ALBERT COWDREY

THE BOY'S GOT TALENT

ALL YESTERDAY AFTERNOON I struggled with a science fiction story, and the story won: the plot sprouted superfluous limbs like a sick frog; crumpled paper fluttered from my desk like the leaves of a dying ficus.
At five o'clock I gave up and settled in front of the TV to watch the evening news. Inevitably I fell asleep, only to be waked by the bleating of the phone.
Now, here was something odd: when I fumbled the phone to my ear, I heard the unmistakable squawky voice of my nephew Josh Bullard. At the same moment, his face seemed to be hovering on the TV screen.
"They're after me," he gasped. "I dunno what to do. I gotta talk to you, Uncle Bert."
Still feeling a bit disoriented, I suggested we meet at the Circus Lounge, and he agreed at once.
"Where are you going?" asked my wife, Alice, as I passed the living room on the way out.
"Josh Bullard wants to talk to me."
"You mean he wants money. If you give him any, you better not come home. Ever."
"If only, my dear, you'd use your talent for menace for some useful purpose, such as extortion."
"You'd better make that silly story come out," she warned. "The bank account's getting low. And no money to Josh."
I slammed the front door.
The Circus Lounge is my favorite oasis, twenty-three floors above the hysterical traffic of Decatur Street in the French Quarter. Greeted by Jimmy the bartender and an impressionistic decor of painted clowns, elephants, acrobats, and dancing bears, I sat down at the revolving bar.
"How's the writing going?" Jimmy asked.
"Not. Sometimes I think I ought to give up. Nobody wants fiction anyway. I'd be better off doing a badminton column for the Times-Picayune."
More than wife or therapist, Jimmy knows what I need in such moods. He opened a bottle of malt-rich Mexican XX beer, set it down beside a chilly glass, and tuned his boombox to a classic-rock station where the Grateful Dead were playing "Dark Star."
The circus creatures picked up the beat, spinning toward me and then away. The bar was revolving, Jimmy was revolving, I was revolving -- kind of a planetary condition. I began to feel I was viewing the world from a great height. Or at any rate, from a tall barstool.
"Hello, Uncle Bert," somebody squawked at my elbow.
"Oh, hi, Josh."
Small, bony, ill-clad, dim of mind and obviously distraught, my nephew climbed onto the barstool next to mine. We shook hands, and I ordered him an XX.
Josh likes to begin conversations in midair, and only gradually let you in on what he's thinking about. Tonight his opener was, "It ain't easy on me, not being nobody."
"My boy, if there's one thing you are, it's nobody."
"That's nice of you to say, but things ain't been good. I tell you I got fired from Tastee Donuts ? When I discovered my talent I figured my life'd improve, but it just got screwed-upper."
The last item was news to me. "You've got a talent, Josh? What is it?"
"Walking through walls."
The beer was good. The bar was balm to my spirit. If I went home, what would I do? Fight the goddamn story with the proliferating plot? Watch television? Listen to Alice complain about our finances?
"Tell me all about it, Joshua," I said.
Josh didn't know how he came by his talent. Maybe he'd always had it.
"Mama brung me up wrong. She was like, 'It can't be done.' And I believed her. You coulda helped me," he added accusingly. "You write science friction and crazy shit like that. Instead, I hadda find out for myself." He explained that a few weeks back he'd fallen desperately in love with a sophisticated older woman of twenty-four. Heather Crome possessed remarkable beauty, major-type hooters, and a virginal air of cool remoteness.
"The first time I saw her, she looked like a great big bottle of antiperspirant," he recalled, breathing heavily. "I figured, like, when she walks around in August her crouch don't even get damp."
But Heather was less than encouraging. "She's like, 'I got rich guys gimme nice stuff. So fuck off, Needle Dick.' She said it real sweet, but even so I felt discouraged."
Josh began to study her habits, stalking her not like a determined rapist but like a hopeful stray in search of a home. She lived in the Quarter and her favorite nightspot was My Blues Heaven. After work, Josh hung about her apartment, followed her to the bar and lurked in dark alleys, getting threatened by paranoid panhandlers and rained on by cloudbursts. Then he'd follow her home and fantasize about being invited inside.
But on the return trip she always had an escort with her. She favored a certain type, hulks with evident bulges on hip or in armpit. These must be the guys who gave her nice things. Josh gave them a collective name. They were all Kong.
Josh tried to cling to his original vision of Heather as cool and virginal, but he had suspicions. Thinking about what the Kong du jour might be doing with or to her almost drove him mad. Tortured by jealousy, he'd repair to some less than A- list saloon and drown his hopeless love in beer until his money ran out.
The Friday night after losing his job at Tastee Donuts, he had his final paycheck to ravage and got drunker than usual. About two A.M., with pockets empty even for him, he lurched away from the Up-Yours Club on Bourbon Street into the broad, dew-slick lamplit emptiness of Canal Street.
A gleaming jeweler's window lured him. Inside stood a papier-mâché pig draped with pearls. Don't Cast Pearls Before Swine, said a discreet sign. Give Them to Someone You Love.
Longing desperately to do just that, Josh lurched forward until his shiny red nose touched its image in the glass. He pressed his right palm against the glass and his hand slipped through and his stubby fingers grasped the string of pearls.
He jerked his hand back as if he had touched fire. The pearls rattled against the glass and fell inside. Josh stared at his right hand. It tingled, then ceased to tingle. Cautiously he rapped his knuckles against the shop window; it was hard and cold.
Behind him a party of crapulous tourists staggered by, singing "Louie Louie." A street-cleaning machine passed with a roar of surf. The pearls lay heaped against the inside of the glass. The pig looked naked without them.
Slowly Josh slipped to his knees and then, feeling incredibly weary, sprawled on the pavement. He closed his eyes and quietly, gently, like a weary child passed out. He woke to find the vast blush of dawn filling the sky over Canal Street.
Such was the essence of his story.
Of course, I've expressed it in English, not in Josh-speak. What with repetitions, circumlocutions and lousy grammar, he took over an hour to convey what I have briefly summarized above.
I wasn't complaining. To hear such a fantasy issue from Josh's mind was like finding a peony growing on an ash-heap.
Spawn of my sister Nat -- an amiable, boozy slattern -- Josh grew up in a succession of trailer parks scattered around the purlieus of New Orleans. Nat rarely fed him, and her parade of scruffy lovers beat him up as a form of calisthenics.
Josh had a lousy life and he escaped it by telling ridiculous lies. When he was six he had an invisible dog; when he was ten he enjoyed an intimate personal friendship with Batman; at eighteen he was accepted into the Navy Seals; at twenty he was abducted by aliens. Banal stuff -- absolute rubbish.
Despite the wretched poverty of his imagination, I always had a soft spot for the boy. After all, we crawled onto life's verge from the same gene pool. The Gene of Prevarication that gave me a career writing fantastic fiction made him attempt to lie his way out of his miserable existence.
And now, suddenly, came this story about the pearls and the pig. All my science-frictional instincts were aroused. Four or five double-X's gurgled in my gut and I smiled blissfully.
Misreading my smile as mockery, Josh said, "I know you don't believe me, Uncle Bert. But -- but this -- this -- this is real."
A strained, desperate honesty throbbed in his voice. That, I thought approvingly, is the right way to put over a big thumping lie. The boy had found his talent -- for telling whoppers. After twenty-one years of nattering nonsense, he was at last ready to graduate from foolishness to fiction, from devising trashy falsehoods to inventing a finer reality.
I signaled once again for beer and said warmly, "Tell me more, my boy. I want to hear all about it."
JOSH SAID that waking up on the marble-chip pavement of Canal Street was even tougher than most waking-ups.
Knees creaking, he clambered to his feet. His mouth tasted like refrigerator fungus smells and his bladder felt like a soccer ball full of BBs.
Yet he took time to check the window. The pearls were still lying where he'd dropped them. It hadn't been a dream.
"Shit fire," he muttered, inadequately.
He stumbled around the corner into Bourbon Street and peed on a wall. Standing there in the roseate dawn, he felt that a new day was beginning in every sense.
After years of wandering and confusion, of two-bit jobs and poverty and scorn, he'd discovered his unique talent, his shtick, the thing that he alone could do in all the world. He was downright blissful as he zipped his fly and started the four-mile walk to the Midcity slum where he lived.
"Jesus God," he thought. "I can walk right into Heather's place and see what's going on with her and Kong. And hey, she wants nice things, I can sneak into stores after hours and get great stuff to give her. I just need practice."
In the apartment he called, with good reason, "the Squat," Josh closed his eyes and fixed his mind on Heather's image - - wasn't he developing his talent for her? -- put his arm through the wall of his airless little bedroom and drew it back.
Next he tried his right foot, only to get something of a shock when his shoe fell off, thumping on the floor. Then he remembered the pearls. His shoe wasn't part of him and his singular power over his own body meant nothing to it.
By afternoon he'd gotten up courage enough to walk through a wall. It was a scary moment; he feared it might stop his heart. But the sheetrock pushed through him, driving his clothes ahead of it with a dry, gently rasping, ticklish feel. He found himself standing nude on the lino of the tiny fetid bath, facing a rusty tin shower stall.
He dressed and repaired to the living room, a thoughtful young man. He was still brooding when his roommate, a jackleg carpenter's helper named Archy Doss, came home.
Kicking his steel-toed shoes into a corner, Doss muttered, "Gimme a joint," and collapsed on the semi-defunct sofa.
Josh joined him. As smoke rose in an acrid ribbon and the shared joint shrank to a roach packed with cannabis residues, Josh stumbled into speech.
"Doss, listen. Real early this morning, you know? Something like totally awesome happened to me."
"Christ, you don't mean you finally fucked Heather."
"No. Something else."
"Well, if you jacked off like as usual that ain't nothing much, unless you used a handful of warm Noodle Roni like I told you to. That's kind of awesome."
"Watch this."
A moment later Josh emerged from the bathroom with an Econolodge towel wrapped around his middle. The look on Doss's face was the first real reward he'd had yet from his discovery of his talent.
A search of the fridge showed no food whatever in the Squat, so they went out for a giant pizza called the Emperor Nero at Tarantella's. Josh's pockets were empty, but for once Doss sprang for the meal without complaint.
"Dude," he said through a mouthful of red peppers, anchovies, mozzarella and crunchy crust, "you gotta talent. So what you gonna walk into first? That julery store?"
Josh blushed. "Nuh uh. First I wanna go inside Heather's apartment. There's something I just got to know. You help me," said Josh, "and later on, when I start stealing stuff, I'll split with you."
"Deal," said Doss, and the two examples of young American manhood shook pizza-stained hands.
In Doss's ancient rattletrap van, they arrived after dark at block-long Talleyrand Street in the French Quarter. The curbs were lined with parked cars and the sidewalks with high walls topped by razor wire and broken glass. Quarter dwellers agree with Robert Frost: good fences make good neighbors.
One streetlight illuminated the far corner. Doss slid into the only empty space, by a fire hydrant.
"So that's Heather's," he said, viewing a door set between stone pillars under an iron lamp. "She live downstairs or up?"
"Down."
"Whatta we do now?
"Wait."
Doss unstuck a wad of previously chewed gum from the steering column, inserted it into his mouth and made popping sounds until the door opened and Heather emerged. At that he swallowed the gum.
After choking briefly, he managed to gasp, "Christ, look at them hooters."
Four yearning eyes followed the firm-fleshed opulent young woman until she rounded the corner and disappeared in the direction of My Blues Heaven.
"Okay," said Josh. "Now you know what to do?"
"You gonna walk through the door. When your clothes fall off, I pick 'em up and put 'em in the van. You find you a place to hide inside, and when I see Heather coming back I knock on the door to warn you."
The two friends searched the shadows of Talleyrand Street, then stepped out of the van. The spring night was fragrant with the scent of secret gardens. From nearby houses came muted sounds of revelry; it was Saturday and parties were tuning up. Someplace nearby a dog barked; on the river, a ship brayed a warning.
Closing his eyes, Josh approached the lamplit door, eyes shut, hands out in front of him like a child playing blind man's buff. The dense oak resisted and he had to lean forward to push himself through. Once again his clothing passed ticklishly through him. Then he was inside Heather's home.
He padded through an archway into the living room, his bare feet moving from the cool of polished floorboards to the tickle of deep-pile white carpeting. The light of a dim rose lamp bathed couches upholstered in zebra skin. An immense system of shelves displayed a sixty-inch TV, a quadraphonic sound system with speakers the size of coffins, and all sorts of elegant doodads -- figurines, china birds, Japanese dolls. The apartment was the most gorgeous place Josh had ever seen.
"Wowwwww," he murmured. "It's like Fuckingham Palace."
He passed into a bathroom with lavender tiles and little gold stars painted on a cobalt-blue ceiling and warm, moist air still fragrant with Heather's last shower. The curtain featured blue and pink bunnies humping one another. Josh tipped a bottle of bath oil into the palm of his hand and sniffed it greedily. Then, like a worshipper entering the holy of holies, he stepped into her bedroom.
A white armoire with gold unicorns for door handles. A bookcase filled with the Great Books. A king-sized bed with flounces and ruffles and a white Persian cat lying on a silk pillow, eyes wide, poised for flight. Josh spoke to the animal, then realized that it was a mechanical cat, the kind that walks and purrs and requires no litterbox. Glancing up, he was startled to see the bed, the cat and himself repeated in the depths of a mirrored ceiling.
He opened a closet door, touched a light switch, and gazed in wonder at rainbow-hued clothing and shoes enough to sate Imelda Marcos. He pulled out a slender drawer in a tall white cabinet and blushed to discover a treasury of lingerie. He touched the garments, not even knowing the names of most of them, and they slipped between his rough red fingers with the silken ease of garter snakes.
He was still fondling these strange and elegant garments when a lock clicked and he heard the front door open.
"The action quickens," I murmured.
The Beatles were singing "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." Darkly the amber beer swirled into my glass. I felt like Voltaire's man of Jupiter striding among the planets; like Poe's Dr. Hans Pfaal, or Wells's Mr. Cavor visiting the Moon. It was a science-frictional evening.
Sighed Josh, "I'd never a guessed she'd be back so soon, not in a billion years. Even a million. She musta made a date with Kong ahead of time."
"So what was your lookout up to? Why didn't Doss spot them coming and knock on the door?"
"Well, I kind of wondered about that. But later on he splained. He said--"
ALL THIS WHILE, Doss was waiting in the van. He'd collected his friend's clothes and dumped them in the back among his grimy tools, and now sat behind the wheel, chewing a fresh stick of gum. The car radio had died long ago, so he amused himself by trying to chew gum and whistle at the same time.
Then Heather hove into view. Briefly the comer streetlamp illuminated her and her companion. Doss stared.
My Jesus, he thought, this guy is two linebackers wearing one suit. If he finds Josh hiding he'll turn him inside out through his own asshole.
His hand was on the door of the van -- there was no latch any longer; he opened the door by hitting it with his shoulder -- and he was tensed to sprint to the house before Heather and Kong arrived, when something roared and sputtered and a light flashed in his eyes. It was a cop on a motorcycle.
Doss blinked and gave the cop a big false smile.
"Good evening, officer."
"License 'n' registration."
Fumbling desperately, he found the two forms. The cop viewed the papers under his flashlight, then returned them with his judgment.
"You cain't park by this here hydrant," he said.
"I'm not parked," Doss protested. "I'm just waiting for a friend."
"You wanna argue, I can give you a poisonal tour of Central Lockup."
"Officer, I'm on my way."
"Say, you ain't one a them fuckin' college students, are you?" the cop demanded with a sudden access of belligerence.
"No, sir. I'm a working man."
"Shitty way to live, ain't it?" said the cop and roared away.
By now Heather and her friend had disappeared into her dwelling. Doss started up his motor and began the slow process of circling the block. Everywhere except on Talleyrand Street itself, the traffic was impacted as a mouthful of wisdom teeth, and his progress was slow.
"And meanwhile, Josh, you were --"
"Well, Uncle Bert, like I say, I heard 'em come in the front door. But they didn't stop there. Heather headed straight down the hall to her bedroom, while Kong, he come by way of the bathroom where he started to pee. My Lord, you shoulda heard him pee! He sounded like Viagra Falls.
"I hid in the closet, but guess where Heather headed for first? So there I was, caught, and just as she come in the closet door I jumped through the wall at the end without no idea of where it might lead to."
UNDER THE SHEETROCK the thick wall of nineteenth-century bonded masonry felt gritty and resistant. For a moment Josh was terrified by the thought that he might get trapped in it and suffocate. He gave a frenzied kick and suddenly stumbled into a scene from a madhouse.
People with horse's heads, with hoop skirts, with suits of armor, with nets and tridents; men and women painted gold or silver, many wearing only a tad more than Josh himself. Lights flashing in many colors, and deafening rock.
A tall bony woman impersonating Morticia sidled up and took Josh's arm. Under a slim mask she had a wide raspberry- colored mouth and teeth like sugar cubes. Her breath was distilled Southern Comfort.
"Hey, that is a costume," she said admiringly. "But the invitation said Masks Required. Come on."
She led him -- feeling he had entered a dream; strolling naked among a crowd of strangers, none of whom spared him more than a glance -- into a small room where a pile of masks reposed on a table.
"Some people forget," she said, fitting a mask onto his face. Then she pushed him back into the party.
"Hey, Sybil, this yours?" she asked a woman in a Hillary Clinton headmask.
Through the eyeholes, two critical orbs swept Josh from head to toe.
"Nuh uh. Must be Cherie's -- she likes pipsqueaks. Kid, you oughta work on those pecs. And that pecker."
"Be nice," said the hostess. "Not everybody has the balls to come to a party naked."
"Ball bearings, you mean," said Sybil.
"Pay no attention, honey," said the hostess. "I like a man who's at ease with his own inadequacy. Wanna dance?"
Josh mumbled that he couldn't dance.
"Then let's go where it's private and suck some face," she said, leading him back into the dressing room with the pile of masks. It was while she was closing and bolting the door that Josh leaped into the wall.
Again the bricks and mortar were resistant. He felt the mask pass through his brain like a nagging headache and vanish. He was standing in near-darkness, amid a crowd of strangers in sinuous, somehow coordinated motion. The rock was, if possible, louder than before.
Somebody embraced him and drew him into the surging mass. Belatedly, Josh realized that he needn't feel out of place here: everybody was naked, and everybody was male.
"W-what's going on?" he managed to gasp.
"The orgy, Sweetheart, the orgy," said somebody behind him. "Can you spread a little?"
The smells of sweat and incense were thick. Everyone was heavily greased, so Josh was able to squeegee through the crowd and find another wall into which he plunged, head first. But when he was half through, strong arms caught him around the waist.
For a long moment he floundered, arms and legs waving ineffectually on opposite sides of the wall, while unseen fingers began to do the spreading for him. A desperate kick sent him head over heels into a flagstoned patio, where for a moment he rested, gasping for breath.
Far above, coolly ironic stars were shining, and down below Josh was just reaching the point where he could rationally evaluate his situation when a dense form detached itself from the shadows and a low growl informed him that his night's adventures were not yet over.
There was a Rottweiler in the patio.
"Well, go on!" I urged Josh.
"Uncle Bert?"
"What?"
"I was just wondering if you really, really believe me. Because for once in my life I ain't been telling you nothing except the honest truth."
I clapped my right palm against my sternum.
"I believe you, Josh, because I believe in the profound truth of fiction. The underlying, the submarine, the subterranean truth. The truth that doesn't lie on the surface, but surges beneath like an alligator making ripples in a carpet of duckweed. Allow me to buy you another beer," I added, waving at Jimmy.
Josh stared at me in utter bafflement. I think he relished my good will, without in any way comprehending what the good will was based upon.
"Now," I said firmly. "Back to you and the Rottweiler."
The dog looked in the dim light like a fuzzy battering ram with teeth. Josh had a distinct feeling that saying Nice Doggy wouldn't work.
Instead he gathered his weary legs under him and suddenly leaped up and sprinted for the nearest wall. He heard a furious scrabble of claws behind him and dove headlong.
Once again he did a somersault, only this time he wound up resting on his shoulders with his feet high above his head. A quivering banana tree had stopped him in mid-revolution. Looking up, he saw his toes outlined against the sky.
Cautiously he lowered his legs and righted himself. After orgies and Rotts, he seemed to have gone up a notch on the social scale. The patio was large and hidden globes backlit masses of white azaleas. Ten or twelve couples were seated at little tables on which candle flames quavered.
Polite, muted conversations were underway. A string quartet played something classical. Josh began to sidle along the wall behind the screen of trees. Then froze; an elderly man and woman were staring at him.
"I saw it move."
"What the hell do you mean, you saw it move?"
"That statue of David or somebody. I'm sure I saw it move."
"Either you've had too much champagne or not enough. Let's assume not enough. Waiter!"
The woman continued to stare.
"It's an absolutely rotten copy," she opined. "With all her money you'd think Dallas could get something better."
The waiter appeared with a fresh bottle and began the ritual of uncorking. Josh was wondering if it was safe for him to move on when the cork blew off and smacked him above the left eye.
"Ow!" he said, but the quartet just then began to saw away again and his cry of pain went unnoticed.
Since everybody seemed oblivious to everything except talk and booze and, possibly, the music, Josh began to hope that he could find some way to end his night's adventure.
Then the answer came to him. While everybody was here in the patio, he would enter the house through the nearest wall and begin a search for male attire, any male attire that would let him walk out into the street and find Doss's van.
Having a plan felt so good that he almost laughed aloud. The quartet was working itself into a frenzy and all the guests were deep in talk and the waiters were occupied waiting. Josh slid along the wall, freezing whenever somebody turned in his direction.

A tuxedoed bartender lounging near an array of bottles blocked access to the main house. But an ell projected -- slave quarters or kitchens in times past-- and Josh took a breath and pushed through still another thick Quarter wall into a narrow, dark space.
Something promptly whacked him on the shins, and when he moved something else jabbed his ribs.
"Ow!" he said again.
He was in a storeroom of abandoned furniture. Chairs were heaped on chairs, tables on tables. Slowly he worked himself through the maze, things passing through him that he never saw, nudging internal organs, shedding dust into his lungs and making him cough. He found a narrow stair, climbed to the top, slipped through a locked door, and emerged into a hallway of creamy plaster.
He was in the main house now, a Persian runner caressing his feet, oil portraits of sour-looking gents gazing down in disapproval at the little bony naked nobody in their midst. Feeling that his troubles were almost over, Josh sprang like a gazelle through a wall into a plushy boudoir, where an old lady sat, reading a copy of Vogue and smoking a joint.
She turned toward him a smooth, immobile face with a nose shaped like the business end of a cottonmouth moccasin and nostrils that ran up instead of out. Josh had never seen such a face and he stopped dead, gawking.
"Many lace fits," I explained.
"What?"
"Many face lifts," I corrected myself, realizing that I had, after all, had a lot of beer by this time. "Somebody gets too many, that's how their face looks."
"Oh," he said. "It was kind of scary."
"So what did the snake lady do when she saw you?"
"Well, she's like, 'Where the hell you come from, Sonny?' And I'm like, 'From the party downstairs.' And she's 1 --"
But I can't bring myself to reproduce any more of Josh's narrative style.
She said, "Yeah, right. I can just see you down there with that bunch of bores, sitting around in your bare ass listening to Mozart."
She added, "They probably think Moe's his first name."
Josh had assumed the traditional posture of a man exposed, crossing his small hands over his smaller private parts.
"Me, I'm Dallas Doolittle," the woman continued. "I entertain this bunch of prominent assholes because I'm a civic leader. But from time to time I just gotta take me a dope break. Sit down, for Christ sakes."
She patted a cushion beside her on a glossy divan with a hundred silken buttons. Josh sat down uneasily, as far away from her as possible.
"Don't think because you got no clothes on and this is my bood-wah, you can do whatever you like," Dallas warned him. "I don't rape easy. You wanna blow some pot?"
"Uhhhhh...yes, ma'am," said Josh. He had heard the phrase once before, in a Cheech and Chong movie.
She passed him the joint and he inhaled deeply. It was superb, a product of cannabis buds developed under grow-light in a secret attic by some anonymous genius of intoxication.
"Wowwwwww," he murmured. Dallas took the joint back and puffed reflectively.
"Now," she said. "Cut the crap, Sonny, and tell me how you lost your clothes and how you got in here."
"I come through the wall."
"You what?"
"Like this," he said and, half-turning, thrust his arm into the wall behind him. He pulled it out covered with whitish plaster dust, and brushed it off with slow, casual strokes.
"Oh, my God," gaped Dallas. "Oh, my God. This old brain's going. I've smoked too much of this fucking dope."
"No," said Josh. "It's my talent. I walk through walls. Can I have that joint back?"
Dallas passed it to him, saying, "You finish it. I'm off this shit till Tuesday. Maybe longer."
"This is summmmm powerful," he muttered, inhaling deeply. "See, I was in a house somewheres around here. It belongs to this lady name of Heather. I wanna get next to her but she's like, 'Whoa -- who needs it?' and I'm like, 'Hey. I do.' And she's like...and she's like...."
Josh lost the thread of his discourse. Dallas came to his aid.
"Heather Crome? She lives next door."
Dallas pointed at the wall opposite.
"I've tried to talk to that girl. I tell her, 'Honey, it's okay to be a whore, if it worked for Pamela Harriman it can work for you, but you keep hanging out with wiseguys, you gonna regret it.'"
With no joint to hold, her long thin right hand was free and she ran it down the rack of bones he called a chest. Sweat broke out on his brow.
"Uh, ma'am?" he said. "I don't -- I don't think -- I --"
"Whassamatta, honey? Lemme check this out," said Dallas, checking. "Chirst, how do you get it out to pee? Go fishing with a buttonhook? Oh, well, it's kind of cute, actually. Makes me think of diapering my grandson."
"Whoa!" cried Josh, shaking off her hand and jumping to his feet.
His head swimming from the superpot, he stared wildly around the room, at silken overstuffed furniture, at Dallas's ophidian face.
Then in three wildly uncoordinated leaps he reached the far wall and plunged into it head first.
"You know what, Josh?"
"What?"
"Tonight, for the first time, I truly feel that we are kin. You have devised a veritable Thousand-and-Second Tale of Sheherazade. Such richness of invention, supported by such a plethora of almost convincing detail!"
The Platters were singing "The Great Pretender," and for a few minutes I sang along with them, to Josh's evident embarrassment. To stop my impromptu karaoke, he said hurriedly: "It's great having you believe me, Uncle Bert. Lotsa people wooden."
I smiled upon him like a Happy Face come to life.
"Please continue, nephew of mine. You plunged into the wall, and --"
JOSH SAW the apartment above Heather's only as a brief, incoherent jumble of lights before falling head first through its polished floor.
Then he was hanging halfway out of the mirrored ceiling of Heather's bedroom over the immense white bed. Large and white too was Heather's upturned backside and, as Josh looked on in horror, Kong, stripped to his fur, deliberately swung a broad black belt and smacked her quivering flesh.
Heather twisted in pain and a kind of despairing moo escaped her lips, but no more, because she had been gagged with some of her own underthings and her hands and feet had been tied with similar silken bonds.
"CUT THAT OUT!" roared Josh in a voice he didn't know he owned.
Her tormentor looked up and saw Josh dangling from the mirror, bizarrely centered amid octopuslike images of his head and arms. Kong's mouth fell so far open that Josh could see two gold molars in back. Then Josh slipped the rest of the way through the ceiling and plunged downward, holding both arms stiff and fists knotted. Kong's nose crunched and splattered under the impact.
Together they crashed to the floor. Josh was up first, seized the belt and began to use it on Kong, who, blinded by his own blood and holding his dripping face in both hands, stumbled about the room, shattering bric-a-brac and crushing the mechanical cat, which perished with one despairing cry.
Then he lurched into the hallway and thundered to the front door, threw it open and ran into Talleyrand Street, where by one of those coincidences so common in life, though forbidden in all respectable fiction, Doss's van flattened him like an armadillo on a Texas highway.
Josh slammed the front door and bolted it firmly. He dropped the belt, returned to Heather's bedroom, and gently untied her. When he took out the gag she spoke to him in a voice as dulcet as the melodies of Moe Zart.
"Christ, Honey," she murmured, awestruck, "how'd a shrimp like you run that big motherfucker off?"
Later on, when a blushing Josh had applied Benzocaine to her injured hiney, and she'd fixed them both scotches from a wet bar concealed behind the Great Books, and they were resting together on her bed -- Josh sitting up, Heather on her tummy -- she had other questions.
"Where was you hiding at?" she wanted to know. "And where's your clothes? Say, ain't you that little jerk been after me to go out with him?"
He admitted as much.
"And if you'd a been with me," he pointed out, "you'd a been better off than with K -- with that other guy."
"I know," she sighed. "It's the only thing I don't like about being a whore. You meet such lowlifes sometimes."
Wincing, she sat up. Josh was fascinated by the hooters Doss had earlier commented on. One of them seemed to gaze straight at him with a moist brown/pink eye, while the other, sagging to one side, appeared pensive, dreamy.
"So what'd you do?" she resumed. "Sneak in here and hide?"
"Sort of," he mumbled.
"Why? Joo wanna watch me git nekkid?"
Staring deep into the amber depths of the scotch that was now numbing his brain, which was still imperfectly denumbed from the effects of Dallas's pot, Josh mumbled the truth.
"Nuh uh. I wanted to see what you was doing with those other guys. I got jealous because I love you."
"Love?" she asked, as if the word denoted some exotic mineral available only on the Planet Krypton.
"Yes, ma'am."
"Well, Honey" -- her voice was like wind chimes on a fern-and-flower-burdened Quarter balcony -- "I'm not into that exactly, but you just lay back and relax. I guarantee to give you a real serious fuck."
So he did, and she did.
"Really?" I asked. "You're not putting me on?"
"Nuh uh," Josh replied, modestly proud. "It only lasted about a minute. But it was real great, anyway."
"First rate," I murmured. "Absolutely first rate. The fantasy climaxes in sexual... sexual... whatever. Fulfillment. Ah! m'extase et mon amour! The narrative arch is now complete. Son, I'm deeply impressed," I told him. To my surprise, he started to cry. Of course, beer has that effect on some people.
"What's the matter now?"
"Getting some ass made me want more," he sobbed. "So after she went to the French Market flea market that morning and brung me back some clothes, I asked her could we do it again."
"And she said --"
"She said she was my friend for life, and she'd never, never forget what I done for her. Also, she don't mind me being kind of small, because big guys hurt and she likes a good tickle. But when it comes to sex, she's got rigid principles: any guys want to do it with her got to give her either money or nice things. And I just don't qualify."
He wiped his eyes with a bar napkin.
"Then, when I got home, Doss was packing. The cops didn't charge him with Van Slaughter because they were glad to see Kong out of circulation. But they warned him that Kong has mean friends and Doss might want to leave town for a short while, like the rest of his life.
"So I lost my roomie, too, and my job's gone, and I can't afford to keep the Squat and I want to move into that great place of Heather's and keep on tickling her, only she won't let me because I ain't got no money to get her nice things."
"What about stealing the pearls?" I asked. Yes, I admit it: by now I was sufficiently potted to be sharing the fantasy.
"I tried that with Doss last night, just before he left town," he said bitterly. "And I almost got my butt in the slammer. The store's got security cameras and gadgets with little red lights that blink when they see you and a silent alarm went off and cops come running, and I grabbed the pearls and pushed them out through the mail slot only the cops was there so I couldn't get them, and I had to jump through a wall to get away and Doss was supposed to be waiting for me but he drove off when he heard the sirens, and I had to run four miles to home with no clothes on, and the whole thing was like a total fucking mess, and now, Uncle Bert, the cops've got my picture and my fingerprints from the store because I couldn't wear gloves or a mask when I went in through the wall, and when I seen myself on TV tonight I called you up quick 'cause you're the only relative I got ever liked me, and what I want to know is this: can you loan me about four or five thousand dollars to run away and start a new life on?"
Do I blame myself for what followed? Yes. But drunk as I was, how was I to think, how was I to know? Indeed, I believed I was being kind.
"Josh," I said, "the state of my bank account, combined with the ferocity of my wife, won't allow me to loan you a dime. But I'm prepared to make you an offer I've never made to another human being."
He stared at me, blearily -- he'd also taken a lot of beer aboard, and into a much smaller body -- hardly daring to hope.
"Of late," I confessed, "my imagination has not been as lush, as purpureal, as it once was. Nor do I write as well. My demons don't terrify, my aliens don't alienate, my invented worlds look more and more like Houston on a bad smog day. Do you understand?"
"No."
"What I'm proposing, my boy, is that you continue to devise magnificent fantasies, that I turn them into salable fiction, and that we split the profits. I could guarantee you -- oh, say for the first year --"
Josh was staring at me in horror.
"Uncle Bert," he whispered in the most betrayed-sounding voice I ever heard, "you don't believe me!!"
"Ah, but I do," I assured him. "I have always believed in the extra-dimensional truth of fiction. You, Joshua, having been in a sense walled out of human life, imagine that you've found a way of passing through the barriers that surround you. Is this truth? Yes, a thousand times yes!" I exclaimed, slamming the bar with my fist. "Your imagination's truer than the ordinary -- truer than the commonplace -- truer than true!!"
But Josh continued to stare. His eyes made me uneasy; they were grayish-green, like sick clams, and like clams they gave one a terrible sense of complete discovery: once the shell opened, you saw the whole inside.
"Oh, no," he said, clambering down from the revolving barstool and almost falling in the process. "Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Uncle Bert, this is for real. This is the only real thing ever happened to me. I'ma show you. Watch."
"Josh--" I began. But Josh, lowering his head and extending his arms, charged the painted circus riders on the wall.
"No!" I shouted, and Jimmy yelled something too, I never knew what.
As I watched, Josh plunged -- there is no other word -- into the wall like a diver into a vertical river.
No quicksand ever swallowed a careless traveler more quickly; no tsunami ever gulped down a seaside resort more completely. A split second, and the circus riders and acrobats were all that remained to be seen, except for a little pile of grungy clothing settling into a heap against the solid wall of the Circus Lounge.
I dismounted from the barstool, staggered, fell, was helped up by Jimmy, and the two of us stood staring down at all that remained of my nephew -- a T-shirt labeled CONFEDERATE COTTON COMPANY; a torn pair of jeans; loafers without heels; the dirtiest white socks I ever saw; a thin eelskin wallet; thirty-six cents in change; and a brass key that probably gave entry to the Squat.
"Where the fuck'dee go?" Jimmy demanded, staring wildly here and there.
But I was thinking of the French Quarter twenty-three floors below us, choked with hysterical traffic. I turned away and lurched toward the nearest elevator.
As I fumbled my way into bed later that night, Alice stirred in her sleep and halfway woke.
"You get rid of your idiot nephew?" she asked.
"Alas, yes."
"Good riddance."
"Don't say that. He's dead."
She woke up entirely. "Dead? At his age? Of what?"
"Of lack of imagination. Of rank literalism. Of clinging to mere experience when he might have progressed to the higher truth of fiction. On a less astral plane, he died by falling twenty-three stories, passing completely through an RTA bus -- several hysterical riders were telling a cop about it when I arrived on the scene -- and plunging God knows how deep into the mucky subsoil beneath Decatur Street.
"He lies there now," I mourned, "embedded deep in the Pleistocene sediments, among the bones of extinct sea- creatures. It's a science-frictional ending."
"A what? Are you drunk?" She sniffed audibly. "You are drunk. Go to sleep. We'll sort this out in the morning."
Instead, I got up again.
"Where are you going now?"
"To write a story," I answered.
"At two in the morning? What are you really going to do?"
"Write a story," I answered with dignity, "because at last I have a story to write."