New Worlds 4

by Edited By David Garnett

  Mr Oakenhurst had never known the detailed circumstances of his wife’s and daughter’s deaths and time had put that particular pain behind him. He sensed some link between his grief and his taste for machinoix torments. He had never, after all, thought to blame himself for the deaths. They had wanted to remain in Hattiesburg where everyone agreed it felt pretty stable. For a while he had wished he could die, too, that was all. Maybe he felt guilty for not following them.

  He let Roy Ornate’s little kiddikin lead him up the rickety outside staircase to his room. The urge to live was very strong in Sam Oakenhurst and not quite equalled by an urge for pain which he only barely governed these days. With relief he watched the jetty and the Ambry House slip away behind, but the look he turned on the kiddikin, even as the skinny white kid glowingly accepted a whole guinea bill for his trouble, was one of vicious and unjust hatred.

  Sam Oakenhurst came out of his room and looked down at the smoking stoves and basket fires of a floating slum. Roy Ornate was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Why do these people live in such squalor, captain, when, on land, they have a better chance of dignity?’ Were they all power addicts?

  Captain Ornate cleared his throat. ‘If you’re trying to fathom the pilgrims, Mr Oakenhurst, you’ll have poor luck. If you’re dining this evening, I’d welcome your company.’ He spoke with no great enthusiasm. Sam Oakenhurst guessed that Roy Ornate was not really his own man and that there was another power aboard The Whole Hog greater than the master.

  ~ * ~

  6. Ml BUENA SUERTE

  THE SALOON WAS on the lower floor, a big, bright room full of old-fashioned wooden Kenya-lamps and carved candelabra. On the other side of the archway, in relative gloom, five people were absorbed in a complex game of Hunt the Moth, their eyes golden with concentration as they fanned their acoustic hands with practised pseudo-electronic signals, listening intensely to the subsonics.

  (In times like these, when hope fades and our expectations of reality become uncertain, people develop a keen interest in an afterlife, she said. She sang to him in a language he did not know. He begged her to translate. “We are trapped in the glare of their headlights,” she said.)

  Elsewhere in the saloon men and women in couples or groups sat together drinking and talking, but it was clear that pains were taken not to disturb the five gamblers as they strove to simulate the serial-linking, the empathetic convolutions, the exquisite arabesques of the powered original.

  Looking again at the jugaderos, Sam Oakenhurst knew at once who was the real master of The Whole Hog. Fat body pulsing, he or she sat facing the room. The head, to one side, was hidden by a queerly shaped mask and old dust seemed to fall from its folds. The pale eyes glittered like over-polished diamonds. The top of the creature’s head was scarred and pitted, as if by fire, and a few tufts of grey-black hair sprouted here and there, while a little multicoloured bead curtain, some bizarre chadurrah, hung from the bottom edge of its mask, obscuring the jaw. The only flesh visible was the ruined crown and a pair of large, white hands which also bore the grey scars of fire and sat poised on their tips like obscene tarantulas, pale with menace.

  The masked figure was, on its right, flanked by a light-skinned, but otherwise handsome, half-caste woman with greased black ringlets and hard Irish eyes. Her name was Sister Honesty Marvell. She was persona non grata at the Terminal, for taking out an amateur in a massive psychic gambit which even broke the high limits Boudreaux Ramsadeen set for the professionals. When he had made her go for good she had sworn she would return and the second Boudreaux saw her would be the second he died.

  (En la playa, amigo, replied Amos Gallibasta when Sam Oakenhurst found him again and asked how he was. The thin giant had grinned, death’s triumph, and snapped his huge fingers. En la playa terminante, eh? Joli blanc! Joli blanc! He had no similar desire to return to New Orleans. The very breathing of the word “machinoix” sent him into uncontrollable fits of vomiting.)

  Next to Sister Honesty sat Carly O’Dowd. Mr Oakenhurst also knew her. Mrs O’Dowd sported a man’s suit in the Andalusian style and as always bore an air of disdainful self-sufficiency. Her Moorish good looks reminded Mr Oakenhurst of some legendary toreador. He tipped his hat when she looked up but she could not see beyond her strategies. The two players at the other side of the enmascaro were people Sam Oakenhurst recognized. He could name only one. Popper Hendricks, sagging with the weight of a thousand indulgences, had once been a famous zeestar in the days when touring was still possible, when the population was considerably larger, and when records were still being made. Fifty percent at least of the white minority had fled north or west after the Fault’s effects began to be felt. Even many middle-class people had preferred to go west into the Frees to take their chances on equal terms with the whites, but mostly got caught by the quakes. Hendricks had the sybaritic, bloated look of a heavy oper. The other man, with his huge square head, had the features of an Aztec god. Even his body seemed made of granite. He moved now, slowly. It was as if ten years went by. Mr Oakenhurst found the Indian disturbing but the masked man at the centre of the game horrified him.

  In shape the mask resembled a map of the old US. Each State, cut out of an alumite can, had been soldered to the next. Washington bore the distinctive logo of Folger’s Coffee, Texas offered RC Cola and Pennsylvania advertised EXXON oil. From the patchwork of pseudo-metal were suspended the heavy beads, veiling a suggestion of red, wet lips, skin as burned and scarred as the hands and skull.

  Mr Oakenhurst turned his back on the table to order a Jax from the bartender, a round-faced whitey who proved unduly surly. To be civil, Sam Oakenhurst asked, ‘What’s your name, boy?’

  ‘Burt,’ said the whitey curtly. ‘You want another beer, mister?’

  Mr Oakenhurst kept his own council. After all, he could soon be facing much more of this behaviour in the Free States and he had best get used to it. He intended to relax. For the first time since he had left the Terminal he no longer depended upon his own will. Whatever problems he found upon the raft, he thought, must seem minor. He was glad there were no power weapons permitted, though he missed the comfort of his Nissan.

  From the shadows in the back of the big room came a sudden wheeze, a whine, and an accordion began to play Pierrot, Pierrot, le monde estfou. Some of the passengers swayed to the old tune, singing the poet Armangal’s sad, ironic words. Le monde estfou, my carazon d’or. Le monde estfou, el mundo c’est moi!

  A voice from the table, soft and threatening, said ‘Play something else, dear.’

  The tune changed almost instantly to Two-Step de Bayou Teche and a few of the couples got up to dance.

  The masked man returned his attention to the game.

  ~ * ~

  7. DESAFIO

  ‘MR MINCT AND me came aboard at Carthage,’ said Carly O’Dowd. She referred to the masked man, still playing. ‘Nice to see you, Sam.’

  ‘And you, Carly. How’s the game?’

  ‘Worth your time, if you’re interested.’ She was taking a break and joined Captain Ornate and Mr Oakenhurst at their table. ‘Some rough edges you could smooth out.’ She reached for his long right hand and drew it to her mouth. ‘Lucky, Sam?’ She kissed the tip of his index finger.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’

  Roy Ornate had grown expansive on his big pipe of ope. His cheeks glowed, his eyes bulged with bonhomie. ‘I can think of no better pleasure than swinging your feet over the edge of the Abyss and contemplating the damnation of the entire universe,’ he confided. ‘Ha, ha, Mr Oakenhurst. You’ll do!’ His confidences became increasingly mysterious. ‘What a thrill, eh? To take the whole damned vessel to the edge - cargo, crew and passengers - and hang upon the lip of some hellish niagara - every day gambling the same stake against a thousand new disasters - all the devil’s winning hands - and every day carry back from the brink - what? Playing dice with God and not a damned thing any of you fellows can do about it. I know the only man good enough to stop
this planet going the way of the rest and that’s Paul Minct, and he won’t do it. I would, but I can’t. And that, sir, should permit me a few privileges…’

  Neither Mr Oakenhurst nor Mrs O’Dowd could follow his reasoning.

  ‘You have a great admiration for this Mr Minct,’ said Sam Oakenhurst.

  ‘He’s my hero,’ admitted Captain Ornate with a confiding gesture.

  Now the Indian Carly O’Dowd had identified as Rodrigo Heat divorced himself from the game and moved heavily over the floor to stand beside an empty chair next to Captain Ornate.

  Sam Oakenhurst received the impression that the masked man had sent Heat to him. The Indian’s massive head inclined towards the seat but his eyes were on Carly O’Dowd. ‘You have a high price, lady, but that don’t scare me.’

  Sam Oakenhurst knew only one way of responding to such boorishness and his words were out before he had properly calculated the situation. He said evenly that if Mr Heat pursued that thread of conversation he would be obliged to invite the Indian outside to the place familiarly known as - and here he looked to Captain Ornate to tell him the name again ...

  ‘Bloody Glade,’ said Roy Ornate, still benign. ‘But we discourage its use. This M&E is better than my own.’ He was trying a mixture, he said, recommended by Paul Minct. He displayed a garish package: Meng & Ecker’s Brandy Flake.

  ‘Bloody Glade,’ said Mr Oakenhurst, ‘and settle the matter alia gentilhombres.’

  Whereupon Mr Heat laughed open-mouthed and asked what was wrong with his conversation.

  Understanding, now, that he was being provoked, Sam Oakenhurst could only continue. His honour gave him no choice. ‘It demeans a lady,’ he explained.

  Mr Heat continued to laugh and asked where the lady in question happened to be, which led to a silence falling in the room, since Mr Oakenhurst’s principles, if not his courage, were shared by the majority of the floor’s diamentes brutos.

  ‘Very well,’ said Mr Oakenhurst after a moment. ‘I will meet you in the usual circumstances,’ and as if he had settled some minor matter he turned back to signal the surly whitey for more drinks and enquire of Carly O’Dowd how her brother was doing in the Border Army. ‘Ain’t they romantic, Carly? I heard they’re winning big new tracts of restabilized up above Kansas.’

  ‘You’re a man after my own heart, sir,’ suddenly says Captain Ornate, puffing on his churchwarden’s. ‘Would you care for a dip from my special mixture?’ He reached into his coat.

  ‘Give him my Meng & Ecker’s, Captain Ornate.’

  Paul Minct’s cruel voice chilled the house into irredeemable silence.

  ‘Give Mr Oakenhurst a dip of my own ope and ask him if, at his convenience, he would come to join me later for a chat. It’s rare to meet an equal, these days. One grows so starved of intellectual cut and thrust.’

  ~ * ~

  8. GRACIAS NADA MAS

  ‘CABALLERO AND MUKHAMIR, you may be, Mr Oakenhurst, of the highest principles and most excellent suba’, but Captain Ornate allows no desafio aboard The Whole Hog and so your affair must be abandoned until such time you are both ashore. Those are Captain Ornate’s rules.’ Paul Minct speaks with a certain weariness.

  Sam Oakenhurst now understands that he has been tested and that his honour is not at issue. He shrugs the matter off.

  They sit together in the snug in the back shadows, a candle burning on the table giving unsteady life to Paul Minct’s geographic mask.

  Mr Oakenhurst finds himself reading the fragments of words - ELMONTE, OLA, AX WELL HOU, CRISCO, CASTRO, ONT MAID, OHNSONS WAX and others - remembering his childhood when such brands were vital and had complex and casual meaning to everyone. The world’s realities changed, he thinks, long before the advent of the Fault. The Fault is perhaps the result of that change, not the cause. He cannot give his entire attention to Paul Minct’s words. The man disturbs and fascinates him. He gathers Paul Minct respects him, which is why he has been taken aside like this and not admonished in public, and he is relieved. But he knows he could never trust the enmascaro. Paul Minct could change his mood at a moment’s notice and casually kill him. Sam Oakenhurst is close to admitting he made a mistake. He should have found the nerve to stick it out at Ambry’s until the stem-wheeler came by. His self-disgust only serves to fuel his discomfort. He wishes the enmascaro would leave him alone, but already guesses Mr Minct plans somehow to use him.

  (Paul Minct had been a blankey-chaser in the old days, Carly O’Dowd said. Mr Minct had gone after bounty boys, always willing to take a dead-or-alive. One day he had crossed the big bridge into Louisiana with six red scalps on his belt, all that was mortal of the Kennedy pack which ran wild for a while up near Texarcana and announced they’d founded a “white republic”. Captain Ornate retired. Mrs O’ Dowd called for more drinks. ‘Paul Minct’s a man who gets what or who he wants, one way or another,’ she said. ‘He was Peabody’s main chaser. He hates whiteys with a passion and would wipe them all out if he could. He loathes them so bad some of us think maybe he’s a blankey himself, or anyway a breed, who was fortunate enough to be burned in a fire - like the blankey who went to hell, got burned black and thought he’d gotten to heaven! Loosen up, Sam. Nothing much ever happens on The Whole Hog.’)

  ‘I was in a bad fire or two in my time, Mr Oakenhurst.’ Paul Minct fingers the tufts of hair on his skull. ‘You should hear my wife complain. But someone has to bring home the bacon. We’re the chaps who have to get out there in the world, eh? Nobody will do it for us. We are never allowed nor encouraged to the best. That’s the shame of it. We must seek the best for ourselves. It is what drives us, I suspect. Almost secretly. Will you be joining our little pasatiempo? You’d be very welcome.’

  When Mr Oakenhurst accepts the veiled order with the same grace with which it is given, one of Paul Minct’s unsightly hands reaches into his and welcomes him to the school.

  (‘He told me he had been in and out of the Fault five times. He says he knows secret trails which only he had the courage to discover. It is true that in the main he has no fear.’

  ‘Does he fear anything, Carly?’

  ‘Something. I don’t know. Is there a jugador brave enough to find out?’) Paul Minct offers his own pouch. ‘A cut above the Brandy Rake. It’s M&E’s Number Three. They’ll try to tell you it’s extinct, but they’re still making it down in Mexico.’

  Against his better judgement, Sam Oakenhurst fills his long-stemmed pipe.

  ‘Señor Heat is an old colleague of mine. ‘ Paul Minct receives the ope again and puts it away. ‘Volatile and blunt, as you know, and a little uncouth, but one of the world’s great people He discovered the factory. The last Meng & Ecker’s is in a place called Wadi-al-Hara, the River of Stones, in Arabic. The Indian dialects give it a similar name. Guadalajara, the Spanish say. Mr Heat made his second fortune bringing it back. This stuff’s what the old days were about, Mr Oakenhurst. Not much of a vice compared to some we hear of. That’s what I remind my wife. She’s overly worried. My health. That’s women for you, isn’t it? My health, as a matter of fact, has never been better. But there you are. Now, Mr Oakenhurst, I know your credentials and I must say I’m impressed. How would you like to come in on a small venture I’m organizing?’

  ‘Well, sir,’ says Sam Oakenhurst. ‘I guess it depends on the game.’

  ‘Very good, Mr Oakenhurst. I take your point. This is in the nature of an exploratory expedition. But only the likes of us can even contemplate the kind of expedition I have in mind. Only a trained jugador has the patience, the experience and the gumption for it. And Mrs O’Dowd says you’re one of the best. Played evens with Jack Karaquazian.’

  ‘Once,’ agrees Sam Oakenhurst.

  ‘Quite enough for me, sir. I’m recruiting, Mr Oakenhurst, a few brave souls. Outstanding individuals who will join an expedition to accompany me into the Biloxi Fault.’

  Sam Oakenhurst has a taste for pain but not for death. He resolves to play along with this madman whose pale unblink
ing eye awaits his acceptance, but if the time comes he will never go with him. That would be suicide. He will jump off the raft the first moment they sight land and put this fresh lunacy behind him.

  He shakes Paul Minct’s hand.

  ~ * ~

  9. ESCUDO D’ORO

  MR SAM OAKENHURST did not immediately join the game but claiming weariness retired early and stood on the little landing outside his door taking the ill-smelling air and staring over the dark water. No light escaped the spot on which they rode, but through the dirty cloud a little moonlight fell, making the water sinister with half-seen shapes.

  In seeking to avoid the machinoix temptations Mr Oakenhurst had put himself into an equally unwelcome predicament. Paul Minct had a horrible authority and, taken unawares, Sam Oakenhurst had been unable to resist it.