Wilt in Nowhere

Chapter 21

Uncle Wally was not so lucky. He was fully conscious and wishing to hell he wasn’t. He had come out of Intensive Care, had refused to see Auntie Joanie and was having a most unpleasant conversation with Dr Cohen who was telling him a man of his age…well, a man of any age deserved an infarct if he did what he’d done to his wife or any other person for that matter. It was, he said, contra natura.

‘Contra what?’ Wally gasped. The only Contras he’d heard of had fought the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

‘Against nature. The sphincter is designed to let excreta out not–’

‘Shit! What’s excrecha?’

‘What you just said. Shit,’ said Dr Cohen. ‘Now, like I was saying, the sphincter–’

‘I don’t even know what a sphincter is.’

‘Asshole,’ said Dr Cohen ambiguously.

Wally took umbrage. ‘You calling me an asshole?’ he yelled.

Dr Cohen hesitated. Wally Immelmann might be a first-rate business man but…The guy was sick. He didn’t want to kill the idiot.

‘I am merely trying to explain the physiological consequences of putting…putting things up someone’s anus instead of in the normal way.’

Wally gaped at him and turned a nasty colour. He couldn’t find words for his feelings.

Dr Cohen continued. ‘Not only could you give your dear wife Aids but–’

Wally Immelmann found words. ‘Aids?’ he yelled. ‘What’s all this about my having Aids? I haven’t got Aids. I’m not a faggot.’

‘I’m not saying you are. I don’t care. What you do is your own business. I am merely telling you that what you have been doing to your wife can be physically damaging to her. Not can be. Is. She could be wearing tampons the rest of her life.’

‘Who says I do what you’re saying I do to her?’ demanded Wally inadvisedly.

Dr Cohen sighed. He’d had just about all he could stomach from Wally Immelmann. ‘As a matter of fact you do,’ he snapped. ‘You can be heard miles away shouting at Mrs Immelmann about giving it to her up the ass. People are taking tours up near Lake Sassaquassee just to hear you.’

Wally’s eyes bulged in his suffused face. ‘You mean…oh my God, they haven’t cut the loudspeakers off? They’ve got to.’

‘You tell them how. The police can’t get near the place. They’ve had the National Guard and helicopters and…’

But Wally Immelmann was no longer listening. He’d had another infarct. As he was rushed back to Intensive Care, Dr Cohen left the hospital. He was a kindly man and gays could do what they liked but screwing wives anally when they didn’t like it disgusted him.

At the Starfighter Mansion things weren’t much better. Auntie Joan had taken to her bed and had locked the door, only unlocking it to go down to the kitchen to get her breakfast, lunch and dinner. She and Eva were hardly on speaking terms and the quads had taken over Uncle Wally’s computer and were sending email messages to all their friends and a number of obscene ones to all recipients on his business address list. Eva, who knew nothing about computers and was in any case too worried about her Henry, left them to their own and Uncle Wally’s devices. She spent her time on the phone to England calling up friends, even Mavis Mottram, to find out where he’d got to. Nobody knew.

‘But he can’t just have disappeared. That’s not possible.’

‘No, dear, and I didn’t say he’d disappeared,’ said Mavis with mock sympathy. ‘I just said nobody knew where he was.’

‘But that’s the same as saying he’s disappeared,’ said Eva, who had learnt some elements of logic from Wilt during their frequent arguments. ‘You said nobody knows where he is. Someone has to know. I mean, he may have gone on holiday with the Braintrees. Have you tried them?’

At the other end of the line Mavis took a deep breath. She had always found Eva difficult to deal with and she wasn’t prepared to be grilled by her now.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I haven’t. For the simple reason that I don’t know their address or if they have gone on holiday and I’m hardly likely to know where they’ve gone.’

‘They always take a cottage in Norfolk for a month in the summer.’

This time Mavis didn’t breathe deeply. She snorted. ‘Then why don’t you phone them?’ she snapped.

‘Because I don’t know where the cottage is. All I do know is that it’s in Norfolk somewhere on the coast.’

‘Norfolk?’ squawked Mavis. ‘If you seriously think I’m going to start searching cottages along the entire coast of Norfolk…well, it’s out of the question. Why don’t you phone the hospitals and the police? They’ve usually kept an eye on your Henry. Ask for Missing Persons.’

All in all it was a most disagreeable and acrimonious exchange, and it ended with Mavis putting the phone down without saying goodbye. Eva tried the house again but all she got was her own voice on the answerphone. Apart from the quads, and she wasn’t going to worry them, Eva had no one to consult. Upstairs Auntie Joan could be heard snoring. She’d taken another sleeping pill and washed it down with Jack Daniels. Eva went out to the kitchen. At least there she could talk to Maybelle, the black maid, and tell her her problems. Even that didn’t help. Maybelle’s experience with men was even worse than Eva’s.

‘Men’s all the same. The second you turn your back they’s off like alley cats chasing other girls.’

‘But my Henry’s not like that. He’s…well, he’s different from other men. And he’s definitely not gay, if that’s what you’re thinking.’ Maybelle had raised her eyebrows significantly. ‘It’s just that he’s not really interested in sex,’ Eva confided.

‘Then he’s gotta be different. Never met a man like that in all my life. That Mr Immelmann sure isn’t. I reckon that’s how come his heart’s so bad.’ She looked out the window. ‘There’s those men again. I don’t know what they think they’re doing snooping round the house all the time. And Mrs Joanie’s lost her voice or something. Comes down and gets herself some ice cream and brownies and goes on back up to her room and never a word out of her. Guess she’s all upset over Mr Immelmann being took bad.’

Up at the lake a blessed silence reigned. A special squad of totally deaf Gulf War veterans had been recruited to destroy the generator with explosives. Even then they had found the task difficult and had had to use clothing that looked like spacesuits to get near the thing. But in the end they had succeeded. The loudspeakers went dead and the Drug Squad moved in and ransacked the place. They found nothing more incriminating than a stack of porno videos hidden in Wally’s safe. But by the time they left, the house looked as though it had been vandalised.