“Not to mention the poor little satanic sucker’s leg.”
“Right.”
“Christ on a Kawasaki.”
“Fnoof.”
“....”
“Lenore tell you all that?”
“I think we’re getting close. I sense the closeness of Cleveland. Can you smell that? A smell like removing the lid from a pot of something that’s been left in one’s refrigerator just a little too long?”
“Can’t say as I smell anything but beer and Wrigley’s Spearmint, R.V.”
“I’m just acutely sensitive to the odor of Cleveland, I suppose. I have a monstrously sensitive sense of smell.”
“....”
“Though not as sensitive as some people I could name.”
“So what books have y‘all published? Have I likely read some books you put out?”
“We’re definitely getting close. See all the dead fish? The density of the fish goes up significantly as we approach shore. It looks as if I’m to be spared a sludge-death yet again.”
“Uh-huh.”
“....”
“So you think I can get a temporary room at this house Lenore lives at, right?”
“I’m practically positive. The young lady who lives directly below Lenore and her roommate Ms. Mandible will be involuntarily out of her apartment for at least three months, guaranteed. Mrs. Tissaw will be predictably anxious to ensure occupancy and so rent payment for that period.”
“How come you know for sure the little lady’s gone for three months?”
“She works for Lenore’s sister, Clarice, who now owns a chain of tanning parlors in the area. There was a horrible accident. The girl will be all right, but will require at least three months of hospitalization and continual Noxzema treatments.”
“You mean ... ?”
“Yes. Tanning accident.”
“Bad news.”
“Yes. But at least an available apartment, cheap. And your assignment with the firm cannot possibly last for more than three months, barring utter disaster.”
“OK by me.”
“Andrew, listen, may I ask a question?”
“Shoot.”
“Will Mindy be coming out to join you? You have told her the developments—she does know where you’re going to be, doesn’t she? What exactly is the Mindy situation?”
“R.V., look and listen. It’s like I told you, I just felt like I had to get out for a while. Breathe some temporarily Melinda-Sue-free air. She and I had a bit of a tiff before I drove up to school, I make no bones. But it’s more’n that. To my mind there’s just this temporary lack of wonderfulness about our whole relationship.”
“....”
“So things are just temporarily up in the air.”
“....”
“And no, I didn’t exactly call her from school, I didn’t tell her I’d run into y‘all and was coming out here to do some work. But she’ll be able to find out when she wants. I had to leave my car with Coach Zandagnio, who was my lacrosse coach, and sort of my mentor, at school, and I told him the whole story. And Melinda-Sue knows that if anybody knows where I would have gone from school, it’s old Stenetore, ’cause she knew him too, he went to our wedding when she got out of school; he gave us a gravy boat.”
“You played lacrosse at Amherst?”
“I was a lacrosse-playing fool.”
“Always struck me as a staggeringly savage game.”
“A truly and completely kick-ass game. A game that kicks ass.”
“I see.”
“....”
“Lenore darling, are you awake?”
“Fnoof.”
“Girl can do some serious sleeping.”
“May I be explicit, here, for a moment, Wang-Dang?”
“Draw and fire, R. V.”
“I am passionately, fiercely, and completely in love with Lenore. She is not quite as explicitly my fiancée as I may have inadvertently led you to believe in the Flange, but she is nevertheless mine. I have a bit of a jealousy problem, I’m told. My setting in motion the process of your possibly temporarily sharing a building with Lenore, actually, to be honest, my inviting you to come and temporarily enter our lives and work for Frequent and Vigorous, at all, was predicated on the understandable assumption that you were emotionally involved with and attached to Mindy Metalman, a woman who, just let me say in all candor, strikes me as the sort of woman an attachment to whom on, for example, my part would leave me completely uninterested in any and all of the world’s other females. Do you get my drift?”
“Go on.”
“Then the drift now becomes a tide, and I say that, in light of what I now know, given what seems to be at least a partial and temporary unattachment to your wife, Mindy, a past that includes an acquaintance with Lenore, under whatever circumstances, prior to my own, and at least clear verbal evidence of vigorous hormonal activity on your part, I feel I can be truly comfortable only in the context of an explicit recognition on your part of the fact that Lenore is mine, and thus out of bounds, that as I am to be regarded as a sort of brother, or uncle, whatever you will, so Lenore is to be regarded by you as a sort of sister, or aunt, with whom any sort of attempted romantic involvement is and would be entirely unthinkable.”
“....”
“There.”
“Damned if you’re not the most articulate little rooster I ever heard crow.”
“....”
“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a tiny bit hurt by the idea that I might do something like what you’re afraid of to a Psi Phi brother, to an Amherst uncle. But to put your mind at rest ... your mind isn’t quite at rest, here, is it?”
“It can be put so with utter ease, by you.”
“OK, then let me just say, right here, that I give you my word of honor as an alumni of the single finest undergraduate institution in the land that I will not harbor any but the most honorable of thoughts toward your woman.”
“I’m all too aware that it’s silly, but could you promise not to take her away?”
“R.V., I promise not to take her away.”
“Thank you. Well there. That’s out of the way.”
“You all right? Your forehead’s wet as hell. You want to use my hankie?”
“No thank you. I have my own.”
“Gentlemen, the captain asks that you please refasten your seat belts for landing.”
“My ears are rumbling like mad.”
“You wouldn’t by any chance want to help me with my particular belt, here, ma‘am, would you?”
“Ixnay—ilotpay.”
“....”
“Fnoof.”
“Lenore.”
“Fnoof. What?”
“Damned if you can’t sleep up a storm, Lenore.”
“What time is it?”
“We’re apparently preparing to land.”
“Boy am I tired.”
“Sweet dreams?”
“I’m not sure. My mouth tastes like a barn. I would kill for a shower. ”
“Have some gum.”
“Want to try some Skoal?”
“Not for anything in the world.”
“Lenore, my ears are in their own private hell.”
“Poor Rick. What can I do to help?”
“Perhaps a bit of a temple massage ...”
“Let me just get my big old carcass out of the way, here ...”
/b/
By the time Rick dropped Lenore and Wang-Dang Lang off near the Tissaws’ it was almost four, and beginning to mist a little, so that even though it wasn’t very cold Lenore could see her breath, and Lang’s. Rick dashed off to attend to some affairs at Frequent and Vigorous, but promised, as he dropped them a few hundred yards from the oral surgeon’s big gray house, to be back as soon as possible to take them both to dinner.
“Super,” said Lenore.
“Straight up,” said Lang.
The reason Rick had to drop Lenore and Lang off near, rather than at, the Tissaws’ was
that the street all around the house was totally clogged with cars, and especially vans. A lot of the vans were white, with the ornate letters P.W.G. on the sides, in red. Lenore had never seen the street so crowded.
“I’ve just never seen the street so crowded,” Lenore said.
“Don’t suppose all these folks are here to try to sublet Misty Schwartz’s room, do you?” said Lang.
“Not a chance.”
“Must be a really bitching party going on around here, then,” said Lang.
“On a Tuesday afternoon?”
“My kind of neighborhood.”
As they went up the walk, Lenore saw that the Tissaws’ front door was propped partly open by a network of thick black cables that led out from the backs of two of the white P.W.G. vans—vans parked halfway onto the grass of the Tissaws’ lawn—and disappeared into the house. Lenore all of a sudden heard what was unmistakably Candy Mandible shout something from her third-story window, a window that looked strangely lit up, right now, and actually had a bit of a tiny rainbow-doughnut around it in the cool wet air, and then from the front porch Lenore heard Candy running down the stairs of the house to meet them at the door.
“Lenore I swear to God you will just not believe it,” said Candy.
“What the heck is going on here?” Lenore said, looking around. “Are we having sewer trouble?”
“Not exactly, come on, it’s Vlad the Impaler,” Candy said, starting to try to pull Lenore toward the stairs, up which the black cables from the vans ran and disappeared from sight. Candy was wearing that violet dress.
“Hey, ho, and hello,” Lang said to Candy. He hefted the suitcases.
“Hi,” said Candy, barely looking at Lang. “Lenore, come on. You’ll flip and die!”
“What can Vlad the Impaler have to do with vans and letters and cables?”
“Mrs. Tissaw heard him say things, God knows what, really, and she just freaked out.” One of the shoulder straps of the violet dress had slipped off Candy’s shoulder. Lang hefted the suitcases again. “She’s getting him on television. Well, religious television, on cable. But still, television.”
“Television?”
“Vlad the Impaler?” said Wang-Dang Lang.
“My bird,” Lenore said. “Who is now troublingly and also obscenely able to talk.” She turned to Candy. “Who gave permission for him to get put on television?”
“Mrs. Tissaw says it’s in lieu of the bill for the chewed wall and the guano-damage to the floor, which she knows you can’t pay because she talked to Prietht at the board and Prietht very helpfully told her you’re broke ...” Candy stopped and looked up the staircase. There was noise from the third floor. Lots of it. “But look,” she said, “come on, they’re going to make him a star, they say. They say literally. ”
“Literally? A star? Of what?”
“Come on. ”
Lenore let herself be pulled. Lang followed her and Candy up the stairs with the suitcases, watching their bottoms.
/c/
“Friends, as subscribing members of the Reverend Hart Lee Syke’s Partners With God Club you can expect the entry of the Almighty into your own personal life in twenty-four hours or less,” Vlad the Impaler was saying, staring blankly into a lavishly unfamiliar little unsmeared mirror perimetered with tiny light bulbs. Lenore’s own personal room was full of television cameras and towering metal lamps, and bright-white light. The room was cruising at about a hundred degrees. Thick black cables, and panels with colored lights winking on and off, and sunglasses were everywhere. The brown velvet chair, the uneven-legged desk chair, the bed, and all the black corduroy cushions on the windowsills were occupied by people holding various sorts of electronic equipment, or thick sheaves of paper, and all smoking, and all tapping cigarette ashes onto the floor. Vlad the Impaler was in his cage, his enormous feet hooked over the arms of a tiny director’s chair, licking tentatively at the hot surface of his lit-up mirror. A truly enormous gray box of a television camera, with a little red light on top, was trained on him. Pushed back onto Vlad’s spiky pink mohawk Lenore thought she could see a tiny pair of sunglasses. Vlad the Impaler’s old smeared mirror, on its chain of Frequent and Vigorous paper clips, was gone.
“Holy shit,” said Lenore.
“You wouldn’t believe what’s been happening,” said Candy.
“One hell of a dress, there, ma‘am,” Lang said to Candy. “A. S. Lang, here.”
“Perfect! Perfect!” came shouts from a huge man with a white leather body suit, and an enormous beehive of sculptured black hair, and several chins. Red sequins on the chest of his body suit formed the letters P.W.G.
“Love it! Love that bird!” the man was yelling.
“Cut!” yelled somebody else, from the middle of the mob near the windows. The windows were smeared with steam, from breath.
“Twist my major limbs if that’s not Hart Lee Sykes himself,” Wang-Dang Lang said, staring at the man in white leather.
“Who?” said Lenore.
“It is, that’s Hart Lee Sykes,” said Candy. She got close to Lenore’s ear to make herself heard. “He’s this truly enormous wheel at CBN, the Christian Broadcasting Network? He used to host this show called ‘Real People and Animals of Profound Religious Significance,’ a sort of religious spin-off of ‘Real People.’ But now he hosts this incredibly successful show on cable called ‘The Partners With God Club.’ ”
“He’s A-OK,” Lang said to Lenore, setting down the suitcases amid a litter of Styrofoam cups and candy wrappers and butts. “My Daddy watches his show all the time. My Daddy thinks Hart Lee’s the spiritual balls.”
“Who are you?” Candy said to Lang.
“This is Andrew Sealander Lang,” said Lenore, “a friend of Rick’s and now a very temporary F and V employee. I’m supposed to get Mrs. Tissaw to rent him Misty’s room while she’s in the hospital.”
“And a friend of you fine ladies, now, too, I hope,” said Lang. “I—”
“Inside out! A camel! The bird has been touched by Auden!” shrieked Vlad the Impaler. A sound-man yelped and tore off his headphones.
“No, no, no!” screamed Hart Lee Sykes, stamping a pointy-toed cowboy boot on the wooden floor. “The next line is ‘All contributing subscriptions are tax-deductible.’ Cindy honey ... where’s Cindy?” Hart Lee Sykes spotted Candy by the door with Lenore and Lang and made his way over as all heads turned toward them. Lenore began to edge toward the door. Sykes towered over all of them, even Lang. To Candy he said, “Cindy honey, you’ve simply got to make the miraculous little incarnation behave. Now if you‘ll—”
“Reverend Sykes, this is finally Lenore Beadsman, who owns Vlad,” Candy said, preempting Lenore’s flight with an iron hand at the small of her back.
The Reverend stopped, turned to Lenore, seemed almost to be getting ready to bow. “Miss Beadsman, at ever so long last. The owner, to the extent that any single man can be called the owner, of this animal—dare I say animal?—touched by the Lord and guided by His hand to His humble servant, me.” Sykes’s voice had risen from whisper to shout. A murmer went through the room from the people looking through scripts and checking equipment.
“Jesus knew the sex was great!” squawked Vlad the Impaler.
“A pleasure to meet you, and a sincere expression of the profoundest gratitude for allowing us into your home and into the presence of an animal of vital theological importance,” Sykes was saying to Lenore, ignoring Lang’s outstretched hand. “Our friend Mrs. Tilsit has told me all about you and your profound relationship with your profound pet.”
“Tissaw,” said Candy Mandible.
“Tissaw.” Sykes smiled. “A bird through which the voice of the Lord has been personally heard by me to cry out for exposure to the American people, through the medium of, again, to my profound and humble honor, me.”
“Hmmm,” Lenore said.
“Lenore, Lenore,” twittered Vlad the Impaler. “Make me come. I need space, as a person. Let’s get rid of th
is disgusting unprofessional mirror. You will be a star in the electronic firmament of American evangelical theology! Like Charlotte’s Web!”
“Boy, he’s gotten even worse,” Lenore said to Candy.
“Worse?” cried Hart Lee Sykes. “Worse? The lady jests with us all, friends. Miss surely you are aware that your feathered companion has been touched by the hand of the Lord Himself.”
“Probably bit it, then,” muttered Lenore.
“Mmm-hmmm,” the crowd of technicians was rumbling at Sykes.
“... that he represents a theological development of the very highest order, a manifestation of the earthly intervention and influence of the Almighty comparable in significance to the weeping fir tree of Yrzc, Poland, and the cruciform tar-pit formations of Sierra Leone! Worse, she jests!”
The crowd of technicians laughed.
“Hart Lee, sweetheart,” crooned Vlad the Impaler.
“You live here too?” Lang whispered to Candy.
“Sshh,” Candy hissed. Lang grinned and put his finger to his lips, nodding.
“Mrs. Tissaw told you to put Vlad the Impaler on religious television?” Lenore was saying to Reverend Sykes. Vlad the Impaler was going to the bathroom on his little director’s chair.
“My little friend, the directive to afford this creature exposure to an American populace crying out for divine direction and reaffir mation came from a source far, far higher than Mrs. Tyson, or you, or I!” cried Sykes, standing on tiptoe in his pointed boots.
Lenore stared at Sykes. “Not my father.”
“Exactly, young Miss. The Father of us all!” Sykes looked around him. “I am the recipient of the mandate which all true humble servants of the Lord pray for, all their miserable lives. Thank you. Thank you.” Sykes made motions toward trying to kiss Lenore’s hand.
“It’s Tissaw,” Candy said wearily. Sykes gave her the fish-eye.
“Andrew Sealander Lang, here, padre,” Lang said to Sykes, taking the Reverend’s pudgy hand from Lenore’s and shaking it. “One of Ms. Beadsman’s closest friends and a deep admirer of her bird, and of your show, sir.”
The Broom of the System Page 30
