Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby Page 3

  Your attention is called to the passage in the pages I send which runs as follows: ‘I walked out of the castle at dusk, not even the joy of a new sunrise to console me, my shaving kit with its dozen razors (although I shaved a dozen times a day, the head was still a donkey’s) banging against the Walther .22 in my rucksack. After a time I was suddenly quite tired. I lay down under a hedge by the side of the road. One of the bushes above me had a shred of black cloth tied to it, a sign, in our country, that the place was haunted (but my head’s enough to frighten any ghost).’ Do you remember that shred of black cloth, Hannahbella? ‘I ate a slice of my mother’s spinach pie and considered my situation. My princeliness would win me an evening, perhaps a fortnight, at this or that noble’s castle in the vicinity, but my experience of visiting had taught me that neither royal blood nor novelty of aspect prevailed for long against a host’s natural preference for folk with heads much like his own. Should I en-zoo myself? Volunteer for a traveling circus? Attempt the stage? The question was most vexing.

  ‘I had not wiped the last crumbs of the spinach pie from my whiskers when something lay down beside me, under the hedge.

  ‘ “What’s this?” I said.

  ‘ “Soft,” said the new arrival, “don’t be afraid, I am a bogle, let me abide here for the night, your back is warm and that’s a mercy.”

  ‘ “What’s a bogle?” I asked, immediately fetched, for the creature was small, not at all frightening to look upon and clad in female flesh, something I do not hold in low esteem.

  ‘ “A bogle,” said the tiny one, with precision, “is not a black dog.”

  ‘Well, I thought, now I know.

  ‘ “A bogle,” she continued, “is not a boggart.”

  ‘ “Delighted to hear it,” I said.

  “Don’t you ever shave?” she asked. “And why have you that huge hideous head on you, that could be mistaken for the head of an ass, could I see better so as to think better?”

  ‘ “You may lie elsewhere,” I said, “if my face discountenances you.”

  ‘ “I am fatigued,” she said, “go to sleep, we’ll discuss it in the morning, move a bit so that your back fits better with my front, it will be cold, later, and this place is cursed, so they say, and I hear that the Prince has been driven from the palace, God knows what that’s all about but it promises no good for us plain folk, police, probably, running all over the fens with their identity checks and making you blow up their great balloons with your breath –”

  ‘She was confusing, I thought, several issues, but my God! she was warm and shapely. Yet I thought her a strange piece of goods, and made the mistake of saying so.

  ‘ “Sir,” she answered, “I would not venture upon what’s strange and what’s not strange, if I were you,” and went on to say that if I did not abstain from further impertinence she would commit sewer-pipe. She dropped off to sleep then, and I lay back upon the ground. Not a child, I could tell, rather a tiny woman. A bogle.’

  The King wishes you to know, Hannahbella, that he finds this passage singularly moving and that he cannot read it without being forced to take snuff, violently. Similarly the next:

  ‘What, precisely, is a donkey? As you may imagine, I have researched the question. My Larousse was most delicate, as if the editors thought the matter blushful, but yielded two observations of interest: that donkeys came originally from Africa, and that they, or we, are “the result of much crossing.” This urges that the parties to the birth must be ill-matched, and in the case of my royal parents, twas thunderously true. The din of their calamitous conversations reached every quarter of the palace, at every season of the year. My mother named me Duncan (var. of Dunkey, clearly) and went into spasms of shrinking whenever, youthfully, I’d offer a cheek for a kiss. My father, in contrast, could sometimes bring himself to scratch my head between the long, weedlike ears, but only, I suspect, by means of a mental shift, as if he were addressing one of his hunting dogs, the which, incidentally, remained firmly ambivalent about me even after long acquaintance.

  ‘I explained a part of this to Hannahbella, for that was the bogle’s name, suppressing chiefly the fact that I was a prince. She in turn gave the following account of herself. She was indeed a bogle, a semispirit generally thought to be of bad character. This was a libel, she said, as her own sterling qualities would quickly persuade me. She was, she said, of the utmost perfection in the female line, and there was not a woman within the borders of the kingdom so beautiful as herself, she’d been told it a thousand times. It was true, she went on, that she was not of a standard size, could in fact be called small, if not minuscule, but those who objected to this were louts and fools and might profitably be stewed in lead, for the entertainment of the countryside. In the matter of rank and precedence, the meanest bogle outweighed the greatest king, although the kings of this earth, she conceded, would never acknowledge this but in their dotty solipsism conducted themselves as if bogles did not even exist. And would I like to see her all unclothed so that I might glean some rude idea as to the true nature of the sublime?

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t have minded a bit. She was wonderfully crafted, that was evident, and held in addition the fascination surrounding any perfect miniature. But I said, ‘No, thank you. Perhaps another day, it’s a bit chill this morning.’

  ‘ “Just the breasts then,” she said, “they’re wondrous pretty,” and before I could protest further she’d whipped off her mannikin’s tiny shirt. I buttoned her up again meanwhile bestowing buckets of extravagant praise. “Yes,” she said in agreement, “that’s how I am all over, wonderful.” ’

  The King cannot reread this section, Hannahbella, without being reduced to tears. The world is a wilderness, he says, civilization a folly we entertain in concert with others. He himself, at his age, is beyond surprise, yet yearns for it. He longs for the conversations he formerly had with you, in the deepest hours of the night, he in his plain ermine robe, you simply dressed as always in a small scarlet cassock, most becoming, a modest supper of chicken, fruit and wine on the sideboard, only the pair of you awake in the whole palace, at four o’clock in the morning. The tax evasion case against you has been dropped. It was, he says, a hasty and ill-considered undertaking, even spiteful. He is sorry.

  The King wonders whether the following paragraphs from his autobiography accord with your own recollections: ‘She then began, as we walked down the road together (an owl pretending to be absent standing on a tree limb to our left, a little stream snapping and growling to our right), explaining to me that my father’s administration of the realm left much to be desired, from the bogle point of view, particularly his mad insistence on filling the forests with heavy-footed truffle hounds. Standing, she came to just a hand above my waist; her hair was brown, with bits of gold in it; her quite womanly hips were encased in dun-colored trousers. “Duncan,” she said, stabbing me in the calf with her sharp nails, “do you know what that man has done? Nothing else but ruin, absolutely ruin, the whole of the Gatter Fen with a great roaring electric plant that makes a thing that who in the world could have a use for I don’t know. I think they’re called volts. Two square miles of first-class fen paved over. We bogles are being squeezed to our knees.” I had a sudden urge to kiss her, she looked so angry, but did nothing, my history in this regard being, as I have said, infelicitous.

  ‘ “Duncan, you’re not listening!” Hannahbella was naming the chief interesting things about bogles, which included the fact that in the main they had nothing to do with humans, or nonsemispirits; that although she might seem small to me she was tall, for a bogle, queenly, in fact; that there was a type of blood seas superior to royal blood, and that it was bogle blood; that bogles had no magical powers whatsoever, despite what was said of them; that bogles were the very best lovers in the whole world, no matter what class of thing, animal, vegetable, or insect, might be under discussion; that it was not true that bogles knocked bowls of mush from the tables of the deserving poor and caused farmers’ cows to be
come pregnant with big fishes, out of pure mischief; that female bogles were the most satisfactory sexual partners of any kind of thing that could ever be imagined and were especially keen for large overgrown things with ass’s ears, for example; and that there was a something in the road ahead of us to which it might, perhaps, be prudent to pay heed.

  She was right. One hundred yards ahead of us, planted squarely athwart the road, was an army.

  The King, Hannahbella, regrets having said of you, in the journal Vu, that you have two brains and no heart. He had thought he was talking not-for-attribution, but as you know, all reporters are scoundrels and not to be trusted. He asks you to note that Vu has suspended publication and to recall that it was never read by anyone but serving maids and the most insignificant members of the minor clergy. He is prepared to give you a medal, if you return, any medal you like – you will remember that our medals are the most gorgeous going. On page seventy-five of your article, he requires you, most humbly, to change ‘monstrous over-reaching fueled by an insatiable if still childish ego’ to any kinder construction of your choosing.

  The King’s autobiography, in chapters already written but which I do not enclose, goes on to recount how you and he together, by means of a clever stratagem of your devising, vanquished the army barring your path on that day long, long ago; how the two of you journeyed together for many weeks and found that your souls were, in essence, the same soul; the shrewd means you employed to place him in power, against the armed opposition of the Party of the Lily, on the death of his father; and the many subsequent campaigns which you endured together, mounted on a single horse, your armor banging against his armor. The King’s autobiography, Hannahbella, will run to many volumes, but he cannot bring himself to write the end of the story without you.

  The King feels that your falling-out, over the matter of the refugees from Brise, was the result of a miscalculation on his part. He could not have known, he says, that they had bogle blood (although he admits that the fact of their small stature should have told him something). Exchanging the refugees from Brise for the twenty-three Bishops of Ho captured during the affair was, he says in hindsight, a serious error; more bishops can always be created. He makes the point that you did not tell him that the refugees from Brise had bogle blood but instead expected him to know it. Your outrage was, he thinks, a pretext. He at once forgives you and begs your forgiveness. The Chair of Military Philosophy at the university is yours, if you want it. You loved him, he says, he is convinced of it, he still cannot believe it, he exists in a condition of doubt. You are both old; you are both forty. The palace at four A.M. is silent. Come back, Hannahbella, and speak to him.

  Chablis

  My wife wants a dog. She already has a baby. The baby’s almost two. My wife says that the baby wants the dog.

  My wife has been wanting a dog for a long time. I have had to be the one to tell her that she couldn’t have it. But now the baby wants a dog, my wife says. This may be true. The baby is very close to my wife. They go around together all the time, clutching each other tightly. I ask the baby, who is a girl, ‘Whose girl are you? Are you Daddy’s girl?’ The baby says, ‘Momma,’ and she doesn’t just say it once, she says it repeatedly, ‘Momma momma momma.’ I don’t see why I should buy a hundred-dollar dog for that damn baby.

  The kind of dog the baby wants, my wife says, is a Cairn terrier. This kind of dog, my wife says, is a Presbyterian like herself and the baby. Last year the baby was a Baptist – that is, she went to the Mother’s Day Out program at the First Baptist twice a week. This year she is a Presbyterian because the Presbyterians have more swings and slides and things. I think that’s pretty shameless and I have said so. My wife is a legitimate lifelong Presbyterian and says that makes it O.K.; way back when she was a child she used to go to the First Presbyterian in Evansville, Illinois. I didn’t go to church because I was a black sheep. There were five children in my family and the males rotated the position of black sheep among us, the oldest one being the black sheep for a while while he was in his DWI period or whatever and then getting grayer as he maybe got a job or was in the service and then finally becoming a white sheep when he got married and had a grandchild. My sister was never a black sheep because she was a girl.

  Our baby is a pretty fine baby. I told my wife for many years that she couldn’t have a baby because it was too expensive. But they wear you down. They are just wonderful at wearing you down, even if it takes years, as it did in this case. Now I hang around the baby and hug her every chance I get. Her name is Joanna. She wears Oshkosh overalls and says ‘no,’ ‘bottle,’ ‘out,’ and ‘Momma.’ She looks most lovable when she’s wet, when she’s just had a bath and her blond hair is all wet and she’s wrapped in a beige towel. Sometimes when she’s watching television she forgets that you’re there. You can just look at her. When she’s watching television, she looks dumb. I like her better when she’s wet.

  This dog thing is getting to be a big issue. I said to my wife, ‘Well you’ve got the baby, do we have to have the damned dog too?’ The dog will probably bite somebody, or get lost. I can see myself walking all over our subdivision asking people, ‘Have you seen this brown dog?’ ‘What’s its name?’ they’ll say to me, and I’ll stare at them coldly and say, ‘Michael.’ That’s what she wants to call it, Michael. That’s a silly name for a dog and I’ll have to go looking for this possibly rabid animal and say to people, ‘Have you seen this brown dog? Michael?’ It’s enough to make you think about divorce.

  What’s that baby going to do with that dog that it can’t do with me? Romp? I can romp. I took her to the playground at the school. It was Sunday and there was nobody there, and we romped. I ran, and she tottered after me at a good pace. I held her as she slid down the slide. She groped her way through a length of big pipe they have there set in concrete. She picked up a feather and looked at it for a long time. I was worried that it might be a diseased feather but she didn’t put it in her mouth. Then we ran some more over the parched bare softball field and through the arcade that connects the temporary wooden classrooms, which are losing their yellow paint, to the main building. Joanna will go to this school some day, if I stay in the same job.

  I looked at some dogs at Pets-A-Plenty, which has birds, rodents, reptiles, and dogs, all in top condition. They showed me the Cairn terriers. ‘Do they have their prayer books?’ I asked. This woman clerk didn’t know what I was talking about. The Cairn terriers ran about two ninety-five per, with their papers. I started to ask if they had any illegitimate children at lower prices but I could see that it would be useless and the woman already didn’t like me, I could tell.

  What is wrong with me? Why am I not a more natural person, like my wife wants me to be? I sit up, in the early morning, at my desk on the second floor of our house. The desk faces the street. At five-thirty in the morning, the runners are already out, individually or in pairs, running toward rude red health. I’m sipping a glass of Gallo Chablis with an ice cube in it, smoking, worrying. I worry that the baby may jam a kitchen knife into an electrical outlet while she’s wet. I’ve put those little plastic plugs into all the electrical outlets but she’s learned how to pop them out. I’ve checked the Crayolas. They’ve made the Crayolas safe to eat – I called the head office in Pennsylvania. She can eat a whole box of Crayolas and nothing will happen to her. If I don’t get the new tires for the car I can buy the dog.

  I remember the time, thirty years ago, when I put Herman’s mother’s Buick into a cornfield, on the Beaumont highway. There was another car in my lane, and I didn’t hit it, and it didn’t hit me. I remember veering to the right and down into the ditch and up through the fence and coming to rest in the cornfield and then getting out to wake Herman and the two of us going to see what the happy drunks in the other car had come to, in the ditch on the other side of the road. That was when I was a black sheep, years and years ago. That was skillfully done, I think. I get up, congratulate myself in memory, and go in to look at the baby.
>
  The School

  Well, we had all these children out planting trees, see, because we figured that … that was part of their education, to see how, you know, the root systems … and also the sense of responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible. You know what I mean. And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the best. We complained about it. So we’ve got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant, and we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown sticks, it was depressing.

  It wouldn’t have been so bad except that just a couple of weeks before the thing with the trees, the snakes all died. But I think that the snakes – well, the reason that the snakes kicked off was that … you remember, the boiler was shut off for four days because of the strike, and that was explicable. It was something you could explain to the kids because of the strike. I mean, none of their parents would let them cross the picket line and they knew there was a strike going on and what it meant. So when things got started up again and we found the snakes they weren’t too disturbed.

  With the herb gardens it was probably a case of overwatering, and at least now they know not to overwater. The children were very conscientious with the herb gardens and some of them probably … you know, slipped them a little extra water when we weren’t looking. Or maybe … well, I don’t like to think about sabotage, although it did occur to us. I mean, it was something that crossed our minds. We were thinking that way probably because before that the gerbils had died, and the white mice had died, and the salamander … well, now they know not to carry them around in plastic bags.

  Of course we expected the tropical fish to die, that was no surprise. Those numbers, you look at them crooked and they’re belly-up on the surface. But the lesson plan called for a tropical-fish input at that point, there was nothing we could do, it happens every year, you just have to hurry past it.