16th chapter...

16.



Maximine came with the uplifting news. “Do you know that Suze the Thai tried to stab her aesthetician…! Actually, she did more than trying, it seems. She’s been arrested and all. Dick says he regrets but they won’t be able to attend our silver anniversary party. Well, good-riddance…! She pretended to be extensively invited. She intended to bring her extended family in. Imagine. All those little monkey-like young people behaving like pigs, blundering their way away, pigging up the food — and destined to die so young…”

“But why…?” Asked Nina, very interested.

“Well, it seems the aesthetician found she was too slim…”

“Too slim!” Incredulous, Coralline.

“No, I mean, why are they doomed to die young, the youngsters in Dick’s wife’s family…? Is it a genetic bane…?” Nina, pounced, seemingly very worried now. “I so hate seeing young people die. Don’t mind so much the old croaking, of course. Law of life, lay of the land. But I’m pretty young now myself… And… And all those poor young simians…? Soldiers sent to war… To fight the radioactivity, to shower the white phosphorous about… Like varmint-killing vaporizers, flitting the human flies…?” She encouraged.

Maximine had to think that one out. At length she answered: “Well, yeah, it seems that they are mighty jinxed, hexed; their mojo blet, bletted, unsound; grim grainy symptoms indeed, all of them wall-eyed. Suze the only fit to be seen of the lot. Barely. Very barely. A stick of a girl with limp tiny tits and a lip curled, such a nasty mien, with superfluous ears and engorged cheeks. And a perfume that lingers as lingers a lingering fart.”

“Must be one of these Oriental shits with cinnamon and cardamom and mummified carrion… Like this soy bean sauce done with rotten fishes, you know?” Vindictive Coralline pointed out.

“A sister of her, I’m told, escaped with her life by a hair. They were visiting a military compound in Alabama, she wandered out into the secret territory, the keep-off, we-shoot-to-kill area, the broad barely capable to read — of course, wall-eyed and all, you tell me how — and the loudspeakers shouting her name, and saying: ‘Fuck off, Lilygold (the hell if I know her real name), you are so fucking dead, Lilygold…!’ She almost died of fright. And then came the dogs, and mauled her pretty much… Then a cousin of her, the daughter of her aunt, had a friend at her side at the theater that suddenly died, in the dark, in the middle of a movie… They had gone to watch a horror flick, both of them girls were around twelve or so, and from the upper rows a waiter gone mad threw down a caldron of boiling oil — are you being served…? — a fried friend for you…”

“Wow, how terrible. They are really doomed.” Nina agreed.

“But wait,” Maximine poured on, “when they were in Arizona, you know they toured the States before Suze meeting Dick, a party went to explore the virgin bush… They encountered an eerie scary shack — a depot of some sort — there in the middle of the brush… Two foolish boys, nephews of her, Suze, dared go inside. Those Thais are real idiots. What are you seeing…? — those left outside would ask, shouting. The two boys said: There is a rear or end wall that’s all pockmarked with bullets — they shoot people in here, execution style — military, gangster, all the same — they line them up — they machinegun them by the twenties… And then they heard machinegun reports, the Thais outside… And the two boys were never seen again. Neither in the shack, when the coroners arrived and checked every inch of the terrain which they said had not been used since the military had secret prisoners there, nor outside, along the rough desert… Only cactuses, and vague skeletons and scorpions and rattlesnakes left… The two boys eaten who knows by what…”

“I’d worry if I were to marry into such a weird family…”

“You don’t know the half of it, Coralline. They have in their garden an idol knoll — a monticule full of niches from whence the malignant idols, comfily ensconced therein, with their big paunches and gaping navels, leer and peer out from the shadows… Gloomy garden of disgraces and sorrowful mysteries…”

“Booo…hhh…” Nina’s voice trembled, adding in jest some atmospheric creepiness.

“The family was outside, the occasion was the celebration of one of their barbarous holydays. Refreshments were being served. A guy was sketching, another photographing, some of the children were playing tiddledywinks at the foot of the baleful knoll… One of the boys, the littlest, the one who was keeping score, was aggressed by a bully, who accused him of cheating. The little accounting fellow complained: ‘But it tallies…!,’ and his head struck one of these lucky stones they put for luck as an offering at the foot of the knoll of the idols. He tallied the stone indeed, notched it deep, with four rents of red. He died on the spot. Everyone went livid — a trick they manage I don’t know how, for the wogs are darkish indeed. The big kahuna among them, the head of the family went leisurely inside, solemnly donned daunting trimmings and trappings, came out looking like a tops samurai or an emperor of the wall-eyed East… He said, more or less, in their lingo: ‘As I’m the guy that cuts the mustard in this bloody family, I say that the little boy wasn’t pushed by any of us — and less of all by the oldest son of my oldest one, you bet — but that the boys were scarfing away there nutritious food and little Jimmy here choked on a bone or something — the case: that, trying to dislodge it, at length he went wacky, and amok, lost it, lost his foot too, and badadang! He banged his melon on the offered lucky stone. Split pomegranate indeed. End of story!’ Everybody agreed, except that this night, once the cops and coroners were gone, all the family with terrible pangs in their stomachs… Ptomaine poisoning, it was. Thirty-two of them died. Only the bullies survived. Vigor counting for something, of course. And the grandmothers, too fed up with the cloying shit they serve each year during the festivities. And abstaining. They too made it.”

“Good for the grannies… They’ve seen it all…”

“How must Dick be regretting that ill-advised marriage…!” Coralline interjected.

“I should think so…! With his last drop of leukemic blood… Poor guy, how he must yearn for his life with you…!” Maximine barefacedly lied.

“And, moreover, to add injury to the gobbledygook insult, now with Suze in prison…!” Stoked Nina.

“Well, she’s liable to get out soon, alas. Just being arraigned for the trial… The beautician, it seems, not dead yet. She had a hairpin pushed into her left temple, her brain attained till about ‘midships… Going crazier by the minute… Who knows if she’ll be able to testify… And if she testifies, what drivel will she spout…”

“Balmy, is she…?”

“Both of them now, the devil Thai to this unnatural nature born, the beautician by the pin thus chilled, higgledy-piggledy distressed… ‘—Where the fuck am I? Who the dickens am I…?’ Her head in a spin, roofs strolling overhead, weathercocks crowing at the wrong cues, plus hearing unsolvable oracles in her skull, and excruciatingly boring pundits underneath the wisps of her perm… They kill each other with such ease, don’t they, those barbaric pagans of the devious East…? Always holding tight to the sanguinary tenets of their shibboleths, while the sparkling scaffoldings where they must hang shine enticingly before their insane eyes (that disappear with a smile, thence their terrifying eeriness.) Suze the ugliest of them all. Ugly duckling hanging by the neck until it snaps, and breaks as the blobs of a rosary recounting the steps down to hell…”

“Is she much contorted while in this awkward proceedings…?” Nina prodded.

“You bet,” Maximine complied. “Her temper flaring, her taint turned a frightening cobalt, and the other day she blew her top, really, some churchman was extolling the pious and she trying to strangulate herself with her scarf, she fainted before dying, such a nuisance of a girl all told…”

“Whom are we talking, the hairdresser or the nasty new wife…” Coralline, somewhat lost.

“Why, both! She was also a Thai, a member of the family, the aesthetician, you know. They are so secretive and disgusting, and buddy-buddy, are they not…?”

“Christ, they fucking are!” Asserted Nina, most firmly.

“Avaricious, and stingy, and astringent.”

“You’ve got them pat, Maximine, you do!” Nina’s enthusiasm was catching. Coralline felt bloody better already.

“And she’s such a cheap vamp, Suze, foolish overpainted monkey; shameless, showing her scrawny dinguses to the laborers even. Sometimes Dick has to beat the hell out of her. ’Will you behave…?’ He says. And she nagging: ’My family will do you in, if only as far as you dare touch a hair of mine…!’ Crazy bitch. I went visiting the other day. All these tales I know from his mouth. I said, ‘Dick, what’s with your knuckles, they are all smeared with raspberry jam.’ He says, ‘Phooey, must be blood from the bitch.’ He had a glint in his eyes…”

“Is he going crazy too…?” Full of hope, Coralline asked.

“Like a loon. I said, ‘With all your mazuma, richer than Montezuma, and now complicit to a band of lousy wogs who conk out easier than flies under flit…’ He answered: ‘No matter, for the breed like cockroaches… The more of them die off the more appear. And I so want a heir to my house!’”

Nina approved: “A wacky-wacky line of reasoning, indeed. The guy is going under alright. Like a sitting duck. And his head shot off.”

“I told him, ‘Take off your blinders. You are being played for a flaking decoy. She’s not going to give you an heir. She’s going to be the death of you, they’ll shoot out of the water, they’ll inherit the lot; the lot of them rich as Croesus, bringing America down. America doomed, by hoodooed association. Don’t you see everyone belonging to this devil-sheltering clan gets burned a mark of desolation on the folds of his soul…? And your bastard going down too…, mark of the devil. Misshapen to begin with, the product of a sewer seep, of miscegenation with the beast, slurping liquefied rubber, not milk, flawed down to his magnetic core, yearning for hell, home.’ And he said, ‘Get thee to a loony bin yourself, Maxicrabby. Fuck yourself. Her tribe lifts the spirits — when the flock lifts up as a man of many capes, as a flying tree of many winged leaves, the elegance, the sweep, the swoop…’ He’s crazy indeed.”

“But for her, it seems…” Dejected, Coralline.

Nina reproached Maximine with fiery eyes. Said: “But wait, Coralline. The story’s not finished. First, Dick beats the bejeezuses out of her. Second, he agrees that he’s dying of a sickness unto the soul. Third, he only said that last phrase in apparent praise of his torturers to show how far gone he is in his head… That’s how I see it, Maximine…?”

“And indeed you see it in the most orthodox way, my pet. Yes, he is going pazzo, and she is a devilish brute, and everything is shits between them… I need a slug of something…”

Nina brought huge servings of cognac.

“He passed out after he’d faintly praised her. It was punishment from on high, or from his own conscience, enemy of himself. The thread between body and spirit blazing with the gleam of hell about to burst forth… What a distaste in my mouth only of being in his presence, and the fart perfume of the murderous bitch lingering in the background, I felt like vomiting, ruined house of rotten ghosts, I loathed the whole package, the while I had been there I had reneged on all my most precious values; what a terrible influence. I had to get out of there. The decaying house was haunted by the Thai bad luck. Nags appeared from behind every curtain. They all say: ‘Bush!’ to frighten me. I was wrangling with my own legs; abreast of me, they wanted to flee the farther, the sooner, the faster, the straighter the better. All that toil and zeal from all this awful women, her aunts, her mothers, her cousins, her ancestors, and the pestiferous boys, and wrongly attired old men, their trousers upside down, so witchy and stupid are they, I couldn’t get the hell faster enough out of that house of doom…”

The rant went on for an hour. With a smile, Coralline had fallen asleep on the couch.

Nina accompanied Maximine outside. Thanked her heartily. Their friend was so near collapse. Earlier that day, Nina had phoned Maximine. “Coralline is approaching a break down, she’s cracking up… We’ve got to do something to fetch her up to level sanity…”

It had all been an act of vast charity, all this wild slandering of Suze and hers… Now Maximine, all warm inside, was saying good-bye from the window of her beautiful new Lamborghini. She was feeling most surely blessed. Such a nice woman as herself, and deservedly, you bet.