Count Geiger's Blues

by Michael Bishop

  “You’ve escaped from a psychiatric ward, haven’t you?”

  “No, sir. Would harmonize, as I was saying, your business with the educative mission of Oconee Tech, from which many of your customers come.”

  “What a high-handed crock.”

  “Try phasing in a few of my suggestions next week. If profits drop, go back to merchandising animal fat and cholesterol.” Xavier extracted another form and spread it out. “By signing this, you agree to give my program an honest try. Tradition’s a jealous master. Sometimes, though, one must change.”

  Bedichek puffed at his own forelock. “Yeah? Why is that?”

  “Try to throw me out.”

  Faced with Count Geiger’s intransigent moral authority, Bedichek signed. Also, at Wednesday’s lunch hour, First Stringers substituted a baked chicken sandwich for its pimiento cheeseburger, and broccoli florets for French fries. A VCR in the Bear Bryant room ran episodes of Kenneth Clark’s acclaimed PBS series, Civilisation. Further, these changes soon proved not only a public-relations coup but also a profit-maker.

  EAT WHERE COUNT GEIGER EATS, a new signboard in front of First Stringers read: STALWARTLY FOOD FOR SENSIBLE PEOPLE.

  44

  Nixing the Cutie Shoot

  On Thursday evening, again stripped down to his Suit, Xavier crossed the river into Satan’s Cellar on a fresh stalwartly mission. A full day in advance of the weekend, the place was explosively teeming. Xavier saw people in every sort of getup, from tuxedos and evening gowns to bedsheet togas and makeshift sarongs. He saw gods, satyrs, elves, hoplites, Vikings, Crusaders, pirates, cowboys, cops, computer nerds, movie stars, comic-book characters. Here, Xavier was just another mask in the crowd. For the first time in person, he was seeing some of the UC-inspired styles, the costumes of female stalwarts, that Bari had adapted from her February couture collection in Paris.

  P. S. Annie’s lay in a secluded and dangerous area of Satan’s Cellar, an enclave less popular among the slummers than the shops and bars near the river. Xavier’s Count Geiger outfit began to look even more splashy and out of place than it had in the alleys near the bridge. Among the bums and hookers here, he stuck out like a sore erection. The bistro was shaking. Hoodluminati country music throbbed from a jukebox as big as a 4 x 4 truck stood on its tailgate. Waitresses in ruffled miniskirts careened among the tables. The tangs of cigarette smoke and salad gas hung acrid in the indoor fog.

  Xavier paid his cover, asked to talk to the owner, and, after assuring a bouncer in a double-breasted suit that he was not a cop or a creditor, was led to a room off the main bar. Here, studying a tiny computer screen, sat D. O. Awtrey, a man who looked oily in spite of a blow-dried haircut and seedy in spite of his tweedy British clothes.

  “I’m Count Geiger,” Xavier said. “The real one.”

  “Yeah? And I’m Mister Spock. Awtrey’s my nom de plume.”

  Xavier assumed a nonviolent-resistance stance. “Try to throw me out.”

  “I don’t do wrestling holds,” Awtrey said. “I hire people for that stuff.”

  Xavier straightened. “Without my Suit, I came here a few months ago, and I saw young women being splattered with beer from toy rifles.”

  “A Party Hearty Cutie Shoot. We still feature it. Don’t use beer anymore, though. Makes for too sticky a clean-up.”

  “Please discontinue it, Mr. Awtrey.”

  Awtrey stood up. He was shorter than Xavier; shorter, even, than The Mick. “Ask me to stop eating. You want me to commit fiscal suicide?”

  “Uncommon Comics supports my efforts to reform and civilize Salonikan society. They’ll offset the initial loss of any business hurt by Operation Uplift.” He pulled a form from his belt and showed it to Awtrey. “Here’s their guarantee.”

  Awtrey turned aside. “Another loony scam-man. Follow me, scam-man.” He led the way out of his office and into the bistro’s salad-gassy murk. At a table on the edge of the main barroom, Awtrey introduced Xavier—“This annoyin’ dude claims he’s Count Geiger”—to a huge man with a burr haircut and a pointy nose. The big man wore trendy clothes, but his body cried out for overalls. “Count, meet Big Possum Screws.”

  “Fester Screws,” the man said. “Big Possum’s a nickname.”

  “My best bouncer,” Awtrey said. To Big Possum, he said, “I want you to arm-wrestle this guy. Prove, or disprove, he’s who he says he is.” Big Possum wrinkled his brow, but sat down again at the table. Awtrey pulled out a chair for Xavier, who, seated, stared across the glass-ringed tabletop at Big Possum.

  “Awm wrasslin’!” an onlooker cried. “Awm wrasslin’!”

  A cheer arose. People crowded around. Across the room, a patron reached down and unplugged the giant jukebox on a Mississippi Mudslingers hit. Xavier paid no heed. Big Possum’s biceps bulged like potato sacks. His forearms shone as thick and raw-looking as prize-winning kielbasa sausages. When Count Geiger locked hands with him, Xavier’s hand vanished inside a fist like a medieval gauntlet.

  “Go!” somebody shouted.

  Blaam! Big Possum slammed Xavier’s hand down.

  “Best two out of three,” Xavier said. “He surprised me.”

  “You’re beat,” Awtrey said. “Ambushed fair and square.”

  “Come on,” Xavier said. “I’ll start the next two matches with my arm pinned.”

  “Go!” somebody shouted.

  This time, Xavier lifted Big Possum’s arm and with an echoing crack banged it down on the other side of the table. Big Possum bent over so far that he was almost gnawing the table’s edge. His fans retreated several steps.

  “You win,” Big Possum managed. “Lemme go.”

  “It’s a best two-out-of-three, Screws,” Awtrey said.

  “Thisere fella’s really Count Geiger. I’m done beat.”

  Xavier released Big Possum, who sat up, rubbed the back of his hand, and ordered a victory beer for Count Geiger.

  The weekend Cutie Shoot & Crotch Potting Contest was less than ten minutes away. Two of P. S. Annie’s waitresses stood outside the showbar with cartons of plastic Uzis, AK-47s, and Armalite AR-18s, renting the toy weapons and directing the renters to a pressurized water keg for “ammunition.” Music boomed again: New Age primal screams, outrage raps, poke-ahs. Everyone but drunks, pokeweed addicts, and a few mellow gays had begun moving into the showbar.

  “Call this off,” Xavier told Awtrey.

  “This cash machine?” Awtrey said. “Ask me to sit on a curare-tipped tent peg.”

  Awtrey, Big Possum, and Xavier squeezed into the rear of the showbar. Tonight, four young women already strutted the catwalk in sheathlike minis that made them look like human candy bars. They processed in grotesque high heels on a platform hardly wide enough for one. The showbar’s mirror doubled their number, reflecting at ankle level the leering faces of the rifle-toting men. “Ready on the left!” the tuxedoed emcee shouted from a nearby dais. The men on the left raised their weapons. “Ready on the right!” the emcee cried. Every man on the right took aim. “Ready on the firing line!”

  “Stop this,” Xavier said, looking at Awtrey.

  “Fire!”

  A dozen tight streams of water rayed up from the crowd, turning the women’s wrappers translucent or clear, ricocheting from their bodies, splashing the mirror. Despite this onslaught, the women continued to pose and strut. Beneath their wet dresses, though, the piercing lineaments of nakedness shone: breasts, rib cages, pelvises, pubic bones. It was like taking an anatomy class in an encapsuled hurricane. Xavier glided forward, wrenched a plastic Uzi from one startled rifleman, and leapt with it to the catwalk. All four dancers gasped and stumbled away from him. Most of the men in the room stopped shooting. At a nod from Big Possum, someone in the main bar pulled the plug on Awtrey’s humongous jukebox again.

  “I’m Count Geiger,” Xavier announced. “The real one.”

  “Giddown. You’re screwing up our Cutie Shoot.”

  Xavier gestured with his water Uzi. “This is a tawdry and sexis
t exhibition. Its only virtue—let me stress only—is that it isn’t quite murder.” After this speech, all anyone could hear was the rasps of salad-gas breathers in the pokeweed dens.

  “ ’F they don’t like working here, they can always go somefuckingwhere else.”

  “They like it!” another voice cried.

  Xavier called for quiet again. P. S. Annie’s dancers book-ended him, two on each side. He asked each woman to introduce herself by name. The dancers complied, but as if taking their cues from either Awtrey or a salacious TelePrompTer. “Divinity Buff.” “Baby Kravitz.” “Sweet Potato Pye.” “Honey Melonz.” Each absurd alias got a lusty jeer of approval. “State your real names,” Xavier said. “Let them know you as persons with honest-to-God names.” “Darned if I much care to,” Sweet Potato Pye said. But the other women cooperated: “Dorothy Broda,” Divinity Buff said. “Beverly Crawford,” Baby Kravitz said. “Henrietta Maloof,” said Honey Melonz. “Oh, all right,” Sweet Potato Pye said grudgingly: “Suzi Pybus.”

  “Good,” Xavier said. “Answer the gentlemen this: Do you like being targets in these weekend Cutie Shoots?”

  “No,” said Dorothy Broda and Henrietta Maloof. “It sucks,” said Beverly Crawford. “It beats hooking on Chattahoochee Avenue,” Suzi Pybus said.

  “Do you want to do this next year?” Xavier asked. “Two years from now? Five?”

  “Shit, no,” Suzi Pybus said.

  Xavier turned back to the crowd. “They don’t like it.”

  A man yelled, “So what? How many of us like our jobs?”

  “May I get down?” Hannah Maloof said. “I’m cold.”

  “Hey, Hannah,” a man said. “You ain’t given me a chanst to warm you up yet.”

  Catcalls. Wolf whistles. Other zoological noises. Xavier helped Hannah Maloof, Dorothy Broda, and Beverly Crawford down the movable wooden steps behind the catwalk. The women dashed from there into a warren of dressing rooms screened from the showbar by a tall black divider hung with lacy brassieres, sequined G-strings, flaglike bikini bottoms.

  Only Suzi Pybus of all the dancers remained on the catwalk. “My mama taught me to give a full evening’s work for a full evening’s wage.”

  War whoops. Cheers. As if given permission, two or three men squeezed off shots at Suzi Pybus, who tried to shield herself by turning away. Other men started shooting, targeting the lizard scales of Xavier’s Count Geiger outfit. “Stop!” he cried. When no one did, he swept the ranks below him with his own fake Uzi, zapping eyes, probing nostrils, scouring the attackers’ mouths. Many of the men called for a cease-fire.

  “‘Men should be trained for war, ’n’ women for the recreation of the warrior,’ ” said a young man in a wet beige jumpsuit: “‘All else is folly.’ ” Xavier recognized him as Trey, one of the yahoos who had introduced him to this asinine sport back in the early fall. Trey was a reader of “Thus Saith Xavier Thaxton,” a yahoo able to quote bad Nietzsche secondhand. “We pay our cover, rent our guns, and take our best shots at the ladies ham-flashin’ it up here,” he said. “Who’s it hurt?”

  “And your name, Mr.—?”

  “Couvillion,” the redneck intellectual said. “Trey Couvillion. Tell ever’body your birth name, asshole.”

  “No,” Xavier said. “I wear this Suit to conceal my everyday identity. To increase my effectiveness as a champion of the city’s victimized.” One eye under Xavier’s hood fell victim to a fluttery tic.

  “What highfalutin chickenshit,” Trey said. Xavier directed a spontaneous karate kick at Trey’s nose. He stopped a half inch before the impact of his foot would have broken it. “Tetchy, ain’t you?” Trey Couvillion said. “One tetchy Suit.”

  Xavier knelt at the catwalk’s edge. He laid his water Uzi down. “I’m sorry. This atmosphere”—indicating the showbar—“does that to us, all of us. And that’s how it hurts us, Mr. Couvillion.”

  “The world according to Superwuss.” Trey pulled the water Uzi off the ramp and pointed it mockingly at Xavier.

  Xavier stood. “You married, Mr. Couvillion?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Children?”

  “Two. A coupla rug rats.”

  “If you have a girl, how old is she?”

  “They’re both girls. Eight and five.”

  “In ten years, the older girl will be about Ms. Pybus’s age.” That was probably being charitable to Suzi Pybus, but charity was a virtue. “Go on then. Take a shot at the lady.”

  Trey glanced around suspiciously. “Me?”

  “Need some help? Want us to call in your five-year-old?”

  “Listen—”

  Providentially, Suzi Pybus, now wet and cold, began to tremble. A hambone-shaped bruise stood out on her thigh like a USDA meat stamp. Otherwise her legs looked spindly and girlish. Xavier asked the man beside Trey to hand up his jacket, and when the man did so, Xavier wrapped it around Ms. Pybus’s shoulders. Still shaking, she pulled it tight. “Come on, Mr. Couvillion,” Xavier said. “Shoot.”

  Trey looked around. “I would if they’d turn the damned music back on. A Cutie Shoot needs music.” He laid the toy rifle back on the catwalk and pocketed his fists.

  Xavier turned to Ms. Pybus and took her hand. Going to one knee before her, he recited from memory:

  “I saw her upon nearer view,

  A Spirit, yet a Woman too! . . .

  A Being breathing thoughtful breath,

  A Traveler between life and death;

  The reason firm, the temperate will,

  Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;

  A perfect Woman, nobly planned,

  To warm, to comfort, and command,

  And yet a Spirit still, and bright

  With something of angelic light.”

  After a pause, Xavier said, “Wordsworth.”

  Visible even through Suzi Pybus’s pancake makeup was the first faint stain of a blush. No one in the showbar moved. “That’s not me,” she said. “A perfect woman. A woman bright with . . . with something angelic.”

  “But it is you,” Xavier told her.

  Turning her face away, Suzi Pybus shook her head.

  Xavier stood and pulled Ms. Pybus to him. “Don’t sell yourself short. Go backstage. Towel off. Get warm.” He helped her down to the narrow aisle leading to the dressing rooms. Facing the crowd again, he readied himself for catcalls and boos. Almost singlehandedly, he had put an early end to their Cutie Shoot. But the men staring up at him showed him either blank or puzzled faces. D. O. Awtrey, muttering audibly, pivoted and stalked back through the bar to his office, and Big Possum Screws, with a look of amiable indifference, watched him go.

  “Next Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights,” Xavier announced, “P. S. Annie’s will offer three introductory seminars, all free, on topics of lasting importance to our male citizenry: Ennobling Images of Women in Modern Suthren Lit; Latter-Day Etiquette and Sensitivity Training for Male Chauvinist Pigs; and Essential Points of Feminist Concern for the Twenty-first Century. Bring your friends.”

  “You gotta be kidding,” a man up front said.

  “I’m Count Geiger,” Xavier told him. “If you aren’t here, I’ll seek you out to know why.”

  “Whoooaa,” two or three men said together.

  Xavier jumped down from the catwalk and worked his way through shoulder-to-shoulder bodies into the main serving room. At D. O. Awtrey’s office, he poked his head in and said, “Don’t fret this too much, Mr. Awtrey. We’ll find ways to better our city and to keep P. S. Annie’s solvent.”

  “Who wants to better our city?” Awtrey said.

  45

  Blue Fairy Dust

  The smokehouse turned to charred ruins in the welding-accident fire. The Therac 4-J—every part but the source canister that Missy had wheelbarrowed up to the porch—was unsalvageable even for scrap. Missy said that she was glad the smokehouse had burned. It may have held a few happy memories for Larry Glenn, of his boyhood and of his daddy, but to her it had been only a
dangerous attraction to Carrie-Lisbeth.

  Inside the trailer, Larry Glenn struggled with the Therac 4-J’s source canister. He pulled it out of the corner into which he and his brother-in-law had wrestled it. He polished it, wedged it into a heavy box, and gift-wrapped the box, which he hid in the bedroom closet. Missy didn’t miss the thing because she was busy getting ready for the birthday party—hers and Carrie-Lisbeth’s—that they held on the day between their two birthdays.

  On party day, twelve people filled the doublewide. The guests included five little girls from Philippi; Missy’s brother and sister-in-law, Ike and Claudia Burrell; and another adult couple, Larry Glenn’s best friend from high school, Ricky Stamford, and Ricky’s wife, Lulah. On the dinette table sat a three-layer carrot cake. The top of the cake was divided with a wavy line of brown M&M’s, with four candles on one side for Missy (each candle stood for six years) and four on the other side for Carrie-Lisbeth. Carrie-Lisbeth got up on a chair to study this outrage.

  “Mama ain’t four!” she said, red-faced. “I’m four!”

  “Whoa,” Larry Glenn said. He picked Carrie-Lisbeth up by the waist and carried her like a big plastic doll to the sofa. “Set right there while I get you somepin to open.”

  In the master bedroom, he and Ike wrestled out the gift-wrapped canister. In the living room again, they set the box in front of Carrie-Lisbeth. Claudia, Ricky, Lulah, and five little girls stood in a semicircle behind the coffee table. Missy returned from the deck, where she’d just fed a stray dog a couple of burned franks.

  “Is that what I think it is?” she said.

  “Shhhh,” Larry Glenn said.

  It was working. While Carrie-Lisbeth popped the ribbon off and shredded the wrapping paper, everyone else sang, “Happy birthday to you.” Although Larry Glenn had to help, Carrie-Lisbeth finally got the oil-stained automobile-battery box off the canister. She eyed the futuristic-looking metal object as if it had come from the Moon. Maybe she thought it needed a handle. Maybe she thought it should play “Pop! Goes the Weasel.” She plunged her arm into the box, to feel around for anything else hidden in it. Finding nothing, she knocked the box to the rug and kicked it with her heel.