Whale Music (24 page)

No, I was not in harmony with my surroundings, even to the extent of hobbling around with an all-day boner. It’s hard to believe I have trouble popping a chub these days—in my youth I couldn’t shake or slake them.

On this particular day, the Babboo was droning on, the bare-breasted women were wafting cool air over us, my mind was wandering, all of which was run of the mill for India, when suddenly I caught sight of Stud E. Baker.

He stood some fifty feet away, taking a leak into the pond. His hips (wrapped in filthy bluejeans, the denim stretched tight as could be) were thrust forward, the legs would often buckle in a muzzy, beery fashion. Stud was holding his pecker in an insouciant overhand fashion. His upper half was T-shirted, the T-shirt full of holes and rents, a deck of smokes rolled into one sleeve. I thought I was imagining things, I blinked and rubbed my eyes. Yes, it was Stud all right, the trademark Confederate Army cap rammed onto the greasy do.

Stud E. Baker took the cigarette from his mouth and flicked it
into the pond. He turned and caught sight of our little circle. Babboo Nass Fazoo continued his philosophizing unmindful, his back, and the backs of the bare-breasted women, to Stud E. Baker.

Stud had just finished stuffing his wad back into his jeans, but at the sight of the fan-wavers he pulled it out and flapped it gleefully. He dropped on to his hands and knees and started crawling towards us commando fashion. The Babboo was reaching the main point of his argument when, with whoops and shrieks, the fan-bearers suddenly tumbled over. Stud E. Baker pounced, he started licking them with puppylike fervour. “I own the pud that boils the blood!” he screamed. There was confusion and thrashing of limbs. Caterwauling and scratching of eyeballs. Babboo Nass Fazoo giggled. (That’s when it occurred to me that our spiritual leader was, in fact, severely brain-damaged, the fuzzy little groat will be giggling even as they tan his hide in Hades.) The Babboo’s henchmen came to get Danny, they were ex-Australian Rules Footballers, there was very little Danny could do about it, although I picked up a fairly substantial stick and managed to open a gash on one of their thick and numby skulls.

Some little newsrat must have infiltrated the camp, because this became big news,
HOWL BROTHERS BANISHED FROM BABBOO’S PARADISE
. Photographers came to record our mass exodus—Daniel and me, Dewey Moore (leaving behind a spiteful strain of gonorrhea), Sal Goneau, but note that Monty Mann elected to stay behind. With us on the plane, however, was the very addled Starflower. She folded her hands gently, protectively, over her swelling belly. She would give birth to Beth Mann, who would become drunken Daniel’s child bride, his final wife.

Daniel stared through the window at the clouds. He turned to me and grinned. My brother had one of the nicest grins ever, even though the Babboo’s gorillas had knocked out two of his teeth. “Well, Des,” he said. “I guess this plane’s headed for the Land of Nod.”

“Where?”

“East of Eden.”

Daniel held a bottle of Wild Crow, so I discounted all this as drunken blabber.

“Know what they got there, Desmond? Know what they got in the Land of Nod?”

“What?”

“Rock’n’roll, my son. Rock and fucking roll.”

“We are not talking,” I inform Freddy Head, “we are not talking great maturity. She is in many ways very childish. When crossed she gives a display of petulance that is quite bone-chilling.”

Fred is ignoring me. Wait, I am not being fair, he is simply single-mindedly trying to run a patch cord from the front of the console to some rinky-dink machine he’s fabricated. I am blocking his way, gesticulating grandly as I speak, waving a cigarette in the air. (Do you know, I think I
will
give up smoking the day after the Whale party, the habit has ceased to be enjoyable and is robbing me of my wind, ill as that wind usually is.)

“Excuse me, Desmond.” Fred holds the male end aloft. “The um, er, enhancer.” By this Freddy Head means the strange black box that looks as though it either creates fissures in the time-space continuum or dices carrots.

“Enhancer?” I give out with a snotty
harrumph
. “No one uses enhancers anymore, Fred. They are old hat.”

“I need it,” whispers Fred, “for the delphinoid herald.”

“The what?”

“Delphinoid herald,” the man repeats, staring at the ground. He blindly lashes out with the cord, hoping that it plugs into something.

“The sax, you mean?”

“Saxophone.”

“If you mean sax, say sax, Fred. We have to communicate.”

Fred Head virtually shoves me out of the way, he waddles over to his contraption and shoves the cord into a female receptor. He breathes heavily with relief, rubs his fat hands together. Fred looks at me and tilts his head like a bewildered hound. “Very nice.”

“Hmmm?”

“Très sportif
.” Fred grins. He has been taking Conversational French at the loony-bin.

“Oh! Oh, this.” I know what he means, I am looking rather jaunty. My lower half is bedecked in jodhpurs (Fay bought us both riding clothes because she’d thought briefly that we might take up equestrianism, a notion she abandoned at her first good snootful of horse) because they are baggy and comfortable around my fat thighs. Mind you, the circulation through my calves is constricted somewhat, greatly if one goes by the purpling of my toes. I couldn’t find a shirt to wear, so what I did was, I took an old satin dressing-gown, cut off the lower three feet and sashed it tightly. It looks a bit like a smoking-jacket or a karate
gei
. I am wearing wraparound shades and a pith helmet. I have trimmed my beard. The whiskers are still orthodox-rabbinical length, but they are uniform and approach neatness. Incidentally, I noticed that over half the hairs that tumbled into the sink were grey. I even took a few runs with the scissors into the ears. I have little shrubberies in there, tufts of gnarly hair. I hadn’t realized how virulent the aging process could be, I must muster my last reserves of dignity. I suppose Danny avoided all this, the one advantage to attempting manned flight in a silver Porsche.

“Why, um, er?” Freaky Fred is wagging his finger again.

“ ‘Why, um, er’?” His ineloquence bothers me a bit. “Speak, man!”

“Why are you dressed like that?”

“Why?” I clap my hands together. “No time for idle chit-chat, Fred! We must get this mixed so Sal can master it before he expires. I must say, you’re doing a very good job.”

Freddy grins and plucks up another patch cord. “I’m going to enhance the delphinoid herald,” he informs me.

“Very good.”

“It’s Mooky, huh?”

“Hmm? Yes, yes. Mooky. He rose from the dead and …” I shake my head violently, the fat on my cheeks producing loud
wubba-wubba
noises. The ringing in my ears has started (I suppose it is always sounding, but I identify a sudden increase in volume as commencement) so I reach over and power-on the tape machine. The “Song of Flight” fills the room. “I love those drums!” I scream gleefully. “The snare sounds like seaspray.”

Freaky Fred Head sings along, the two of us are beached whales, I join in with baleen harmony, and then suddenly I reach over and whack the bright
OFF
button.

“Fred,” I announce, “I’m going out.”

“Out?” Fred Head quakes visibly. “Why?”

“It is no big deal,” I claim, fooling no one. “I am merely going out for a constitutional. I shall visit a few of the local emporiums, make discreet inquiries. Perhaps I shall effect some purchases. Groceries, for example. Have you not noticed that you have been subsisting almost entirely on jelly-filled doughnuts, some of which have antebellum best-before dates?”

“When will you be back?”

“I shall be back when—” The time has come for truth-telling. “I shall be back when I find her, Fred.”

“How in the world are you going to find her? How are you going to find her in the world?”

“They used to set out in longboats made of reeds. They rode
the waves by night, navigating celestially, Cassiopeia’s chair to Orion’s belt. Necromancers sat at the front of the boat and examined the entrails of albatross, of seal-pups.”

Fred Head remains unconvinced.

“The real world holds no fear for me,” I assure him. “I know what goes on out there. Kingsley Charlesworth, the scurrilous knave, is secretly bedding his own stepsister Amanda’s twin cousin.”

“It’s not her twin cousin,” Fred informs me urgently. “It’s
her
. It’s Amanda pretending to be her own twin cousin so that she can sleep with Kingsley.”

“Deceit! Treachery!” I take a few deep, calming breaths. “Point well taken, Fred. I must never let down my guard.”

“But what about the mixing?”

“You can handle the mixing, Fred. Truth to tell, I wouldn’t be of any use. I can’t concentrate. She is a mousy little girl, for all her vivacity she is as emotionally crippled as the next guy, she causes me consternation and grief, but there you have it.”

Fred is thinking. When Fred thinks, he toys with his features quite ruthlessly, as if to rearrange his face. “I had a girlfriend,” Fred Head informs me. “Marsha Lem. And one day they took her away. And I thought, go out and find her, Frederick. I packed my bag. I snuck down the hallway at night. I even had a map and knew which road would take me into the city. But the nurse caught me, and I never went. But do you know what, Desmond? I knew the nurse would catch me. I didn’t tip-toe, I made a lot of noise, I knew that Mrs. Ames would step into the hallway and say ‘Just
where
are we going, young man?’ ” Fred Head shrugs, finishes his patching job. He flicks a switch on his strange machine and lights flash. “So maybe …,” he says—he aligns all the frequency levels, begins to shave off those at either end of the spectrum—“So maybe you’re telling me this because you think I’ll say no, Desmond, you can’t go, you have to stay with me.” Fred Head looks up at me. “Maybe?”

“Maybe,” I admit.

“I can make myself things to eat,” says Fred. “I can go to bed when I get tired. I can mix this music by myself.”

“Can you?”

“Go, Desmond. Don’t come back without Claire. I want you to promise because you owe me one.”

“I owe you one?”

“If it wasn’t for me,” says Fred Head, isolating track thirteen, Mooky’s delphinoid herald, “you’d be the biggest fuck-up ever.”

So it’s down the golden hallway (platinum, too, in my youth I was quite the rock star) and, laying my hand upon the doorknob, which feels icy cold, into the—

Now is the time to bolt if ever a time there was. Now is the time to race upstairs, climb into nappies and scurry between the sheets
.

—real world.

Talk about your bright sunshine, that orb is suspended about thirty feet overhead, it’s giving out with a Tarzanian yodel. My eyes, even hidden behind the Polaroids, shrivel into tiny annulated beans. And hot, phew, it’s like the sun has grabbed me by the collar of my makeshift smoking jacket and is demanding what
did you do with the money, huh?
Still, my eyes will adjust in time, and a few flaps with my arms direct a soothing breeze across my chest.

My front yard is ruinous, three or four species of weed are battling it out for possession, the only competition coming from garbage. Empty liquor bottles stud the lawn (I have vague recollections of pitching dead soldiers out of windows, hoping to outwit Farley and the missus), but I likewise suppose that my yard has become a nocturnal hang-out for alcoholic transients. I don’t care. What’s the difference between me and alcoholic transients? Several million dollars.

Agh
. You remember agh, don’t you, the idiosyncratic little kecking sound I make when deeply distressed? I make it now because what has appeared from around the side of the house but a snarling dog, fangs bared and hackles raised. It is a small
dog, an unruly collection of mottled cowlicks, but its teeth are pointy and its eyes are red.

I give out with a little of the
nice dog, good dog
, but this mutt is too intent on its yawping to heed me. Then I say, “Excuse me. Do you realize that I am Desmond Howl? I
own
this house. I don’t remember retaining you, and if I did in some drug-and/or alcohol-induced state, all agreements are null and void. Now, I beg your pardon.”

Curiously, the dog falls silent. It is quite the silliest hound I have ever seen. Its eyes are crossed, its tongue hangs out almost a foot, it is splay-footed, and the fur on its paws is too long by several inches. I haughtily step by it and stumble on my way. Even with shades I seem to be blind as a mole, I must hold my arms out and describe wide circles with them lest I run into the black iron fence that contains my property. And already I am sweating, I haven’t gone ten feet, this expedition was a bad idea. How about a nice refreshing flop in the pool, how would that be? But then, you see, what happens is, the mere thought of the pool conjures an image of Claire poolside. Her buttocks presented to Phoebus like an Incan offering. I must keep going.

There is a squeal, my feet get caught up and it is extremely lucky that I don’t go tumbling can over tea-kettle. That mutt has gotten underfoot, I curse like the next-door neighbour in a comic strip, “*@*?!!!” The dog whimpers, and without thinking I shoot a clownish hoof. I catch its belly in the crook of my foot and lift the cur into the air. The pooch adds a high, surprised whine. It executes several acrobatic manoeuvres before collapsing on the pathway.
Whap!
A black iron bar catches me squarely in the face, I reel backwards and flop on my keester. Another squeal, this is not going at all well, my nose is bloodied, my sunglasses are askew, a tooth is loose, and I believe I have rendered a relative innocent into a puppy pancake.