor said and went outside to the drinking fountain and popped another goof-ball, this one covered with lint from his pocket. He peered sadly into the middle distance and thought: I was the darling of the fleet.

Payne was wheeled by, on his way to the operating room. He began to review his life. Very little of it would come. He could go back — lying there numbed, the victim of purloined spinal fluid — about two weeks with any solidity; then, flashes. As: boarding school, Saturday morning, in a spectral study hall for unsatisfactory students; Payne and three other dunces watched over like meat by the master on duty, in pure Spring light, in silence. At one window of the hall, striped boy athletes rock noiselessly past for batting practice; a machine pitched hardballs out of a galvanized hopper and the base paths were still muddy. Payne shielding his eyes in apparent concentration, occasionally dozes, occasionally slips a magazine out from under the U. S. History text: Guns And Ammo. In his mind, he cradles a Finnish Sako rifle, sits on a ridge in the Canadian Rockies that glitters with mica and waits two hundred years for a Big Horn Ram. Something moves a few yards up the draw: The master on duty has spotted Guns And Ammo. Payne’s heart whirls in his chest and loses traction.

“Miss?” Payne asks.

“Sir?”

“I feel like a dead Egyptian. You and Proctor are fixing to pull my brain out of my nose.”

“No, sir!”

“I feel that life has handed me one in the snot locker. You see I’m the last buffalo. And I’m dying of a sucking chest wound. Isn’t there something you could do in a case like mine? Some final ecstasy you could whip up?”

“Nothing that comes to mind, sir.”

“Miss, if my beak falls open and cries are heard during Doctor Proctor’s knifework, will that be it, as far as you’re concerned? I mean, will you sign off on yours truly? As another has?”

“Possibly a leetle.”

“In other circumstances I would be a simple hero to you. But maybe your life already is not unencumbered. Is there a certain someone?”

Proctor strode in. “Let’s do it.” Payne intoned a helpless sphincteric dirge. He was in terror. This room was filled with strange and frightful machinery which would have been the envy of any number of pirates whose names are household words.

“Will there be pain?” Payne inquired.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Surely the word rings one little bell in your medical carillon tower.” Payne regretted his words instantly. He did not want to antagonize Proctor.

“It appears,” said the doctor to the nurse, “that the medication has taken our friend by storm.”

Proctor looked down from his end of the operating table. He had Payne on his back, in the lithotomy position; not the one Proctor was most comfortable with; but the only one a serious proctologist would consider with spinal anesthesia via the hyperbaric solutions that Reeves found so irresistible. Reeves! What a bleary little cornball.

From this perspective, Proctor saw with a tiny almost atavistic horror the ring of thrombosed hemorrhoids. And it was now a question of demonstrating the internal complications so that they could be excised without any further fiddling around.

Proctor thought helplessly of how he could have been a big, clean career aviator instead of staring up some wise guy’s dirt chute.

He inserted his index finger well into Payne’s rectum withdrawing and reinserting several times without, in his opinion, sufficiently extruding the internal hemorrhoids. In a moment of impatience and almost pique, he stuffed Payne’s rectum with wads of dry gauze which he hauled out slowly dragging the hemorrhoids with them. Now he had a perfectly beastly little mess to clean up. The entire anal verge was clustered with indisputably pathological extrusions. Proctor sighed languorously.

With a certain annoyance, he dilated Payne’s sphincter to an anal aperture of two centimeters and then, making more work space for himself, rather zealously went for, and got, three centimeters without tearing even a teensy bit of sphincteric muscle. He swiftly clipped four forceps into position to keep the site exposed. A smile broke out on his face as he remembered his Asian days.

All of the sound and movements around Payne were informed with the most sinister lack of ordinary reality. Implements passed his vision which were not unlike those with which we eat; yet, somehow, something was wrong with them. They had crooked handles or the ones you thought were spoons had trap doors or when they touched each other they rang with an unearthly clarity. And surrounding the hard if intolerable precision of all this weaponry were various loose bags, drooping neoprene tubes, cups of deep blubbery gels, fleecy, inorganic sponges in space-age colors, and the masked, make-up lacking face of the nurse, her hair yanked back in utilitarian severity.

Around himself, he could hear the doctor talking, nipping off the words as if to challenge a misunderstanding of his grandiose medical technicalities. Payne felt that something like the same smugness and expertise must attend the performance of electrocutions, the kind of officiousness that would make a condemned man hesitate before using the terms “hot seat” or “fry.”

Proctor was cranky. He needn’t have made this kind of a mess. And so he muttered with the usual authoritarian voice that there wasn’t one thing there he couldn’t clean up. Not one.

Still, he didn’t know what had become of his coordination. Ordinarily, he could incise the most perfect demi-eclipse around the base of the hemorrhoid and dissect the varix from the external sphincter with a deft turn of the wrist. Truly, this was surgery that could have been performed with a rotary mower; and yet, he was barely up to it.

So, instead of a nice clean finish, he had to hunt up and down the patient’s dirt chute for bleed points, stop them — in one case resorting to catgut, so nasty was the lesion — and then impatiently make a thick dressing the size of a catcher’s mitt to sop up the serosanguineous ooze that was surely going to be a part of this man’s postoperative period.

He had Payne wheeled away unconscious after a veritable hosing down with demerol. He indicated he would have the nurse remain. When the door was shut and Proctor looked around at the spattered operating room, the nurse stood without motion. Proctor spotted smart wads of disapprobation in her eyes.

“Nice little rectum you left him with there,” she said in a brave squeak, “with your cut-and-try surgery there.”

“A bleeder.”

“That poor boy,” she said. “I have never in my life witnessed a thing like that. It almost looked like you were trying to make some sort of meal back there.”

“What meal!”

“I don’t know, some, I don’t know, almost like some sort of pasta fazoula or—”

“Pasta fazoula! Are you Italian? Pasta fazoula is this great Italian dish—” The nurse waved him silent with a harsh and impatient motion.

“God, Doctor, I was illustrating something oh never mind I …”

“Nurse, I used to sit on the starboard catapult during international emergencies, waiting to go bomb. In a forty-thousand-pound aircraft with wings that wouldn’t glide a sparrow if the engines ever failed: a flying piano. And me in the driver’s seat getting to feel more and more like pure crash-cargo, lady. And from my viewpoint on the steam catapult I could see, below me in the waters of the South China Sea, twenty-foot man-eating sharks that had been feeding on Oriental sea burials for a thousand years. How do you think I felt?”

“How?”

“Punk. Those sharks would break up a funeral halfway through the services and there’s me on the starboard catapult: one flame-out and you’re so much fish food. And you tell me pasta fazoula.”

“But Doctor I—”

“Tell me cut-and-try, do you?”

“Doctor, I—”

“I’ve had enough. I thought that after war a man could return to a life of service with interludes of silence spent among a tasteful collection of art objects.”

“Doctor, how can I make it up to you?”

Payne lay quiet as a fossil in the deep sweeping benignity of demerol, the Kuda Bux of Key West. Pale surgical lights rolled by as moons. Then it was blistering dry and hot; an expanse of macadam curled at the far edges and made twenty-nine identical mountains. Payne held a big, ice cold chronometer.

A bedside view would have shown that, if only for the time being, Proctor, Ann and Clovis had made of Nicholas Payne pure meat.

Finally, in the middle of the night, he woke up laughing in complete weakness. “Seep, seep, seep.” Clovis, in perfect health, yelled, “Shut up, can’t you! I’m a dead goose as it is for crying out loud.”

Payne opened his mind like the sweet dusty comic strip from a pink billet of Fleer’s bubblegum and saw things as deep and appropriate as soft nudes on the noses of B29’s. He saw longhorn cattle being driven over the Golden Gate Bridge, St. Teresa of Avila at the Mocambo, pale blue policemen nose-to-bung in an azure nimbus around the moon.

He had happy dreams. He could hear the punctual ringing of the first pair of steel taps on his first pair of blue suede shoes and remembered Jerry Lee Lewis climbing a piano in Miami in fiery lemon-colored underwear, assaulting the keys with hands feet head knees, two-foot platinum hair flapping the Steinway contours and howling GREAT BOWLS OF FAR!

Jerry Lee knew how to treat a piano.

• •

He awoke early in the morning in the sharpest kind of pain and with a feeling of clarity. The principal menaces were behind. And the rather murky situation with Ann seemed to have fallen into place; though he would have been hard put to say where. He felt as if he were collecting into one shape and that he would soon make a kind of sudden expansion. He would stop feeling the little nerve headaches urge their way up from his neocortex. He would get his saliva back and his lips wouldn’t stick to his teeth when he was talking.

It wasn’t at all long before he remembered the dreams of Ann and saw how extremely selective they were; to the effect that she was present in the dreams and absent in reality. An insistent phrase pressed itself upon him: I couldn’t have been more of a pig. He knew very well that an attempt to make something perfect — a love that would not exclude towers and romantic riskings of the neck — had turned swiftly into a regular fuck-up flambeau, staggering even in memory. No, he thought, it must be that I couldn’t have been more of a pig.

Soon enough, he went on a cheerless regime of mineral oil and a soft low-residue diet. Nevertheless, early in the second day, after half a dozen Sitz baths had restored the firmer edges to his personality, he found it necessary to adjourn to the bathroom for his first postoperative bowel movement.

Why go into such a nightmare? A single enormous turd explored every surgical error Proctor had made. Somewhat to his own discredit, Payne howled like the Anti-Christ.

And when he heard Proctor and the nurse muddling around the room outside the john, he booted the door open exactly as he had booted open the door on his grandfather’s disused farmstead, shamelessly revealing himself in an exhibit of fearful squattery and tragically droned, “You bastards core me like an apple and let me have a hard stool two days later! That makes me laugh my God that makes me laugh!”

He wouldn’t shut up though he could see Ann snapping away with her Nikon. Next to his bed, wet roses soaked on a newspaper; the note was hers: “This is it.”

Ann looking in at this ashen, pooping, howling form felt, thus early in her career, a grave seepage of idealism, an invidious pissing away of all that was good and held meaning. She found herself staring out the window past the parking lot and the blackened contours of asphalt, past the lunatic geometry of Key West roofs to the dynamo sky of America; and turned to smile inwardly; hers was one dream that wouldn’t get off the ground.

It was a pleasure to sit at the wheel, the diesels not straining, and listen to the ship-to-shore. The captain found on a clear night like tonight he could pick up the other boats as far off as the Cay Sal Bank. After a month in the Tortugas and Marquesas and a week or two violating the nursery ground, he was ready to go back to Galveston. Where he was known.

“You don’t figure she’d use the camera to blackmail no one?”

The mate who looked more and more like a hillbilly song star the more the running lights accentuated his face’s declivities, said, “Of course not, Captain. This here is just some sort of adventurer.” The captain got up happy.

“Steady as she goes,” he said to the mate, who took the wheel with a gravity that was possibly not genuine. He waited for the captain to head for the lighted companionway. “If you want yer trousers pressed, skipper, why the winch would be an awful good spot to leave them,” he said, bringing down the house.

It was a starry night going to Galveston with the boom of the big trawler swaying a black metronomic line over the silver fan of wake.

And it was real life out there on the Gulf of Mexico; because down in the hold of a Key West shrimper, a person of culture was committing experience.

The tower went up with embarrassing speed and now it was Saturday on Mente Chica Key. The bats had all been dyed day-glo orange so that their bug scavenging circulation would be plain to all. Confined by a single polyethelene sheet, every last one of them was sealed in the tower.

There was a blue satin ribbon tied about the base of the tower. The tower itself stood stern and mighty and impervious to termites against the Seminole sky. Around its base, the Mid-Keys Boosters stirred by the hundreds in anticipation. There were many military personnel in Polynesian mufti. There were many retired persons of legendary mediocrity known locally as “just people.” There were many snapping camera pests from the newspapers.

All around the area, the mangroves released their primitive smell and made expanses of standing water where billions upon billions of the little dark awful salt-water mosquitoes would be born in perpetuum, bats or no bats, quite honestly.

Nicholas Payne and C. J. Clovis flanked Dexter Fibb, aging Grand Master of the Mid-Keys Boosters, and explained how he must yank the manila rope, how he must bring down the polyethylene sheet to release the bats so that they might begin devouring the mosquitoes that this minute were making every spectator’s head lumpy. Payne, unable to accustom himself to a sanitary napkin, shifted about irritably.

Dexter Fibb crushed his worn blue-and-gold yachtsman’s hat about his ears, preparing himself for action, should it come his way.

As anyone could have seen by looking into their eyes, Clovis and Payne were flush with the seventeen thousand.

The dedication of the bat tower was seen as a great chance to cement the U. S. Navy’s relationships with the Downtown Merchants’ Association. So there were any number of Mister Fix-It types of formidable rank, often chief petty officer, on loan from the base. These helpers, enclouded by mosquitoes, gathered around bits of electronic gear, loudspeakers, strobes and emergency gadgets, sonic shark repellants and smoke bombs for attracting helicopters. One group, ordinarily employed maintaining the kind of fighter planes Doctor Proctor himself had flown, had erected a banner over their project that read:

PHANTOM PHIXERS

Some of the wives had laid out tables of country fixings, jams and jellies and whatnot, in a sentimental materialization of the kind of quasi-rural bonhomie that seemed a millimeter from actual goose-stepping and brown-shirt uproars of bumpkin fascism.

Payne moved through, scared to death. He saw the tower and the old wagon beneath, the bats whirring, vortical. The mosquitoes were definitely a problem. One reason the bats were whirring, vortical, and not sleeping was that the mosquitoes were biting them all the time and the bats couldn’t do a thing about it.

To show that their husbands had gotten priority tours, some of the Navy wives wore grass skirts and red bandana tops. Beyond their muscular shoulders you could see the tower, the crowd, the whirring bat wagon, the mangroves and the hot glistening sky. Kids pegged rocks at the bat wagon and everyone swatted and dervished in clouds of mosquitoes.

One of the husbands, a chief petty officer, darkened his crew cut with an oily hand and said to mid-air: “This oscillator is givin me a fit.” The chief’s wife was reading the newspaper.

“Listen ta this what Pola Negri has to say: ‘I was the star who introduced sex to the screen but I don’t like nudity and obscenity in today’s films. Movies and men were more romantic in my day.’ I buy that.”

“I do too, honey,” said the chief, “but I haven’t got time to think about it. Do you read me? I’ve got this oscillator and that rectifier back at the hangar I was mentioning which is causing me to throw a fit.”

Payne was all ears. The wife saw and addressed her remarks to him.

“Don is trying to make E9 before he retires,” the wife informed Payne, “then he is going to open a TV repair on Big Coppitt Key.”

“What I don’t have time to think about,” said Don, the chief petty officer, “that is, if I am ever gonna operate a TV repair on Big Coppitt, is Pola Negri’s sex life.”

“Although Don would agree, wouldn’t you Hon, that things in movies has got way out of line.”

“I haven’t got time for a bunch of beaver shows,” Don told simply everybody, “Pola Negri’s or anybody else’s. I got this oscillator on the blink, frankly.”

“What’s it for?” Payne asked politely.

“Well, it’s not for nothing if it’s on the blink,” said Don. “You follow that, don’t you?”

“Yes …”

“And the rest I can’t explain unless you got a U.S. of America Navy rate in electronics which you don’t.”

Payne wandered away without reply. He felt, somehow, that he was in no position to start skirmishes around here. But that wasn’t enough; the chief followed him. “Me’n the wife,” he said brazenly, “think you’re takin this outfit to the cleaners.”

“The cleaners?”

“That’s right. I have had a look at the tab. There’s quite the margin of profit.”

“How much would you say?”

“Two-thirds.”

“Way off.”

“Am I?”

“I’m afraid you have no head for economics. Econ as we used to say.”

“Uh huh. You know, us ordinree citizens has about had it with being milked all the time.”

“You’re not being milked.”

“We’re being milked. Don’t contradict me.”

“You’re being taken to the cleaners,” Payne corrected. “And if you had something going on in your head besides a few gummy notions of how to work less and keep the old lady in Monkey Ward’s pedal-pushers and plastic bath clogs, you’d never get taken. Now, unless you want to come out and play with the grown-ups, I suggest you quit whining and go back to fixing wires for the U.S. of America Navy before you spoil your credit with them. Isn’t all that many outfits have room for you time-servers.”

The chief came very close, squinting. He waved a whole handful of fingers slowly in Payne’s face. He tilted his head. “Amo tell you one thing sumbitch; if I see a way to come in on you, amo take it.” The not quite pitiable swab was worked up to the point that, with any more goading, he would have had a philosophical outburst with references to the nation and its perpetrating enemies. There seemed to be no cure for pests like Payne but automotive decals and secret handshakes. The freaks were coming out of the woodwork.

Payne joined Clovis at the tower where the two of them greeted the faithful. Payne stood beside him with an easy winning grin and waited for the group to clear. “Do you get the feeling they’re on to us?” he asked with a smile for a small lady gorged with potato salad who yoo-hooed from the mangroves, flapping at a cloud of insects with a red plastic picnic fork.

“Sure do,” Clovis smiled to them all. “Let’s just hope we can keep it glued together until the ceremony is over. I notice you’re limping.”

Some moments later, the chief petty officer of various electrical pursuits came toward the tower, only to set up the loudspeakers that would amplify Clovis’ singular voice. Nevertheless, he made Payne nervous. Payne had begun to regret his speech about taking people to the cleaners; and, in fact, had lost what little interest he had had in the money; so that he was in a very bleak frame of mind about their prospects.

He had too a tremor of agony that some child would come up and tell him he hoped these bats would do the job because his baby sister was dying of encephalitis. Here, son, here’s all the grimy loot we chiseled out of your dad and his neighbors and here are the keys to my Hudson Hornet and that Dodge Motor Home over there. Wire me collect, Leavenworth, if you have motor trouble. I’m cashing in. My soul is all shot to shit and I don’t know where I get off next. I am penitent, Payne thought, I have brought this upon myself.

Dexter Fibb, at fifty-three, had never had a moving violation. He had never declined a luncheon speech at the Lions and he had never hesitated to dry the dishes or take out the garbage when he was asked to do so by his wife, Bambi.

Dexter Fibb loved symmetry. He loved the bat tower because it was symmetrical and he loved Bambi because her whopping bust was the same size as her gibbous backside. Dexter Fibb often grew upset with himself when he tried to cut his sideburns to the same length, and would advance them millimeter by millimeter until they were small indentations above his ears. He could never get his sleeves right when he rolled them up either; one would always be somewhat farther down on his elbow than the other and on those unfortunate mornings that he would button his shirt out of line, he would rip it from his body with a shriek and fish another heavily starched white-on-white see-thru from his top drawer.

Fibb believed in many things that verged upon superstition but which helped him through a world in which he seemed to lack some essential spiritual coordination. He read Consumer’s Digest and evaluated his friends’ cars by looking at the color of the exhaust pipe. His favorite automobile was that old model Studebaker that seemed to go backward and forward all at once.

The pilot committee of the Mid-Keys Boosters bought the bat tower mainly because Fibb made so much of its looking the same from any angle. And it is to his love of symmetry that we must ascribe his instantaneous horror at the sight of C. J. Clovis.

On the sound truck next to the door, leaking wires into the hands of the electric petty officer, this sign:

OUR GOD IS NOT DEAD.

SORRY ABOUT YOURS.

“How’s she goin, Don?” Fibb asked the CPO.

“Real good, Dexter. I had this oscillator givin me a fit but I isolated the sumbitch with a circuit tester.”

Fibb went inconspicuously to the microphone, still disconnected and, half-preoccupied, tried to warm it up. He did a couple of licks from old Arthur Godfrey and Paul Harvey shows. He did a quick Lipton Noodle Soup take and smiled to remember the old applause-meter. A couple of the muscular hula ladies wandered by and Fibb got randy.

He sat on the platform, waving mosquitoes away with the want-ads from the Key West Citizen, and tried to think what he would say. Another hula lady went by and Fibb thought how he would like to slip it to her, right in the old flange, where it counted, by God.

The chief pulled a plastic ukulele out of his truck and strummed at her wildly without effect. “You’re a damn lightnin fingers,” Fibb told him.

“I own every record Les Paul and Mary Ford ever cut. My wife’s got all the Hugo Winterhalters. And have I got the Hi-fi. Crackerjack little sumbitch I grabbed cheap on my last tour. Diamond needle, sumbitchin speakers waist-high, AM, FM, the whole shootin match.”

Dexter Fibb spotted C. J. Clovis looking just especially grotesque, all by himself, with that aluminum understructure sticking out of everywhere. He winced.

“Kind of pathetic, ain’t he?” inquired the chief.

“Some people just don’t draw lucky,” said Dexter Fibb with some strain, watching Clovis hitch across the field.

“I don’t know, Dexter. I think he come up with a handful on this go-round.”

“Oh, God, who’s to say, who’s to say,” said Fibb, eyes askew.

The chief said with craft, “Would you just want me to estimate the rake-off for you? I have a little background in econ, Dex. I could show you …”

The generosity of the Navy was considerable. A parking problem which had begun to look acute was quickly alleviated by the arrival of four MPs whose training showed immediately. The incoming mass of automobiles magically became rows of parked cars with walking lanes in-between that permitted people to move directly to the stage and tower.

Clovis met Payne at the bat wagon. Payne talked to a booster who was handing out ice-cream parlor fans. He limped over to Clovis, gesturing to him with his head.

“They want you to speak,” said Clovis. “I told them you were a lawyer.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t want any loose legal questioning. I wanted them to figure you as an expert.”

“Oh, God, I don’t think I can make a speech.”

“You plain have to. You make one before they open the tower and I’ll do the wind-up. Hell, that’ll give you a chance to get to your car before I do.”

“No,” said Payne the sport, “I’d wait for you.” He couldn’t think of a thing he could tell these people, except possibly that they’d been had.

But when the time came for him to speak, he climbed up on the platform not only ready but with a sense of mission. At his very appearance, a shimmer of antagonism passed through the crowd; and when, in his introductory remarks, he referred to beer as “the nectar of the gobs,” he was actually booed, if only a little. He began to wonder exactly how he would handle himself if the crowd decided to work him over. “Beer then,” he said after his joke was badly received. “Have some beer.” Silence. You bastards, he thought: very well. I will win them over.

“Let me be quite frank with you,” he lied. “I’d like to say that even though I don’t recognize a face out here except that of my partner, I feel as if I’ve known you all. Everything here has reminded me of you folks. Not so much the tower as the potato salad you folks been eatin out chere.” He thought he’d try a little Delta gumbo-mouth on them. “Do you know what I mean? Last night I listened to a nigra militant on TV, talking about what he called blapp people and gee as I look around I see this community is entirely short of blapp people. Not only blapp people but weirdos.” The sympathetic chuckle that ensued put him entirely out of reach of hecklers. “Why God, you’re the secret honky underground network of America!” Applause. “And I don’t see any backs up against any walls!” More applause. “Why it’s solid potato salad out there!” The applause this time was uncertain.

“Well, now. Next time you’re recollecting this day, as you will, just remember that you bought yourselves a bat tower and all the freaks and weirdos and agitators and blapp people didn’t!” Wild, bewildered applause.

“I’m just awful afraid the aforementioned citizens didn’t buy a bat tower at all!”

“NO!” from the crowd.

“But you doozies with your prickly heads and hush-puppy shoes sure bought one!”

“Hurray!”

“I was just telling this chief petty officer a few minutes ago. You people have been taken to the cleaners!” A good-natured, superior murmur passed over the potato salad. “You’ve been fleeced!”

“HURRAY! HURRAY! HURRAY!”

Clovis, ashen, passed Payne on his way to the microphone. “You’ve got moxie,” he offered, “I’ll say that.” Then he added: “In another hour, A1A will be a fugitive’s bottleneck.” Payne limped off, patting his pocket. The wad of money was as big as a pistol.

Dexter Fibb received Clovis on the podium, unable to touch him or shake his hand or really take in with his eyes Clovis’ implausible lack of symmetry. Moreover, Fibb was miffed that he had not himself been asked to speak.

The crowd, too, was sobered by the sight of the multiple amputee. “My partner’s slighting remarks,” he began, “about minority groups are not necessarily the opinion of the management. Ahaha. Ahmm.” As far as the crowd was concerned, Clovis was a dead man. “You’re ah you’re a um a really great audience folks!” Then simply, humbly, “And a much appreciated customer.” He smiled, head bowed, awaiting the kind of response Payne had gotten. It never came. Better speed things up. Better speed them right the fuck up before this dude comes down like a bomb.

The potato salad had begun to stir. Dexter Fibb nervously crushed his worn blue-and-gold yachtsman’s cap about his ears, preparing himself for action, and cried, “Let’s put these bats to work!”

Clovis suddenly and almost spasmodically went into his speech about encephalitis and about how bats were like little angels and how mosquitoes were like flying pus-filled syringes. But he ran down like a child’s gyroscope. His face, at last, revealed his defeat.

Only Payne was able to start the applause — a strange noise like breaking waves. The vacant faces were intent with the motion of their hands beneath them. It surged through the mangroves in a gesture of confidence and of more than that: of faith.

Ultimately, though, looking into all those hopeful vacant faces gathered at this tower from every corner of the U.S.A., his own flush with the purloined funds and a special joy that went beyond that, Clovis snipped as he must with heavy shears the blue satin ribbon. Dexter Fibb gave a self-conscious rebel yell, got a red face and pulled the rope. The polyethylene came down the sides of the tower, caressing it as it went, lofting and flowing in wind-borne plastic beauty. Bright orange bats poured into the sky.

They were scattered at first, just as they ought to have been, circulating in the immediate area. But then they began to form up. A single shape, more demonstrative than an arrow, in a color derived from every neon monstrosity in the land, formed on the soaring sky at the edge of America. All the hopes of all those empty faces were pinned to that shape that held brilliant overhead a moment more then headed for the interior of the continent and disappeared.

Quite rightly, the wail went up: “They’re gone! They’re gone forever! They won’t ever come back!” and so on.

And when the anguish had passed, the potato salad began to advance upon the podium. Dexter Fibb, seeing slippery-looking Payne and the horrifically malformed Clovis, cued the crowd with outraged glances at the two. A serious question with its roots deep in Econ had arisen.

With the first movement of the crowd toward him, Clovis fell to the boards, dragging the Telefunken microphone after himself, convenient to his lips. The great portable speakers transmitted his gasps and howls: “MY HEART IS ON THE FRITZ!” It was amplified over the sea of bat fans, bug loathers and mangroves. “THE FRITZ I SAID!”

Croaking even more impressively than Clovis, Dexter Fibb cried, “Look at him, he’s dying!” and stared pale and mute at this crooked item on the stage. Payne listened to Clovis perform extravagantly at the microphone, bleating a ravaged play-by-play as to the condition of his ticker. Payne knelt consolingly beside him. Clovis glanced at him, simulated a grisly death rattle, looked at Payne once again in surprise, looked all around himself and said, “No.” Then, without further notice, he died quite blankly.

Payne was the solitary customer at the burial. Though, because of some logistical miscalculation, row upon row of empty folding chairs faced the oblong black hole in the sod. Overhead, a green and white canopy — a pavilion — was turn-buckled tautly on a galvanized pipe frame. Four men took the coffin, a piece of mildly pretentious metal furniture containing the jury-rigged mortal remains of C. J. Clovis, and lowered away. Payne sat on a folding chair, his legs crossed tight on themselves, leaned his face heavily into his hands and thought, “Oh, gee. Oh, fuck.”

Payne stayed, after the four men left, in the big open cemetery. The skeletal Poinciana trees stood upon an enormous ocean sky with tenuous, high-altitude horsetail clouds. Key West, a clapboard town accreted upon a marine hummock at the end of the continental shelf, seemed a peculiar place to have buried Clovis, who had entrusted himself to Payne. Overhead, a pair of frigate birds circled in perfect synchronization as though fixed to the ends of a glass fulcrum.

Payne was tapped gently upon the shoulder by a recent graduate of the police academy who said, “You are under arrest.”

“What is the charge?”

“Fraud.”

In the police cruiser, Payne quietly began to slip a little. They drove past the cryptic gestures of docks, careened trawlers and crawfishing boats of Garrison Bight. They passed the breaking Atlantic at the foot of Simonton Street. “Take me to the Burger King,” he told the cop without getting an answer. “Officer, what you see before you is a futuristic print-out of a thousand years of bog-trotting and one boat ride to an experimental republic: a fiasco.” Silence. It was dizzying to Payne. From the inside of a police sedan, Payne believed he could see a vast and unplowed interior ridge, buried beneath flags, gum wrappers and diplomas. “I have found my swerve, officer. It makes a gentle glowing contour on the history of the New World.” This hero, Nicholas Payne, began smiling. He had the oceanic feeling a thousand yards from sea. The lowering of one defunct sensorium into the sod still filled his head with the martial music of winds and supermarkets, a fugue of singing trees and internal combustion engines, of Miss America contestants past and present doing night things with sturdy flutes, an international autoharmonium of homocidal giddiness manipulated by played-out bobby soxers and sharp dressers in security councils and command modules; it was all out there, the unplowed ridge where energetic riders on winded ponies were impeded by hairdressers with bullwhips, tigerish insurance adjusters, rodents in command formation and other servants of the commonwealth. The last thing Payne said to the perplexed young policeman was, “To me he was illustrious.”

• •

By returning most of the money, the small discrepancy justified by the touristic utility of the empty tower, Payne avoided the brunt of sentencing. And finally, it was agreed that if he would re-enact his trial for the TV program Night Court, he would be let free altogether.

Payne walked into the studio. Two or three technicians wandered around trailing rubber cables and, finally, rolling a camera forward on its dolly to face a plywood judge’s bench. The “Judge” himself came in a few moments later and prated in a resonating actor’s voice that if Equity found out what he was getting for this bit they’d have him in the slammer so fast his head would swim. Once seated, his judicial mien returned and he was given a “policeman” who declared court was in session. Payne felt as if he were in a dream. He watched a man tried for manslaughter do some wonderful Karl Malden stuff, his upper lip whitening with the tension of vigorous speeches, slobbering with Actor’s Studio reality an ad-lib monologue that had the technicians winking at each other.

Then Payne, dreaming, was called, and subsequently so were the witnesses against him. The charge was fraud. The witnesses were Dexter Fibb and five Mid-Keys Boosters, including the chief petty officer, all on TV for the first time.

When they got to the death of Clovis, Payne burst into his only tears since the actuality, a weeping sleepwalker. He looked around himself, saw the trial as though through glass. The judge tried not to beam. The director crowded behind the cameramen to see this. Night Court, rich with corrective lessons, was a hit.

Let’s have this quickly now: At Galveston, Ann wired for money, a lot of it, waited three hours, got it, flew to Dallas, took a room, called George and gave him the yes he had waited for so many years. Hearing his tears, his gratitude, she made reservations on Delta to fly up the next day; then, headed for Neiman-Marcus.

So that: She ran across the tarmac at Detroit-Metropolitan Airport, adorable in a little mini-caftan by Oscar de la Renta made of pink linen. Over that she wore a delicate Moroccan leather coat. The sandals were Dior; and their blocky little heels looked like ivory. Anyone who says she wasn’t darling has another think coming.

And George ran to her perfectly attired in an impeccably tailored glen plaid from J. Press. What seemed almost risky in his livery was the wild, yellow Pucci cravat that precisely counterpointed his sedate, seamless cordovans from Church of London.

See them, then, running thus toward one another: perfect monads of nullity.

They whirled in one another’s arms.

“Darling,” Ann said, “I’ve been through much.” She had caught a little cold aboard ship and George was very, very concerned. After gathering her luggage, they went directly to a hotel where George greedily massaged her chest with Vick’s Vap-O-Rub.

It is quite true that George hired the gallery. Nevertheless, Ann’s first show was reviewed legitimately; and was a success. Probably the quarterly critic, Allan Lier, of Lens magazine, represents the consensus:

… Miss Fitzgerald’s striking available-light photographs of commercial fishermen turning in for the night are the best sequence of the show. Frame after frame, we see these tired men backlit against the hatchway, heading for a long-earned rest. In their impatience and exhaustion, they are already in various stages of undress.

By way of contrast, the group of pictures called “Nicholas” introduces us to a private yet utterly communicated vision of what is lost in the conventional life. We see time and time again the same weary face of Nicholas: the ‘shy suitor,’ the spurious rodeo cowboy, the motorist. In one superb shot, in a claustrophobic laundry room, Nicholas is drubbed over the head with a toilet plunger by an attractive older woman: It is left to the viewer to speculate as to what he has done to deserve this! In another picture, he stares directly into the camera, apparently about to speak but unable to think of a single thing to say. In the most terrifying picture of them all, he rises from a toilet seeming to spring at the camera. He wears a short institutional shift and we see where his mediocrity leads. Nothing that is said here can communicate the banality which Miss Fitzgerald captures with polish and control. Thanks to her craft, humanity and attention, she has delivered a cautionary monument to the failed life.

See this show at once.

Payne headed North, making two stops in the State of Florida. One was to see Junior Place and inspect the bat cave with him; the tower bats had not been rejected by their friends and hung upside down from the roof of the cave like thousands of Indian River oranges.

He stopped on the Georgia border and bought an M. Hohner Marine Band harmonica and spent the better part of an evening failing to play Hank Williams’ “I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive.”

A truck drove by with a sign: HOLD UP YOUR PACK OF AMERICAN SPACE. The question was whether he had actually seen that. That was getting to be the real question all right.

On a lonely beach in the Sea Islands, Nicholas Payne unfolded his camp stove and began to prepare his supper. He could smell the sea and the sandy groves of loblolly pine that throbbed with uncommon birds. Turned at an angle to the homemade trailer whose floor smelled balefully of departed bats, the Hudson Hornet pointed to the interior of the continent.

Payne poised a jacknife spread with peanut butter over a rigid piece of bread and lifted his face to the sea. He felt as if he had been made an example of; and that, even now, he was part of a demonstration, an exhibit. He held the knife and peanut butter steady. The sky rose over him, round and vitreous, a glass enclosure. He smiled, at one with things. He knew the great blenders hummed in state centers and benign institutions; while he, far away, put it all together at a time when life was cheap.

But then the abrasions, all the incredible abrasions, had rendered him. The pale, final shape of Payne, like the yolk of an egg held to the light, had come to be seen.

I am at large.