“Dessert time,” Claudia said. “Cake and ice-cream time.”
“Yaaaay!” the little girls cried. Along with Claudia, Lulah, and Carrie-Lisbeth’s friends, Missy went to the kitchen to slice the carrot cake and to lay a scoop of Neapolitan ice milk on every slice. Luckily, these desserts grabbed the girls’ attention, and eating together—scattering crumbs around, finger-printing the furniture with sludgy ice milk—kept them all busy.
With difficulty, Larry Glenn and Ike picked up the canister and led Ricky out the kitchen door to the deck. They sat down on the steps to the yard, each man at a different level, and Larry Glenn, who was wearing his tool belt, worked the top off the Therac 4-J canister with a screwdriver. He removed from the source canister a slightly smaller, but still heavy, metal capsule. “A pregnant paint can?” Ike said. “And its ’iddy-biddy baby?” Ike was a roofer; Ricky, an assistant to the supervisor of Philippi’s waterworks.
“Right-o.” Larry Glenn worked to prise open the object that had lain like a silver fetus in the canister’s stainless-steel womb. Inside the capsule was a chalky cake with a bluish shine. The sight of this clumped-together powder or salt brightened Larry Glenn’s mood, reminding him of sequins on a baton twirler’s costume, or the blue eye shadow of the hootchy-kootchy girls who showed up at the Silvanus County Fair every October.
“And what the hell’s that?” Ricky asked. He and Ike moved up a step so they could see into the unlidded capsule.
“Fairy dust,” Larry Glenn said. “Yeah. Blue Fairy dust.”
About once a week, Missy told Carrie-Lisbeth a good-night story about Little Rabbit Frou-Frou and the Blue Fairy. The story ended with the Blue Fairy pissed off at Little Rabbit Frou-Frou for beating up the field mice in the meadow. “Down came the Blue Fairy,” Missy would croon in a sticky-sweet sing-song voice: “She picked up Little Rabbit Frou-Frou and she BOPPED him on the head.” Carrie-Lisbeth would giggle like crazy. Listening in on the story, Larry Glenn always imagined the Blue Fairy dropping to the meadow in a halo of blue sparkles.
Carrie-Lisbeth slammed through the screen door with Missy and two of her friends from town. Sticky-fingered, frosting-smeared, she leaned over Larry Glenn’s shoulder to see what he was showing Ike and Ricky. “Oooh, Daddy. What is it?” She stuck a finger into the salt cake. Larry Glenn caught her hand and tilted his head back to give her a loud smacking kiss on the chin. “Yuck,” she said, wiping her face.
“Just keep your fingers out, okay? It’s part of your birthday present, doodle-bug. It’s magic.”
“What is it—really?” At the deck’s edge, Missy looked down over Larry Glenn’s and Carrie-Lisbeth’s shoulders, the other girls flanking her like cherubs.
“Blue Fairy dust.” Larry rubbed a pinch of the powder on Carrie-Lisbeth’s face: a stripe down her nose, a spot for each cheek, a thumb smear on her forehead. Even in daylight, the stuff gleamed glittery blue. His fingertip was like a firefly doing skywriting stunts before her eyes. Carrie-Lisbeth was tickled to the point of going hyper. Crooning, “Down came the Blue Fairy, down came the Blue Fairy,” Larry Glenn divided the sparkling cake into lumps for Ike and Claudia, Ricky and Lulah, and Missy and him. Later, all but two of the little girls who banged out onto the porch to see what the fuss was about begged for makeup jobs too. All in all, the Blue Fairy dust was a big hit. Even the wives tricked themselves out in the carnival glitter, then served the chattering girls, and their giddy husbands, more carrot cake and ice milk.
That night, Carrie-Lisbeth fell asleep with a glowing piece of salt cake under her pillow, while in the doublewide’s largest bedroom Larry Glenn and Missy made love in an arousing dazzle that made them both feel like characters in an old Disney flick: Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty.
Afterward, tight against Missy’s warm backside, Larry Glenn drifted off thinking that this had been one helluva day. . . .
46
Outings
A mild and pleasant day. At Zoo Salonika, Xavier and Mikhail stood at the rail-capped stucco wall enclosing the moat around Gorilla Island. On the grassy island, a silverback named Mighty Clyde sat on a teenage male, Si, who had annoyed him, pinning him to the turf. Heedless of Si’s whimpers, Mighty Clyde licked from his hairy fingers all the runamok ants gathered from a nearby anthill. In both activities, rebuking Si and digging ants, Mighty Clyde was serene but persistent.
“You closed P. S. Annie’s Cutie Shoot?” said The Mick, gripping the guard rail.
“Yeah. What’s the matter?”
“Count Geiger’s supposed to fight crime, unc, not run around smashing liquor bottles and icing nightclub parties. Jeez. Are you a stalwart or a holier-than-thou sin buster?”
“I’m a crime fighter, Mikhail. But I’m also a defender—go ahead: snicker—of civilized values.” He wished he could sit on The Mick the way Mighty Clyde was sitting on the chastened Si.
“Nobody’s going to go to your stupid seminars. Awtrey’ll lose money.”
“Bari doesn’t think they’re stupid. She and Howie believe UC will fund them until they become self-supporting. Mr. Awtrey can market videos of our consciousness-raising sessions to other cities trying to clean up their acts.”
“Gak.” (Xavier regarded this ugly retort as something of a tribute.) “UC’s sold out. They trashed Bowman. Now they’re trying to dictate values. They’ve gone fucking cryptofascist on us. You too. It’s enough to make a good retropunk drop to his knees and yodel into the porcelain megaphone.”
What? Xavier thought. What? Aloud he said, “Maybe UC wants to make amends for canning Bowman.”
“Wait a sec.” The Mick seemed to tumble to a nasty truth. “You lied to Awtrey. You haven’t even talked to anybody at UC yet. Not Finesse nor like anybody else over there has promised to stand you the green for Operation Upyours—I mean, Uplift—have they?”
“No,” Xavier admitted. “Not yet.”
“You not-nool raver. You disgusting charl.” Charl, Xavier knew, was one bad epithet. Where did it come from? Charlatan? From a retropunk? Not likely. And then, over on Gorilla Island, Si wrenched one leg out from under Mighty Clyde’s bulk and made to escape. Mighty Clyde grabbed Si’s foot, upending him. A female once lounging in the pale sunlight knuckle-walked over and pounded on Si’s back like a Swing Era drummer. Si hugged the grass and covered his head. The other gorillas, sprawled on the steep-banked island, ignored this interchange.
Still jealous of Mighty Clyde’s authority, Xavier caught sight of a man and a child walking toward Gorilla Island from an awninged concession stand. What seized Xavier’s eye was a silver glint, and then a blinding sheen, from the man’s costume: he was dressed like Count Geiger. The girl holding his hand nibbled at a huge pink dandelion puff of cotton candy and fed her pigeon-chested guardian looks of sheer hero worship. Xavier’s anger with The Mick spilled into a sour resentment of the phony Count Geiger. He stepped into the man’s path.
“You can’t wear that.” (Xavier wore grey trousers and a burgundy jacket with the Ephebus Academy shield on one pocket.)
“Of course I can,” the man said, turning about slowly. “See?”
“He’s Count Geiger,” the girl said. “He’s my daddy.”
“He may be your daddy”—he leaned down avuncularly—“but he’s not the real Count Geiger.” Xavier straightened up. “He’s just another showboating fake.”
“Is not,” the girl said. “Is not.”
Mikhail turned to watch this altercation. Uncle Xave was right on one level—the dude in the Suit was a fraud—but wrong on another: nothing Uncle Xave said would convince the man’s daughter that her daddy was less than what he said. Of course, Xavier knew this too. He resolved the stand-off by skinning the man out of his burn mask with a pincer-like grip and a quick backward roll of his forearm. Unmasked, Count Geiger was a balding thirty-year-old with hollow, acne-pitted cheeks and a zit on one earlobe. Almost as if she’d never seen him before, his daughter began to cry.
“Kid, your daddy’s a fake,
” Xavier said. “An everyday fella like me could never rip the mask off a real living stalwart, it’d be impossible.”
“Way to strike a blow for truth, justice, and crass assholism,” The Mick said.
Through the child’s tears and hiccups, Xavier talked to her father: “Yesterday, Salonika’s city council passed an ordinance against anyone but the real Count Geiger’s dressing like the Count in public.” This was the truth. The council had determined that a glut of local impersonators fostered confusion and so diminished the real Count Geiger’s effectiveness as crime fighter and role model.
“You’ve violated that ordinance,” Xavier said. “Clearly, you’ve also lied to your daughter. Go home. Change clothes. Then return to Zoo Salonika as an upright citizen. If you stay in that Count Geiger suit, you’ll be subject to arrest and fines.”
“The council’s action is illegal,” the man said lividly. “It’ll never stand.”
“Do you claim to be the hero who foiled the Bridgeboro Station mugging? Who’s trying to return a respect for human dignity in Satan’s Cellar? Do you?”
“No, but I—”
“Then you’re in violation of a true city ordinance. For now, anyway, its legality is irrelevant to that simple fact. Go home.”
The man grabbed his hood back from Xavier. As his daughter sniffled, he knelt before her and stroked her hair. “I’m still your Count Geiger. I’ll be your Count Geiger at home, Sammi. There’s still no law”—glancing defiantly up at Xavier—“against that. That I know of. Yet.” He led Sammi back toward the tunnel of bamboo staves leading to Zoo Salonika’s parking lots.
“Sheesh,” The Mick said. “Triple sheesh.”
“Did I just do that?” Xavier said, abashed. “I can’t believe I just did that.”
“Me either, unc.” Hands in pockets, The Mick headed for the sunken paddock where elephants and giraffes had their own walled, Serengeti-style environments. Xavier, peering across the moat at Gorilla Island, had an urge to hurry after the Count Geiger impersonator and apologize for shaming him in front of his little girl, but he couldn’t work up the courage. Besides, the impersonator and his daughter were probably in the parking lot by now. Stalwartly powers or no, he had behaved like a power-tripping bureaucrat. In short, like a perfect asshole.
Mighty Clyde, bored with eating fire ants and tormenting Si, lumbered off into a thicket of milkweed and cockleburrs to defecate.
*
Soon thereafter, Xavier dejectedly trailed The Mick onto the edge of Bari’s fashion shoot. Bari’s photographers were posing ten long-necked, long-legged models next to Splinters and Stilts, Zoo Salonika’s oldest adult giraffes. Five models were actually down in the paddock, wearing sheathlike dresses patterned with jungly whorls or miragelike stripes, outfits that emphasized the women’s resemblance to the giraffes. To insure everyone’s safety, a zookeeper had escorted the photographers and models into the paddock. Another model stood at the low wall overlooking it feeding a graham cracker to Gambol, a younger giraffe whose head was on a level with the model’s. Two photographers, one beside the model and one in the paddock, toyed with their equipment.
“What’s next?” The Mick said when Xavier joined him at a spot not far from the model. “Scoring wheelchair tires? Firebombing a kiddygarden?”
“I’m sorry,” Xavier said.
“I’d accept your lame-o apology if it like really belonged to me.” He studied the giraffes, the models, their safari-ish clothes. “Sad to say, this is lame-o too. Bari’s UC Look was dead-on nool, but these are retread threads for, uh, yuppie bimbettes.”
“I think the noolness isn’t so much in the safari patterns as in the materials and the cuts,” Xavier said. They watched for thirty minutes. The shoot ended. Bari joined them, and they walked to an open-air café, Zooey’s Place, next to the vitrifoam reptile house. At the café, they sat at a metal table with a Day-Glo orange parasol.
“UC’s glad the city passed the Just One Count Geiger law,” Bari said. “They’re also happy to pay you a commission every time you do something stalwartly in Count Geiger’s name. They won’t sue you for copyright infringement. Remember, though, F. Deane Finesse can be awfully tightfisted at times—”
“As Tim Bowman copped,” The Mick said.
“—and he won’t put UC money into any project called Operation Uplift to fund consciousness-raising seminars and poetry readings. For those, Finesse thinks the Count should seek municipal or university backing.”
“What does that mean, practically speaking?” Xavier asked.
“The city’ll kick in money to help you fight crime, but you’ll need other revenue sources for your educational and rehabilitative programs.”
“What about Bari’s of Salonika?” The Mick said.
Bari flinched. “I’ll contribute. But I can’t be the major, or even a major, revenue source. The fashion industry’s freighted with overhead. We’ve turned a healthy profit with our UC tie-ins, but reinvestment is absolutely crucial. Launching four new lines a year is much like starting over each season from scratch.”
“Yeah,” said The Mick, biting his thumb.
“What will you do next?” Bari asked Xavier. “As Count Geiger?”
“Score a wheelchair tire. Firebomb a kiddygarden.” Xavier smiled. “In-joke stuff. Sorry. A better answer is, Something spectacularly stalwartly.”
The Mick jerked as if someone had dropped an eel down his shirt. “Oooee!” he cried. “I’ve got you a backer, Uncle Xave! Somebody right here in Salonika!”
“Who?” Bari and Xavier asked together.
“Never you all mind,” said The Mick, nailing the Suthrenism.
A lion in the lion house growled. An alligator in the reptile house replied. Cockatoos squawked. Vervet monkeys tittered. From their sunken paddock, Splinters, Stilts, and Gambol checked in with a croon of sandpapery silence.
At their table appeared a man in a short white cutaway jacket. Bari ordered three soft drinks and three chicken-salad sandwiches, and, as quietly as he’d come, the man departed. As The Mick told Bari about a letter from his mother describing Bangladeshi suffering in the wake of a recent monsoon, Xavier tried to get a fix on Bari’s mind set and affections. Her feelings about him seemed shifting, ambivalent. Why? He was trying, with intermittent success, to guard against becoming the sort of monster that he was now equipped to battle. The waiter returned with their sandwiches and drinks. “Still a little cool to be eating outside,” he said. Would there be anything else? Bari said no, and he clicked his heels and retreated. Xavier stared after him. The waiter’s personality—or, at least, the ghostly nugget of personality that Xavier remped floating within him—radiated anger and resentment.
The Mick started to eat his sandwich. “Smell it first,” Xavier said. Puzzled, The Mick removed a slice of bread from his sandwich and bemusedly sniffed the chicken salad. It smelled okay to him. He was hungry. Xavier and Bari took like precautions with their sandwiches. “What’s the matter, unc? You think our waiter wants to off us?” Pointedly, Bari reassembled hers and began to eat. Xavier could not, even though he knew that his hunch-driven squeamishness was, well, foolish. “Paranoia,” Bari said. “An occupational bogey of professional supermen.”
The waiter returned. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes,” Bari said. “Grape halves in chicken salad are a favorite of mine.”
“Thank you, Ms. Carlisle.” Setting his notepad before her, he asked for Bari’s autograph, which she willingly gave him. “And aren’t you Xavier Thaxton? I’m an avid reader of yours. Yours too, please.” Glumly, Xavier obliged the man, who was still broadcasting on a hostile frequency. “Thank you, both of you.” He bowed and retreated again.
“Like what am I?” The Mick called after him. “The bastard son of Turd World do-gooders?” The waiter didn’t hear him or chose to ignore him. “Like I could turn out famous too!” Finally, The Mick shut up and finished eating. Because neither he nor Bari died of cyanide poisoning, Xavier at last
began to eat and drink too.
*
Both Bari and The Mick left, Bari to return with her models and photographers to her studio, and The Mick to ride into Salonika to mount a direct appeal to the party whom he thought a likely backer of Count Geiger’s Operation Uplift. Xavier stayed at Zooey’s Place to settle up. “Waiter!” he called.
The man in the cutaway appeared. “I wasn’t always a waiter, Mr. Thaxton. A short time back, I was a . . . waitperson.”
“What?”
“I know who and what you are, and your secret’s no longer safe with me.”
“My secret?”
“Come on. You’re Count Geiger, the real one. You should be proud of your secret identity. So proud, in fact, that maybe you should be outed.”
“Outed?”
“Yes. As I was once. Twice, if you count my firing from Zapotec’s as an outing.”
“Ah. I didn’t recognize you without your war paint.”
“From Zapotec’s to Zooey’s Place. How different things can be at different eateries at the tail end of the alphabet. And all because I allegedly botched my handling of your bizarre public disrobing. Management blamed me for that embarrassing scene. On a good night at Zapotec’s, I earned in tips in an hour what I make here in a day. Thank you, Mr. Thaxton. Or should I say, ‘Thank you, Count Geiger’?”
For a moment, Xavier could only stare at the man. Then he gave him a twenty-dollar bill.
The waiter made change. “I have nothing else to say to you, Mr. Thaxton.” He slapped down the appropriate bills and coins. “Wait. I do.” With great dignity, he lifted his chin. “Up yours. Sir.”
Browbeaten by guilt, Xavier left him a generous tip.
47
Count Geiger’s Greens
Bari rode EleRail in from the zoo with The Mick, but parted from him at the Oconee Heights Station, near the parklike campus of Skye University, a private institution with exorbitant tuition fees and a reputation as a world-class liberal-arts school. The buildings (except for the classrooms and chapel of the Augustine-Graham School of Theology) consisted of grey stone covered over by heavy-hanging mats of ivy. From the Oconee Heights platform, you could see the squids in their preppie wardrobes hiking the school’s shadow-dappled footpaths.
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