The Free-Lance Pallbearers

by Ishmael Reed

  COMMUNITY MEETING WHERE ARE OUR CHILDREN?

  speakers discussions committees

  symposiums Kool-Aid & lemonade

  I stood in the back of the auditorium. M/Neighbor was speaking to the audience from a lectern which stood on the stage.

  “Folks, Nosetrouble be back directly from his gotiating with SAM—but in the meantime how about a few frank pranks?” He began to slap his thighs and fuss with his trousers as he performed a mean hambone.

  “Aw man, quit shuking,” said one man, raising himself from a cot in the middle of the auditorium. “We’ve been waiting here for two weeks now and the kat hasn’t come back and all you do is throw a whole lot of empty lemonade at people. Now if he doesn’t come back soon we’re going to take things into our own hands.”

  “Have patience, my friends,” M/Neighbor said. “I tell you what I’m going to do. How would you like to meet a real live ghost? A man who spooked Rutherford Birchard Hayes’s biography and is gung ho about the lawd.”

  “Awwwwwwww ain’t that commendable,” said some of the ol sisters. The water pitcher rattled as the first poltergeist to integrate Cornpone University walked toward the lectern. But having no time for a matinee I ran down the aisle and jumped to the platform, wresting the microphone from his hand.

  Never one good at diplomacy, I blurted, “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, SAM’S EATING YOUR CHILDREN.” The audience gasped. “I mean, I mean …” (thinking of how brutal the language was), “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, SAM HAS A RARE DELICACY YOU OUGHT TO KNOW ABOUT.”

  “Man, what are you talking about? Babbling like that,” M/Neighbor said. “You’re supposed to be dead. Look at what this says,” he said, removing a ny tooth from his pocket.

  ACTOR MEETS QUEER DEATH IN BLACK BAY

  NOSETROUBLE STILL NEGOTIATIN’ MISSING CHILDREN

  WORLD-WIDE YAM RIOTS BREAK LOOSE

  MARINES SENT TO LATIN AMERICA, ASIA AND MOST OF AFRICA POPE ABDICATES

  “Lies,” I said. “Nosetrouble is not negotiating anything! And I’m alive and kicking,” I said as a fish jumped from my pocket and flipped about the stage until it died.

  “Now I suppose you’re going to tell us you swam the Black Bay?” M/Neighbor taunted.

  “Not only that,” I said, “NOSETROUBLE IS UP IN THE JOHN DOING THIS.” I screamed, raising my fist to my lips and making squishing sounds.

  “Aw man, you’re just trying to get publicity for your show,” M/Neighbor said. “Prove it.”

  “I’LL PROVE IT!” I said, yanking the sheet from the ghost who blushed and put his hands over his privates. His pubic hairs were shaped into a Smith Brothers’ beard giving him away to the audience who began chasing him and M/Neighbor off the stage.

  “COME OUTSIDE,” I shouted to the audience.

  We reached the outside of the auditorium just as the merry-go-round was kinda slipping and easing away from the curb.

  “STOP THE MERRY-GO-ROUND! STOP IT!” I shouted.

  The women ran and plopped themselves into its path. I leaped to the platform and unscrewed the head of an evil smirking steel droll and placed the infant on the sheet. In another compartment, I found a tape recorder.

  ALL HELL BROKE LOOSE!!!

  The man helped me as I tried to open the door of the truck’s cab. The door was locked. Someone came from the rear of the crowd with a blowtorch. We melted the door open and climbed inside to find an abandoned steering wheel.

  Surely the thing didn’t drive itself, I thought. I sat on the leather seats as the statue of HARRY SAM in the project park fell with a thunderous THWACK.

  Above my head I heard a light scratching sound. I turned around. Behind me were two doors belonging to a cabinet used to store tools and other gear for the merry-go-round. On the front of the door was a pinup picture of Betty Grable. I opened the door while two men stood on each side of the truck. Inside the cabinet, crouching, looking like the cat who had swallowed the canary—grinning and waving at us—was none other than Elijah Raven.

  “What are you doing up there, Elijah?” I asked.

  “‘Trickin’, Charlie,” was the terse reply. “You see, I drive this truck for SAM. Doing a little moonlightin’. Little does he know that I’m collecting box tops from his cereal right under his nose so that when the revolution comes we can pull a Quaker Oats gambit on the kats. Popping from guns, so to speak. Get it, hee, hee, popping from guns.”

  The two men on the side of the truck were not amused. “You gone have to do better than that, my man,” said one.

  I left Elijah in the cab of the truck biting his nails and surrounded by the men who were rolling up their sleeves—as Elijah tried to come up with something better than that.

  “UP TO SAM’S,” I shouted to the crowd, who now believed my discovery of sheer evil. We ran through the vapidness of SAM and to the Emperor Franz Joseph Park, climbing through the ol men’s possessions—the colostomy bags, snuff boxes, fake frills and moles. “FOLLOW ME!” I yelled to the crowd that lined the bank. “INTO THE DRINK.”

  “But those Latin roots,” someone said, “those terrible bloodletting plants.”

  I whispered into the ear of the man standing next to me and told him about the bottle’s secret. Pouring the remainder of the bottle into the bay I dove in and started plowing toward the island. Hundreds of splashes registered behind me.

  After the seven-mile swim we arrived at the wharf on the island. People were assisted from the water until everyone stood along the platform.

  “Now we’ll have to be very quiet,” I advised. “The place is heavily guarded.”

  We walked up the steps and reached the top of the wall. I expected stiff resistance, but to my surprise the pathway leading to the motel was deserted. We moved through the bush until we reached the top of the mountain. A handful of Swiss guards poured out to challenge us. They had been driven from Italy at the height of the Bingo crisis and were given freedom-fighter status in HARRY SAM. After their unemployment checks ran out they were hired as the household guard, the Chief Nazarene Bishop, the theoretician of the party, and the Chief of Screws, having been sent all over the world to put down the Yam insurgencies.

  We tore the Swiss guards to pieces, whipping out some of those trapezoidic switchblades (blades dat upon opening spring every which way), and put them on the kats.

  No one remained to guard the place but the washroom attendants in the bottoms. We reached the door of the grand John and slowly opened it. HARRY SAM sat in a wheelchair with his back turned to us. He was watching television.

  On the screen: the vicar of the Screws, Mr. Nancy Spellman (called on the sly “tail-gunner Nancy” by some Screw pilots) was having his swanky ermine robe and golden girdle rudely removed by some mean-looking Puerto Rican nationalists. Their children were eating Chuchifritos and rolling Nancy’s little fat butterball of a severed head around the room. In some unidentified port thousands of plumbers were drowning in oil fires while their battleships capsized in the background. In a Peruvian market place natives shoved yams and copper wire down the throat of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until his jaws split open (incendiary yams).

  Someplace else five hundred big black Gurkhas were gang banging Lenore who rolled her thighs, popped her fingers and enjoyed every minute of it. She smacked her lips and squirmed like an eel, punctuating these ecstatic cries with the comment, “WOW-EE. This sure doesn’t taste like tomato juice.”

  Da Chief of da Screws was giving his farewell lecture on a scaffold in Leopoldville. He was trying to explain that if they’d release him, he’d have his men learn Puerto Rican and Yoruba—but before he could start loll-gaggin’ and handing out white papers the trap door opened, two seconds before his scheduled death, and the kat kinda dropped and with a crraaacccckkkk, his neck snapped.

  On another channel Mile. Matzabald had been caught trying to make it down the Amazon River with a rowboat full of profits reaped from her Anti-Freeze Creplach Shows. The real headhunters caught up with her and waving a copy of
the Wall Street Journal shouted, “Come back here wit dat anti-freeze. Dat ain’t yo anti-freeze. Dat’s our anti-freeze. We sick and tired of you ‘mericans comin’ down here carrying off our anti-freeze.” They then gave her their version of the now famous Nuremberg War Trials which they called an “Anaconda Flop” (they were still savages, you see)—which simply means that the kat was allowed to row through the Amazon and flop about with them anacondas and after flopping if she still felt like bopping she could join their fires and listen to all the Prestige and Bluenote albums that the headhunters had snatched from all of the deadhead missionaries from NOW-HERE. They wanted to see if she was really that hip.

  So you see, things were very very shaky everywhere the eye could scan.

  SAM’s assistants were running around with hot-water bottles, ice packs and thermometers as they aided the ailing leader. I crept up behind him and put my hands in front of his eyes. He in turn put his fat hand on my wrist. “Is that you Miss Matzabald, come to take my mind off this crisis by giving me some of them good mechanical drawers?”

  He started, jerked forward, and sprung to his feet. “Hey! whad’s da big idear? You …” He continued to pant. “How did you get out of that Black Bay?”

  But before I could explain, the gnomes having got wind of their leader’s difficulty, rushed out and attacked the crowds. But they were no match for my greasy stompers who mashed them as if they were so many pesky little bugs. Rapunzel was in the corner holding off some wild-eyed bruisers.

  “Spare that man,” I yelled. “We owe him a lot.”

  “Look, buster,” Rapunzel said. “You don’t owe me no favors.”

  “Come down off your perch, Rapunzel,” I insisted. “I know what you did for us and we’re eternally grateful.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, giving one man a quick-as-a-flash karate chop.

  But another man moved in quickly and subdued the gnome. The little creature fought back furiously, even digging his nails into the man’s back.

  “Hey, wait a minute! Where is SAM?”

  While we were fat-mouthing about Rapunzel’s fate, SAM had slipped inside his John. I opened the door of carved griffins and gargoyles. There was the Great Commode! But I had no time to admire it. On the floor encircling the bowl were SAM’s discarded shirt, pants and shoes. Footprints tracked the tile near the bowl. Well, at least one print. The other was the mark of a hoof covered with blotches of fresh dung. Had he disappeared into thin air?

  I walked over to the bowl. There were heavy stains on its sides as if some object had squeezed through with much effort.

  “I know where he is,” I announced to the crowd, some of whom had dispersed throughout the motel and were helping themselves to SAM’s legacy.

  I ran up the stairs and out onto the path. Down toward the statues of the Presidents I charged, trampling twigs and cutting through the thicket. Some fingers were creeping over the rim of one of the mouths as an uneven flow of puslike substance roared into the Black Bay.

  Then a gas mask peered out as SAM, coming out of RBH’s trap on his back, chinned himself headfirst on the lips. I crawled out onto RBH’s nose. It was a long drop to the bay so I moved with caution. When I reached the edge where the fingers gripped the lips holding on for dear life—while I clung to the cracked nostrils of the President—I kind of lost my cool and stomped up a storm on my man’s fingers.

  “NO! NO! LET’S GOAT-SHE-ATE THIS THING.”

  But lightning struck his mask as the smashed fingers slowly slipped from the rim of the lips. The gas mask tore away as SAM fell back into the waters sending a geyser of spray many miles high while ripples fanned out across the waters sending tides to the banks of the Emperor Franz Joseph Park. For one brief second as the gas mask fell away from his face I caught a glimpse of it.

  NOW I WAS DA ONE. NOW NOT ONLY WOULD I BE THE NAZARENE BISHOP WHICH WAS AFTER ALL PEANUTS, BUT I WAS GOING TO RUN THE WHOLE KIT AND KABOODLE. ME DICTATOR OF BUKKA DOOPEYDUK. NOW DEY WOULD HAVE TO PUT DEM JOOLED ANTLERS ON MY HEAD AND NOW I WOULD BE DA ONE SURROUNDED WITH DEM TENDENTS WHO WOULD WAIT ON ME HAND AND FOOT AND EVERYONE DIDN’T LIKE IT WOULD BE SLUGGED. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA, DA GOLDEN BEDPAN WAS MINE NOW AND I WOULD BE DA ONE GIVE OUT DA BINGO SCORES, HAR HAR HAR.

  I walked up the path toward my motel, exultant, rehearsing the phonemes of UNNERSTAND and INNERSTEAD. I COMBED MY HAIR WITH A TWO-FOOT COMB.

  A noise came from inside the main ballroom where people were running around the halls with their arms loaded with SAM’s legacy-locks of Roy Rogers’ hair, Picayune cartons, Hershey bars (semisweet and sweet chocolate), spittoons, phonograph records, etc.

  But the fourth door had been opened. Deep tracks in the rug indicated that a massive object had been rolled from the room and into the ballroom. I opened the door of the ballroom. A giant smiling replica of HARRY SAM in a squatting position had been brought out. IT WAS WHITE HOT WITH ELECTRICITY! The people were climbing into the molten-hot lap and whining at the top of their lungs.

  “WAIT! WAIT! GET OUT DAT LAP! I’M DA ONE WHO’S BOSS! LISTEN TO ME.”

  On the other side of the room a familiar voice shouted, “STOP HIM! THAT’S THE ONE!”

  I turned to see a battery of microphones and TV crews wheeling in and out. The next-in-rank on the Civil Service list was being sworn in. He was surrounded by fourteen of his followers; little men in quilted jackets. Nosetrouble was administering the oath and Cipher X was pointing an accusing finger at me. I started to cop a plea but found myself looking into the barrel of a gun held by one of the little men.

  I was hung by meathooks in the Emperor Franz Joseph Park. It was televised nationally, narrated by Fredric March and written up in Variety. On the first day a weird boat moved up the bay. The entire student body and faculty of the University of Buffalo were riding behind on surfboards. They held hoopla hoops under their arms. They also carried some subscription blanks for the Deformed Demokrat (which incidentally had bought serial rights for U2 Polyglot’s long-awaited paper). Two men leaning over the bank waved to me. They were Matthew and Waldo going into exile as guests of the mayor, Steve Wolinski. His honor stood next to them munching on a thirteen-foot kabalsa. Steve was overjoyed. Not only were there plenty of snowplows and cement in the boat’s hold, but now he’ll be the hit of the Chopin Singing Society with the news of all the BECOMINGS and avant-garde muggle-smoking and head trips going on in NOW-HERE.

  On the second day of my swinging, I was visited by my parents. They placed a gaudy wreath at my feet, then made a request. “Bukka, we saw you on television and called up the television people to ask how much time on the air cost. They said that television is very expensive. Right, honey?”

  “Right,” answered my father, having added a Billy Eckstine shirt to his items of adornment.

  “We got the time chart to see how much air time cost. Way we figure it, you must be cleaning up. We were wondering whether you could turn us on to some change so that we can add an air conditioner to the sixth house we just bought to rent out.”

  “I didn’t receive anything, mother. Do you think that I enjoy swinging by these meathooks?”

  “Nigger probably lying,” my father said. “Soon as he get famous he forget about his peoples. Well, as my mother use to say before she flaked out, ‘hard head makes a soft ass.’ Let’s go, dear. The Donna Reed Show is on the other channel. We’ll fix him. We’ll support his competitor.”

  Just as they walked toward the subway Rapunzel came up and placed a gift-wrapped box of Gillette razor blades at my feet. I was touched. “I was on the way to Aqueduct and I wanted to show you my ’preciation for sparing me and to ask you a couple of pertinent questions. First of all, how come you let me go?”

  “The preacher said that you had stolen the secret of the Black Bay from Matthew and Waldo and gave it to him so that he might save us. Where did SAM get ahold of the bottle that cleared the Black Bay, Rapunzel?”

  “SAM thought that if things ever got hot, he�
��d have to take it on the lam. Like if GOAT-SHE-ATE-SHUNS failed or something. So he had the Counter Insurgency Foundation invent this formula what would work if he ever had to swim the Black Bay. They worked closely with this ol dame who was corresponding—”

  “O, no, no, no. That old witch again!” My father-in-law’s mother would be the death of me yet.

  “Well, anyway, Bukka, tanks again.”

  “Wait a minute, Rapunzel,” I asked. “Why did you bother to save me?”

  “I don’t know. I ask myself that all the time. Why did I stick my neck out? Maybe it’s because you had balls and most of the kats who came up there were always talking about SAM behind his back but when they were with him they were kissing his ass all the time. You stood up to the guy. Which reminds me,” Rapunzel continued, “there was somethin’ else puzzlin’ me and it confused SAM too but he didn’t say anything to you about it because he thought it was some special custom your people had, and didn’t want to seem ignorant about it. What was that Nazareeny thing you kept yapping about?”

  “Well, Rapunzel, it’s a long story,” I began. “It all started when I stood outside my dean’s office when he was pushing this ball of manure around the world by his nose. … I mean, you see, these kids were on an elevator one day fighting with clipboards and they disappeared. … You see, there was this thing stuck in my frig and it asked could I arrange an appointment for it with SAM. … O, no, that’s not the way. What’s the use?” I said, giving up the ghost, as the little man removed his derby and bowed his head.

  On the night of the third day, the darkness surrounding out-of-sight became a horrifying yellow. Hundreds of eyeholes encircled NOW-HERE. It was the Free-Lance Pallbearers. (Better late den never.) They had come to cut me down. But you see they couldn’t get through. There was this great ball of manure suspended above Klang-a-Lang-a-Ding-Dong. Held down by spikes and rope it stank to high heaven. The Pallbearers consulted the maps provided by the martyred neighbor’s son and his sidekick, Joel O. A little figure hobbled on crutches moving through these deadly professionals. It was U2 Polyglot making his way toward a mailbox behind the Free-Lance Pallbearers. His arm was in a sling. He had been winged while U-twoing through Indochina but nothing can stand in the way of scholarship.