Slippage (29 page)

One day, lifetimes ago, I felt my heart miss its rhythm when I entered a small co-op grocery store on the other side of the tracks in Painesville, Ohio, and saw for the first time the roll of all-chocolate Necco Wafers. Surely, there was a God. To this day—and they are now hard to find—I cannot resist a roll of chocolate Necco Wafers.

I was standing in a movie line. I had brought two rolls of candy with me, and as I waited for the line to move, I ate a pastille or two. Behind me, a man my age, speaking softly to his female date, not wanting to seem to have been snooping, said, with hushed awe, "He's got Necco Wafers!" and the woman, considerably younger, repeated what she
thought
she had heard, and she said, "Necro wafers?" and he corrected her and explained; but
I
had already misheard what I wanted to hear. Necro waiters. Yes. For what are they waiting? How did they die? Oh yes! Necro waiters. Process.

Mark

At forty-one minutes after midnight on the night of 28 April 1910, with Halley's Comet boiling through the ink black skies directly overhead, in a graveyard in Elmira, New York, two young boys worked feverishly digging up a freshly-laid grave. The tombstone had not yet been set; the ground had not settled sufficiently.

It was cold for April, but the boys were sweating.

It had been cold a week earlier in Redding, Connecticut, when he had died at sunset.

It had been cold as thousands had filed past the casket, as he lay there in a freshly-pressed white linen suit, in Brick Presbyterian Church, in New York City.

And it had been cold all the while they were bringing him to Elmira for burial.

Cold, past midnight, a slice of moon not nearly as bright as Halley's Comet, and the boys dug, they dug, really dug.

"Tom," whispered the taller of the two diggers, the one wearing the crushed and chewed-out straw hat. There was no answer. "Tom? I say, Tom, you all right down there?"

A voice from below. "Except for the dirt you drop on me."

The tall boy made a
whoops, sorry
sound. "Tom, danged if n I ain't afeared to be out here. I wisht we wasn't here. It's awful solemn like,
ain't
it?"

Tom, four feet down in the rectangular pit, jacked a foot onto his shovel, wedging it deep in the dark soil so it stood up of its own accord. He wiped sweat from his nose and forehead, but his face still shone in the dim light of the lantern at the pit's edge. He looked up at his companion. "Knock off that cornball dialect, will you, 'Hucky,' and keep moving that pile of dirt away from the edge before it buries me."

Huck looked chastened. "Sorry, Tom—"

"And for Pete's sake, stop calling me
Tom
!"

"Sorry, Migmunt, I just thought...in case there was anybody around, you know, just happened to be listening, I should stay in character..."

"Listen, Podlack, just keep shoveling. My back is killing me and I want to get
out of
here—"

A voice, muffled heavily by at least a foot of dirt, interrupted him. "And I want to get the hell out of
here,
you pair of imbeciles!"

The boys looked at each other with panic, and without a sound began shoveling furiously.

Fifteen minutes later, the coffin had been uncovered. There was a steady banging from inside. And the voice: "Get this infernal thing
off
me! Come on, move your weird butts!"

Podlack, also known as Huckleberry, dropped into the pit and, using a claw hammer, began prising loose the nails that held the coffin lid in place. "Just a minute, sir; we'll have you out of there in a jiffy."

"Jiffy, my groaning sphincter, you incompetent! You should have been here yesterday! Move yourself!"

Finally, with both boys straining, the lid was wrenched free; they leaned it up against the end of the pit.

The white-maned old man with the drooping mustaches sat up, cricked his neck till it popped, then got to his feet by bracing his hands against the sides of the coffin. "By god, I think my bladder will burst," he said, beginning to unbutton his fly. He suddenly realized the boys were staring at him. "Do you
mind?"

They turned their backs. After a minute Migmunt, also known as Tom, said, very politely, "Uh, we'd best hurry, sir. The shuttle won't wait, you know."

Behind them, the old man snorted. "It took long enough to get here in 1835, and it'll be well bedamned long enough pokeying till it gets me home; it'll wait, or I'll have that insipid comet-jockey up on charges so fast it'll make his bedamned escutcheon tarnish!"

They peeked around, and saw he was trying to crawl out of the grave, despite what he had said. They hastily clambered out the other side of the pit and extended their hands down to lift the old man. He slapped at the hands. "Get away from me," he snarled. "What the hell's the matter with you; what do you think I am, some crepuscular, withered, senescent sack of sheep-dip, to be yanked around at your pleasure?"

As he complained, he crawled up the side of the grave, dirt slipping away under him, dropping him back two feet for every one he gained. Finally, he reached ground level and brushed himself off. He looked around carefully. "You're certain we're alone here?"

"Yessir, yessir," they both said, almost in chorus.

"Let's hope so," he replied, pulling off his clothes.

Standing buck naked in the dim amber glow of the lantern, he said it again. "Let's hope so." Then he reached down between his big toe and second toe on the left foot, grasped the sealing strip between thumb and forefinger, and unzipped his body from bottom to top. Then, shrugging off the clever plastic disguise with all four of his arms, he scratched his blunt yellow beak and drew a deep breath, a prisoner freed from a confining jail cell. He turned to look up at Halley's Comet, and smiled as best a beak could smile.

"Give my regards to Broadway," he said, and began loping off toward the pickup point, Tom and Huck pumping along as hard as they could behind him, unable, in their clever plastic disguises, to keep up with him.

"Sir...sir..." Migmunt named Tom called, wheezing heavily as he tried to shorten the distance between himself and the former owner of the estate called Stormfield. "Sir...could you...would you...if you please, sir...slow down a bit so I can ask you..." He abruptly felt considerable pain in his face as he ran full tilt into the beaked, feathered, webbed-and-spur-footed personage who had perspired inside the shell of Samuel Langhorne Clemens for the entire seventy-five year tour of duty. No-longer-Mark had stopped suddenly.

"Now what
the bleeding bejeezus do you want?"

"Sir, it's just...I've been on this tour a lot longer than I'd expected. I was told when I was assigned...that is to say, sir, I was
advised...when
my orders were cut..."

"That you'd be off this miserable duty in what, ten, twelve, maybe fifteen years?" He tapped his three-toed claw impatiently.
 

"Well, uh, yes. Sir. That is."

"And you want me to say something to the Archangel of the Guard when I get back, is that it?"

"If you would, sir. If you only would."

"Son," the elder entity said, reaching out with one wing and laying his five-fingered talon on Tom's shoulder, "I was told I'd be mustered out in a maximum of fifty years. Fifty was up twenty-five years ago. It's a job, boy, a job dirtier than most, living among these idiots; but someone's got to do it. Can't have them running amuck all over the place, can we now?"

"But..."

"I'll mention your plight. Won't do any good, but I'll mention it. Now...do you mind if I go home?"

And, without waiting for a proper answer, he whirled on his toes, and loped off again toward the pickup point. Behind him, the two figments of his imagination pumped their knees hard trying to keep from falling too far apace.

When they reached the drop target, the slave unit from Halley's Comet was already waiting. The egg had opened, the jasmine light poured forth in a perfect pool across the ground, and three field-echelon sqwarbs were waiting, the eldest looking pointedly at his thigh clock. "Let's go, let's go, come on and let's go," he called across the clearing as the three running figures broke out of cover of the trees. "Time's on the slide, along along, let's go!"

He who had been Mark slid to a halt, threw a slovenly salute, and said, "Ready to go. Seventy-five years- is long enough. Take me on home, sqwarbs!" He turned to the ersatz Huck and Tom who had come to a breathless halt behind him, there in the lee of the egg, and he saw their pathetic looks. Fluffing his pin-feathers, he said to the eldest of the echelon sqwarbs, "These two want to go home, too. Any chance, any hope?"
 

"Next time," said the clock-watcher.

"Next time?
Next
time!" Migmunt shouted. "That'll be almost ninety years I'll have spent here! Twelve, maybe fifteen,
that
was
what I signed on for, not ninety!"

Then ensued an argument, a violence, a wrangling that would have brought the authorities, had it not taken place in the middle of a clearing inside dense woods, well past midnight, in a remote section of south-central New York state near the Pennsylvania border. Podlack actually hit the youngest of the three field-echelon sqwarbs, knocking him on his tail-feathers and crimping his comb. Migmunt and Huck tried to climb inside the egg, but were driven back by force.

Finally, when it was clear to everyone that the egg would not take their full number, Migmunt and Podlack were chivvied aside by weapons awesome to behold, Mark was hustled onboard, and the egg resealed and sped aloft, leaving the forlorn and furious Huck and Tom behind; for another seventy-five years.

As the egg soared toward the shuttle that was Halley's Comet, the one who had been Mark craned his neck and shook his feathers and said, "That wasn't perhaps the smartest thing you could have done, you know."

"What wasn't?" the echelon grenadier said.

"Leaving a pair of extremely disquieted employees in charge of an operation that big. They were angry enough to do almost anything, even let the creatures know about everything."

"Let them," the clock-watching echelon grenadier said, with a haughty curl of his beak. "How badly can they mess up a primitive society like that in just seventy-five years? What are we talking about here...war, famine, pestilence, plague, cheap entertainment, overpopulation, bad art?"

"Seventy-five years is a tweep in a whirl," said the youngest as he rubbed analgesic on his bruise. "How hard did
you
work to bring some common sense to them? How well did
you
do; how much influence did
you
have?"

Mark fell silent. Very true. The creatures of that sleepless orb were highly resistant to sensible behavior. He had done all he could, but the poor dumb things were seemingly determined to stumble about blindly, like sqwarbs with their heads cut off.

He sighed and closed his eyes, hoping for some rest on the journey home. It couldn't really get much worse down there. Not in just seventy-five years. When you wish upon a sqwarb.

PROCESS: Early 1985, and all the foofaraw about Halley's coming back. And no one pairing up Mark Twain's birth in 1835 with the Comet's arrival, and his death in 1910 at its next pass, with the current swing past the Earth. And I was so fascinated with the idea, that I reread all of Twain. One night, I was reading Tom Sawyer to the son of a woman I had been seeing, he was about ten or eleven at the time, and we were both eating Hydrox cookies, and I told him this thing about how I wanted to write about Twain, and the Comet, and maybe the Comet wasn't really a comet but was possibly a spaceship, or a star, or something like that; and he had his face full of Hydrox, and he said, "When you wish upon a sqwarb..." which wasn't, of course, what he said; it was what I
heard
him say.

And I knew what the story should be. Except I didn't have an ending, so I didn't write it in 1985. Or '86. Or '88. Or '90. But I write it now. And it
still
doesn't have an ending. But I like the opening a lot. Process.

The Last Will and Testicle of Trees Rabelais

My grandparents came from Poland. They came from a town, Bydgoszcz. That's in the north, right near the middle. I'm probably not pronouncing it properly. Bydgoszcz. They weren't Jewish, they were just Polish. That has almost nothing to do with me or this final statement, but I always tell everybody that my grandparents came from Poland. You never know when it might help. Once I got stopped by a traffic cop as I was speeding to the airport, and I don't know why, but I told him my grandparents came from Poland, and so did his, not from Bydgoszcz. So he let me off with just a warning.

I like to say: let any three people hose me down, and I'll wind up making friends of two of them.

Occasionally someone will ask me what that means, and I tell them, it means I'm a very friendly person.

I leave Montana to the descendants of the last surviving member of the original cast of
Gilligan's Island.
Go to Montana, if you must. You will hear more intelligent sounds by rubbing a tweed jacket.

Every beach contains the last three chapters of the story of someone's life. If you look out to sea, to see what you can see, you will see the previous pages bobbing at the top of rolling waves.