Tug and Olive had met and bonded over their love of vintage postcards, bumping into each other at an ephemera convention, chatting tentatively, then adjouring for a coffee at a nearby branch of Seattle’s ubiquitous Il Giornale chain. Subsequent outings found them exploring a host of other mutual interests: from movies, of course, through the vocal stylings of the elderly Hank Williams. Their middle-aged, cool-blooded romance, such as it was, progressed through retrospectively definable stages of intimacy until moving in together seemed inevitable.
But cohabitation disclosed a plethora of intractable quirks, crotchets, demands and minor vices held by both partners, fossilized abrasive behavior patterns that rendered each lover unfit for longterm proximity—at least with each other.
Three years after putting her collection of Felix the Cat figurines—including the ultra-rare one depicting Felix with Fowlton Means’ Waldo—on Tug’s shelves, Olive was tearfully shrouding them in bubblewrap.
Despite this heavy history, Tug vowed now to deal with Olive with neutral respect. She had worked hard all morning to help him move, and now obviously sought some kind of rapprochement.
Olive’s words bore out Tug’s intuition.
“I wanted to have some time for just us, Tug. I thought we could grab some ice cream at Don’s Original, and talk a little.”
Don’s Original had been their favorite place as a couple. Tug was touched.
“That—that’s very kind of you, Olive. Let’s go.” Tug tossed his pack in the car, and climbed in.
The drive to Culver Road took only a few minutes. (With no car of his own, Tug felt weird to be transiting the city in this unaccustomed fashion.) They mostly spoke of the inarguable: what a Grade-A jerk Narcisse Godbout had unsurprisingly proved himself to be.
Inside Don’s, Tug and Olive both paused for a sentimental moment in front of the Banana Split Memorial. Fashioned of realistic-looking molded and colored silicone, like faux sushi, the dusty monument never failed to bring a sniffle to any viewer of a certain age.
Forty years ago, the beloved and familiar Cavendish banana—big creamy delicious golden-skinned monocultured artifact of mankind’s breeding genius—had gone irrevocably extinct, victim of the triple-threat of Tropical Race 4, Black Sigatoka, and Banana Bunchy Top Virus. In the intervening decades, alternative cultivars had been brought to market. Feeble, tiny, ugly, drab, and starchy as their plantain cousin, these banana substitutes had met with universal disdain from consumers, who recalled the unduplicatable delights of the Cavendish.
Tug’s own childhood memories of banana-eating were as vivid as any of his peers’. How thoughtlessly and gluttonously they had gorged on the fruit, little anticipating its demise! Sometimes after all these years of abstinence he believed he could not recall the exact taste of a banana. Yet at other unpredictable moments, his mouth flooded with the familiar taste.
But this particular moment, despite the proximity of the banana simulacrum, did not provide any such Proustian occasion.
Tug and Olive found a booth, ordered sundaes, and sat silent for a moment, before Olive asked, “Tug, precisely what are you doing with yourself?”
“I—I don’t know exactly. I’m just trying to go with the flow.”
“Squatting with a bunch of strangers—yes, Pete told me about it—is not exactly a longterm plan.”
“I’m thinking…maybe I can write now. Now that I’ve shed everything that kept me down. You know I’ve always wanted to write. About movies, music, my everyday life—”
Olive’s look of disgust recalled too many similar, rankling moments of harsh condemnation, and Tug had to suppress an immediate tart rejoinder.
“Oh, Tug, you could have written at any time in the past twenty years. But you let those early rejections get to you, and you just caved in and gave up.”
Unspeaking, Tug poked pensively and peevishly at his melting ice cream. Then he said, “Can you drop me off in Henrietta? I’ve got to find the Tom Pudding.”
7.
In Pursuit of the Tom Pudding
At its inception the Attawandaron Canal had stretched unbroken for nearly four hundred miles, from Beverwyck on the Hudson River, the state’s capital, all the way to Bisonville on the shores of Lake Attawandaron, another of the Grands. Constructed in the mid-1800s during the two terms of President Daniel Webster, the Canal had been an engineering wonder, and came to occupy a massive place in American history books, having opened up the Midwest to commerce with the established East, and also generated an immense folklore, still fondly recalled. The Canal Monster, Michel Phinckx, Sam Patch, and other archetypes. Bypassed now by other modes of transport, chopped by development into long and short segments, the old Canal had become a recreational resource and prominent talismanic presence in Carrollboro and environs.
Tug had chosen the Henrietta district as a likely starting point for his search for the Tom Pudding. Beginning at Carrollboro’s city lines where the Canal entered town, he would follow its riverine length until he encountered the utopic loafer’s haven limned by Pete.
Tug waved goodbye to Olive’s dwindling rear-view mirror, shouldered his pack, and looked at the westering sun. Their trip to the Little Theatre to drop off Tug’s last load of stuff had chewed up more time. Now he had barely a few hours before frosty autumnal dusk descended. No plans for how to spend the night. Better get moving.
Tug’s earlier whimsy of inhabiting a vanished Currier & Ives era intermittently materialized as he began to hike the Canal. Stretches of the original towpath, paved or not, served as a bike and pedestrian trail, alongside the somnolent unworking waters channeled between meticulously joined stone walls, labor of a thousand anonymous Irish and Krakówvian workers. The mechanisms of the old locks hulked like rusted automatons. The whole scene radiated a melancholy desuetude most pleasing to Tug. Something older even than him, yet still useful in its decrepit fashion.
Of course, at other points the Canal fought with modernity—and lost. It vanished under grafitti’d bridges or potholed pavement, was pinched between ominous warehouses, paralleled by gritty train tracks: a Blakean straitened undine.
Tug was brought up short at one point as the canal slipped liquidly beneath a razor-wire-topped fence surrounding an extensive auto junkyard. Furious big dogs hurled themselves at the chainlink, bowing it outward and causing Tug to stumble backwards. He worked his way around the junkyard by gritty alleys and continued on.
By ten PM exhaustion had set in. The neighborhood around him held no familiar landmarks, a part of Carrollboro unvisited by Tug before, despite his long tenure in the city. He found a Tim Horton’s open all night, bought a coffee and donut as requisite for occupying a booth unmolested by the help. But the desultory kids behind the counter cared little about his tenancy anyhow. He drowsed on and off, dreaming of a Narcisse Godbout big as a mountain, up whose damp woolen flank Tug had to scrabble.
In the morning, he performed some rudimentary ablutions in the donut shop rest room, his mouth tasting like post-digested but pre-processed civet-cat coffee beans. Then he went on hunting the elusive barge full of slackers.
He made it all the way out past Greece Canal Park to Spencerport, before deciding that it was unlikely for the Tom Pudding to be berthed further away. Then he turned around and began wearily to retrace his steps, following the fragments of the Attawandaron Canal as if he were Hansel lacking a Gretel, seeking a way home.
Luckily that day featured pleasant weather. Tug had a pocket full of cash, his first unemployment money, so he was able to eat well. He even took a shower at Carrollboro’s downtown branch of the Medicine Lodge, changed his underwear, and dozed in the kiva chapel with some winos, despite the shaman’s chants and the rattle of his gourds.
Tug extended his search beyond Henrietta. No luck. He spent the night in another Tim Horton’s, emerging smelling like a stale cruller.
Eliminating the unlikely distal regions, the third day saw him repeat the whole central portion of his fruitless quest, traversing eve
ry accessible inch of the Canal without seeing so much as the Tom Pudding’s oil slick.
When dusk arrived, Tug found himself at the edge of the sprawling park adjacent to the University of Carrollboro in the city’s center, one hundred acres of path-laced greenery, wild as Nature intended in spots.
Slumped against a foliage-rich oak tree atop a dry carpet of last year’s leaves (trees stayed seasonally green longer these days), Tug polished off a can of Coke. Disspirited and ennervated, he mused on this latest failure.
Why hadn’t he gotten Pete to nail down the location of the Tom Pudding? If the place was unknown, he should have discarded the option, despite its romantic allure. But having chosen to search, why couldn’t he accomplish this simple task? It was as if the world always turned a cold shoulder to him. Why couldn’t he ingratiate himself with anyone? Was he too prickly, too proud? Would he die a bitter, lonely, unrequited fellow?
Tug’s thoughts turned to a wordless pall along with the descent of darkness. He stewed for several hours.
Then lilting ocarina music infiltrated his blue funk.
Tug had heard ocarina music intermittently for the past three days: from street musicians, lunchtime amateurs, kids in playgrounds, commercial loudspeakers. Fipple flute music provided the background buzz of Ocarina City, and he mostly paid little attention to it.
But he had never heard an ocarina sound like this. The music conjured up vivid pictures of foreign locales, an almost sensory buzz.
From out the bushes of the park emerged a dim figure, source of the strangely gorgeous sounds. Tug strained his eyes—
He saw Pete’s Nubian Princess.
The black woman was bundled up against the cold in a crazyquilt assortment of shawls and scarves. Tug suspected the patterned garments would be gaudy and colorful by day. Lithe, tall, thin, she moved like a swaying giraffe. Her indistinctly perceived facial features seemed more Arabic or Semitic than Negroid. Her hair was a dandelion explosion.
She stopped a few yards away from Tug and continued to play, a haunting melody unfamiliar to the man.
Tug got to his feet. What were the odds he’d encounter such an exotic creature, given that the whole of North America hosted perhaps only ten thousand Africans at any given moment, and those mostly diplomats and businessmen? Could she be a foreign student attending Carrollboro’s University? Unlikely, given the prestige of schools in Songhai, Kanen-Bornu and the Oyo Empire. Nor was it likely she’d be a shorebird, given that Africa’s displaced coastal citizens had all been taken care of at home.
Tug took a step toward the outré apparition. The woman ceased playing, smiled (teeth very white against dark skin), turned, then resumed playing and began to walk into the undergrowth.
Tug could do nothing but follow. Had not an ounce of will left otherwise.
Deeper into the park she led him. Tug could smell water. But not the semi-stagnant Canal water. Fresh, running water. He realized that they must be approaching the Cunhestiyuh River as it cut through the park and city.
Sure enough, they were soon at its banks, and could not cross. The woman led the way leftward along the shore until they reached a line of thick growth perpendicular to the river. Employing a non-obvious gap amidst the trees and bushes, she stepped through, Tug just steps behind.
No more ocarina music, and the woman had vanished.
Tug became more aware of his surroundings, as if awaking from a dream.
He stood on the edge of an artificial embankment. He suddenly realized the nature of the spot.
The Attawandaron Canal had been connected to the Cunhestiyuh River at intervals by short feeder canals, to refresh its flow. This was one such. A leaky yet still mostly functioning feedgate on the riverside was still in place, barring ingress of the River and making for a low water level in the feeder chute. Entering the Canal on the opposite side from the towpath, this feeder inlet, perhaps overgrown on its far end too, had been totally overlooked by Tug in his quest.
Tug looked down.
Nearly filling the narrow channel, the Tom Pudding floated below, lit up like an Oktoberfest beer garden with colored fairy lights, its deck busy with people. A ladder ran from top of the feeder canal on down to the barge’s broad roof.
A fiar-haired man looked up then and spotted Tug. The man said, “Pellenera’s brought us another one. Hey, pal, c’mon down!”
8.
Vasterling’s Mad and Marvelous Menagerie
The planning and rehearsing for the quantum physics chautauqua were complete. A vote among the barge’s citizens had affixed the title of “Mystery Mother and Her Magic Membranes” onto the production, passing over such contenders as “The Heterotic Revue;” “Branes! Branes! Escape from the Zombie Universe;” “I’ve Got the Worlds on a String;” and “Witten It Be Nice? Some Good Sub-Planckian Vibrations.”
The one and only performance of the educational saturnalia was scheduled for this very night, at the Carrollboro venue that generally hosted visiting chautauquas, the Keith Vawter Memorial Auditorium. Franchot Galliard had paid for the rental of the space, reluctantly tapping into his deep family fortunes, despite an inherent miserliness that had caused him, about four years previously, to purchase the Tom Pudding at scrapyard prices and take up residence aboard, whilst leasing out his Ellwanger Barry-district mansion at exorbitant rates to rich shorebirds.
Oswaldo Vasterling was just that persuasive.
The young visionary self-appointed captain of the permanently moored barge full of oddballs could have herded cats into swimming pool, Tug believed. Short and roly-poly, his complexion a diluted Mediterranean olive hue, the stone-faced twenty-one-year-old struck most first-time interlocutors as unprepossessing in the extreme. (Tug suspected a bit of Asperger’s, affected or otherwise, in Vasterling’s character.)
Gorm Vasterling, Oswaldo’s Dad, had been an unmarried Dikelander resident in Fourierist Russia, an agriculture specialist. When the Omniarch of the Kiev Phalanx ordered Gorm to transplant his talents to Cuba, to aid the Fourierist brethren there, Gorm instantly obeyed.
Upon relocation to Cuba, Gorm’s Dikelander genes almost immediately combined with the Latina genes of Ximena Alcaron, a Fourier Passionologist specializing in Animic Rehabilitation. The result was a stubby, incipiently mustachio’d child who had received the least appealing somatic traits of each parent.
But in brainpower, little Oswaldo was not scanted.
Some three years ago, in 2007, at age eighteen, educationally accelerated Oswaldo was already doing post-doc work in M-theory with Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, a semi-independent think-tank headquartered on the campus of Carrollboro U. But Smolin and his star student had clashed violently over some abstruse quantum heresy, and Oswaldo Vasterling had been cast out from the sanctum.
He hadn’t gone far, though, ending up just a mile or so away from the campus, serendipitously stumbling upon Franchot Galliard’s welcoming barge. There, he commandeered several rooms as his lab-cum-sleeping quarters and set up a rococo experimental apparatus resembling the mutant offspring of a Portajohn and a digital harmonium, attached to a small-scale radio-telescope, a gravity-wave interferometer, and a bank of networked ordinateurs, the whole intended to replicate what he had left behind at the PITP.
Forever short of money for his unperfected equipment, he perpetually harrassed the stingy Galliard for dough, generally with little success, and inveigled everyone else onboard to participate in money-raising schemes, of which the chautauqua was the latest. (The city had been plastered with advertisements, both wheat-pasted and CERN-spaced, and if Oswaldo’s show filled half of Vawter’s seats with paying customers, he’d net a hefty sum—especially since all the performers were volunteers.)
But the mixed-media performance also stood as Oswaldo’s intended refutation of his ex-comrades at the PITP. He had invited them all to witness his theories rendered in music and dance, light and sound, hoping they would repent and acknowledge the Vasterling genius. And his quondam
colleagues had accepted en masse, in the spirit of those anticipating a good intellectual brawl.
Tug’s part in this affair? He had been placed in charge of stage lighting, on the crack-brained logic that he had worked before with machines that projected light. Luckily, the boards at the Vawter were old-fashioned, non-o consoles, and Tug had mastered them easily in a few rehearsals, leaving him confident he could do his part to bring off “Mystery Mother and Her Magic Membranes” successfully.
So in the hours remaining before showtime, Tug had little to do save hang out with Sukey Damariscotta. He looked for her now.
The vast open cargo interior of the old decommissioned barge had been transformed over the past four years into a jerry-built, multi-level warren of sleeping, dining, working and recreational spaces by the resident amateur carpenters (and by one former professional, the surly alcoholic Don Rippey, who managed just barely to ensure that every load-bearing structure met minimal standards for non-collapse, that the stolen electricity was not fed directly into, say, the entire hull, and that the equally purloined plumbing did not mix inflow with outflow). Consequently, there were no straight paths among the quarters, and finding anyone involved something just short of solving the Traveling Voyageur problem.
If the layout of the Tom Pudding remained still obscure to Tug even after a month’s habitation, he felt he finally had a pretty good fix on most of the recomplicated interpersonal topography of the barge. But initially, that feature too had presented an opaque façade.
Hailed from the barge that night of discovery, Tug had descended the ladder into a clamorous reception from a few dozen curious strangers. Supplied, sans questioning, with a meal, several stiff drinks and a bunk, he had fallen straight asleep.
In the morning, Tug stumbled upon the same fellow who had first spotted him. Brewing coffee, the ruggedly handsome guy introduced himself as Harmon Frawley. Younger than Tug by a decade or more, boyish beyond his years, Frawley had been an ad copywriter in Toronto until a painful divorce, after which he had gone footloose and impoverishedly free. He still favored his old wardrobe of Brooks Brothers shirts and trousers, but they were getting mighty beat.
The Paul Di Filippo Megapack Page 47
