Gravity's Rainbow (105 page)

Lucky Bland, to be free of it. One night he called his whole family together around
the davenport in the study. Lyle, Jr. came in from Houston, shivering with first-stage
grippe from contact with a world where air-conditioning is not so essential to life.
Clara drove down from Bennington and Buddy rode the MTA in from Cambridge. “As you
know,” Bland announced, “I have been taking these little trips lately.” He was wearing
a simple white smock, and holding a red rose. He looked unearthly, all were later
to agree: his skin and eyes had a clarity which is seldom encountered, except on certain
spring days, at certain latitudes, just before sunrise. “I have found,” he continued,
“that each time out, I have been traveling farther and farther. Tonight, I am going
out for good. That is, I am not coming back. So I wanted to say good-by to you all,
and let you know that you’ll be provided for.” He’d been to see his friend Coolidge
(“Hot”) Short, of the State Street law firm of Salitieri, Poore, Nash, De Brutus,
and Short, and made sure all the family finances were in perfect order. “I want you
to know that I love you all. I’d stay here if I could, but I have to go. I hope you
can understand.”

One by one, his family came up to say good-by. Hugs, kisses, handshakes done, Bland
sank back into that davenport’s last embrace, closed his eyes with a dim smile. . . .
After a bit he felt himself beginning to rise. Those watching disagreed about the
exact moment. Around 9:30 Buddy left to see
The Bride of Frankenstein
, and Mrs. Bland covered the serene face with a dusty chintz drape she’d received
from a cousin who had never understood her taste.

• • • • • • •

A windy night. The lids of GI cans blow clanging across the parade ground. Sentries
in their idleness are practicing Queen Anne salutes. Sometimes gusts of wind come
that rock the jeeps on their springs, even the empty deuce ’n’ a halfs and civilian
bobtail rigs—shock absorbers groan, deeply, in discomfort . . . in the peaks of wind,
living pine trees move, lined above the last sand dropoff into the North Sea. . . .

Walking at a brisk pace, but out of step, across the lorry-scarred spaces of the old
Krupp works here, Doctors Muffage and Spontoon look anything but conspiratorial. You
take them immediately for what they seem: a tiny beachhead of London respectability
here in benighted Cuxhaven—tourists in this semicivilized colony of sulfa shaken into
the wells of blood, syrettes and tourniquets, junkie M.O.s and sadistic corpsmen,
a colony they were spared for the Duration, thank heaven, Muffage’s brother being
highly placed in a certain Ministry, Spontoon having been technically disqualified
because of a strange hysterical stigma, shaped like the ace of spades and nearly the
same color, which would appear on his left cheek at moments of high stress, accompanied
by severe migraine. Only a few months ago they felt themselves as fully mobilized
as any British civilian, and thus amenable to most Government requests. About the
present mission, though, both now are deep in peacetime second thoughts. How quickly
history passes these days.

“I can’t think why he asked
us,”
Muffage stroking his full Imperial (a gesture that manages only to look compulsive),
speaking in a voice perhaps too melodious for a man of his mass, “he must
know
I haven’t done one of these since ’27.”

“I assisted at a few whilst I was interning,” Spontoon recalls. “That was during the
great vogue they had at mental institutions, you know.”

“I can name you a few National Institutions where it’s still in vogue.” The medicos
share a chuckle, full of that British Weltschmerz that looks so uncomfortable on the
faces of the afflicted. “See here, then, Spontoon, you’d rather assist me, is that
it?”

“Oh, either way you know. I mean it’s not as if there’ll be some chap with a
book
standing there, you know, writing it all down.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure. Weren’t you listening? Didn’t you notice anything . . .”

“Enthusiastic.”

“Obsessional. I wonder if Pointsman isn’t
losing his grip,
” sounding here remarkably like James Mason: “L(h)oo-ssing(?) hiss
khrip.”

They are looking at each other now, separate night scapes of Marston shelters and
parked vehicles flowing darkly by together behind each face. The wind carries smells
of brine, of beach, of petrol. A distant radio tuned to the General Forces Programme
features Sandy MacPherson at the Organ.

“Oh, all of us . . .” Spontoon begins, but lets it lapse.

“Here we are.”

The bright office is hung with crimson-lipped, sausage-limbed Petty Girl pin-ups.
A coffee mess hisses in the corner. There’s also a smell of rancid shoe-dubbing. A
corporal sits with his feet on a desk, absorbed in an American Bugs Bunny comic book.

“Slothrop,” in answer to Muffage’s inquiry, “yes yes the Yank in the, the pig suit.
Well, he’s in and out all the time. Completely dotty. What are you lot then, M.I.
6 or something?”

“Can’t discuss it,” raps Spontoon. Fancies himself a bit of a Nayland Smith, Spontoon
does. “D’you know where we might find a General Wivern?”

“This time of night? Down at the alcohol dump, most likely. Follow the tracks, head
for all the noise. If I weren’t on duty, I’d be there m’self.”

“Pig suit,” frowns Muffage.

“Big bloody pig suit, yellow, pink, and blue, on my oath,” replies the corporal. “You’ll
know him when you see him. You wouldn’t have a cigarette, one of you gentlemen, by
any chance.”

Sounds of carousing reach them as they trudge along the tracks, past empty triple
flats and tank cars. “Alcohol dump.”

“Fuel for their Nazi rockets, I’m told. If they ever get one in working order.”

Under a cold umbrella of naked light bulbs are gathered a crowd of Army personnel,
American sailors, NAAFI girls, and German fräuleins. Fraternizing, every last one
of them, shamefully, amid noise which becomes, as Muffage and Spontoon reach the edge
of the gathering, a song, at whose center, with a good snootful, each arm circling
a smiling and disheveled young tootsie, ruddy face under these lights gone an apoplectic
mauve, and leading the glee, is the same General Wivern they last saw in Pointsman’s
office back at Twelfth House. From a tank car whose contents, ethanol, 75% solution,
are announced in stark white stenciling along the side, spigots protrude here and
there, under which an incredible number of mess cups, china mugs, coffeepots, wastebaskets,
and other containers are being advanced and withdrawn. Ukuleles, kazoos, harmonicas,
and any number of makeshift metal noisemakers accompany the song, which is an innocent
salute to Postwar, a hope that the end of shortages, the end of Austerity, is near:

It’s—

Mouthtrip-ping time!

Mouthtrip-ping time!

Time to open up that icebox door—

Oh yes it’s

Mouthtrip-ping time,

Mouthtrip-ping time,

And once you’ve eaten some, you’ll come, for more!

Ah, mouthtrip-ping time,

Mouthtrip-ping time!

It’s something old, but also very new-w-w—

Life’s so sublime,

In mouthtrip-ping time—

We hope you’re all mouth
trip
-ping, toooooo!

Next chorus is soldiers ’n’ sailors all together for the first eight bars, girls for
the second, General Wivern singing the next eight solo, and
tutti
to finish it up. Then comes a chorus for ukuleles and kazoos and so on while everyone
dances, black neckerchiefs whipping about like the mustaches of epileptic villains,
delicate snoods unloosening to allow stray locks of hair to escape their tight rolls,
skirt-hems raised to expose flashing knees and slips edged in prewar Cluny lace a
frail flight of smoky bat-wings here under the white electricity . . . on the final
chorus the boys circle clockwise, girls anticlockwise, the ensemble opening out into
a rose-pattern, from the middle of which dissipatedly leering tosspot General Wivern,
tankard aloft, is hoisted briefly, like an erect stamen.

About the only one not participating here, aside from the two prowling surgeons, is
Seaman Bodine, whom we left, you recall, carrying on in the bathtub at Säure Bummer’s
place back in Berlin. Impeccable tonight in dress whites, straight-faced and sober,
he trudges among the merrymakers, thickly sprouting hair from jumper sleeves and V-neck,
so much of it that last week he spooked and lost a connection just in from the CBI
theatre with close to a ton of bhang, who mistook him for a seagoing version of the
legendary
yeti
or abominable snowman. To make up some of what he blew on that one, Bodine is tonight
promoting the First International Runcible Spoon Fight, between his shipmate Avery
Purfle and an English Commando named St. John Bladdery. “Place yer bets, yes yes the
odds are even, 50/50,” announces suave croupier Bodine, pushing through the gathered
bodies, many of them far from upright, one shaggy hand clutching a wad of occupation
scrip. With the other, from time to time, he will tug the big collar of his jumper
around and blow his nose on it, grommets on the hem of his T-shirt blinking, light
bulbs dancing overhead in the wind he’s raised, his own several shadows thrashing
in all directions and merging with others.

“Greetings, gate, need an opiate?” Tiny red eyes in a vast pink Jell-o of a face,
and an avaricious smile. It is Albert Krypton, corpsman striker of the U.S.S.
John E. Badass
, who now produces from inside a secret jumper pocket a glass vial full of white tablets.
“Codeine, Jackson, it’s beautiful—here.”

Bodine sneezes violently and wipes the snot away with his sleeve. “Not for any fucking
cold, Krypton. Thanks. You seen Avery?”

“He’s in great shape. He was getting in some last-minute practice down the goat hole
when I came over.”

“Listen, old buddy,” begins the enterprising tar. This decrypts into 3 ounces of cocaine.
Bodine comes up with a few squashed notes. “Midnight, if you can. Told him I’d see
him out at Putzi’s after the fight.”

“Solid. Hey, you checked under the barracks lately?” Seems the CBI returnees get together
to play marbles with opium balls. You can pick up hundreds if you’re any good. Corpsman
Krypton pockets his money and leaves Bodine flexing his thumb and thinking about it,
moves on copping feels, pausing to drink from a shell case of grain alcohol and grapefruit
juice, whilst dealing the odd tablet of codeine. He has a brief paranoid episode as
two red-hatted MPs show up, stroking their billy clubs and giving him, he fancies,
pregnant looks. He slides into the night, peeling away, banking through dark sky.
He is coming on to a proprietary mixture known as the Krypton Blue, and so it is a
giddy passage to the dispensary, not without moments of deep inattention.

Inside, his connection, Pharmacist Birdbury, is conducting the last act of
La Forza del Destino
crackling in from Radio Luxembourg, and singing along. His mouth snaps shut as Krypton
comes taxiing in. With him is what appears to be a gigantic, multicolored pig, the
plush nap of its coat reversed here and there, which widens the possible range of
colors. “
Micro
grams
,
” Krypton striking his head dramatically, “that’s right, micrograms, not milligrams.
Birdbury, gimme something, I’ve OD’d.”

“Ssh.”
The dispenser’s high forehead wrinkling in and out of operatical cross-furrows. Krypton
goes back in among the shelves, and watches the lighted room through a bottle of paregoric
till the opera’s over. Comes back in time to hear the pig asking, “Well where else
would he head for?”

“I got it third-hand,” Birdbury laying down the hypodermic he’s been using as a baton.
“Ask Krypton here, he gets around a bit.”

“Greetings, gate,” sez Albert, “let’s inoculate.”

“I hear Springer is supposed to be coming in tonight.”

“First I’ve heard. But go on out to Putzi’s, why don’t you. That’s where all that
sort of thing goes on.”

The pig looks up at a clock on the wall. “Got a funny schedule tonight, is all.”

“Look here, Krypton, there’s a bigwig from SPOG due in here any moment, so whatever
it was, you know. . . .” They haggle over the three ounces of cocaine, the pig politely
withdrawing to leaf through an old
News of the World.
Presently, taping the last of the crystal-stuffed bottles to his bare leg, Krypton
invites everyone to the runcible spoon fight. “Bodine’s holding some big money, folks
in from all over the Zone—”

“
Seaman
Bodine?” inquires the amazed plush pig.

“The king of Cuxhaven, Porky.”

“Well I ran him an errand once in Berlin. Tell him Rocketman sez howdy.”

Krypton, bellbottom pulled up, opening one bottle just to see what he has, pauses,
goggling. “You mean that
hash?
”

“Yup.”

Krypton snuffs a big fingerful of the flaky white into nostrils right ’n’ left. The
world goes clarifying. Bitter snot begins to form in a stubborn fist at the back of
his throat. Already the Potsdam Pickup is part of the folklore of the Zone. Would
this pig here be trying to cash in on the glory of Rocketman (whose existence Krypton
has never been that sure of)? Cocaine suspicions, cringing and mean as rats . . .
shining bottles of a thousand colors, voices from the radio, the drape and hand of
the pig’s shag coat as Krypton reaches out to stroke . . . no, it’s clear that the
pig isn’t looking for anything, isn’t a cop, isn’t dealing, or about to hustle anybody. . . .
“Just wanted to see how it felt, you know,” sez Krypton.

“Sure.” Now the doorway is suddenly full of red hats, leather and brass. Krypton stands
very still, the top to the open cocaine bottle in one hand.

“Slothrop?” sergeant in command comes edging into the room, hand resting on his sidearm.
The pig looks over at Birdbury, who’s shaking his head no, not me, as if he means
it.

“Wasn’t me, either,” Krypton feels he ought to mention.