GRAVITY RAINBOW (12 page)

Follow? Red, the Negro shoeshine boy, waits by his dusty leather seat. The Negroes all over wasted Roxbury wait. Follow? "Cherokee" comes wailing up from the dance floor below, over the hi-hat, the string bass, the thousand sets of feet where moving rose lights suggest not pale Harvard boys and their dates, but a lotta dolled-up redskins. The song playing is one more lie about white crimes. But more musicians have floundered in the channel to "Cherokee" than have got through from end to end. All those long, long notes… what're they up to, all that time to do something inside of? is it an Indian spirit plot? Down in New York, drive fast maybe get there for the last set- on 7th Ave., between 139th and 140th, tonight, "Yardbird" Parker is finding out how he can use the notes at the higher ends of these very chords to break up the melody into
have
mercy what is it a fucking machine gun or something man he must be out of his
mind
32nd notes demisemiquavers say it very (demisemiquaver) fast in a Munchkin voice if you can dig
that
coming out of Dan Wall's Chili House and down the street-shit, out in all kinds of streets (his trip, by '39, well begun: down inside his most affirmative solos honks already the idle, amused dum-de-dumming of old Mister fucking Death he self) out over the airwaves, into the society gigs, someday as far as what seeps out hidden speakers in the city elevators and in all the markets, his bird's singing, to gainsay the Man's lullabies, to subvert the groggy wash of the endlessly, gutlessly overdubbed strings… So that prophecy, even up here on rainy Massachusetts Avenue, is beginning these days to work itself out in "Cherokee," the saxes downstairs getting now into some, oh really weird shit…

If Slothrop follows that harp down the toilet it'll have to be headfirst, which is not so good, cause it leaves his ass up in the air helpless, and with Negroes around that's just what a fella doesn't want, his face down in some fetid unknown darkness and brown fingers, strong and sure, all at once undoing his belt, unbuttoning his fly, strong hands holding his legs apart-and he feels the cold Lysol air on his thighs as down come the boxer shorts too, now, with the colorful bass lures and trout flies on them. He struggles to work himself farther into the toilet hole as dimly, up through the smelly water, comes the sound of a whole dark gang of awful Negroes come yelling happily into the white men's room, converging on poor wriggling Slothrop, jiving around the way they do singing, "Slip the talcum to me, Malcolm!" And the voice

that replies is who but that Red, the shoeshine boy who's slicked up

Slothrop's black patents a dozen times down on his knees jes poppin' dat rag to beat the band… now Red the very tall, skinny, extrava-

gantly conked redhead Negro shoeshine boy who's just been "Red" to all the Harvard fellas-"Say Red, any of those Sheiks in the drawer?" "How 'bout another luck-changin' phone number there, Red?"-this Negro whose true name now halfway down the toilet comes at last to Slothrop's hearing-as a thick finger with a gob of very slippery jelly or cream comes sliding down the crack now toward his asshole, chevroning the hairs along like topo lines up a river valley-
the true
name is Malcolm,
and all the black cocks know him, Malcolm, have known him all along-Red Malcolm the Unthinkable Nihilist sez, "Good golly he sure is
all
asshole ain't he?" Jeepers Slothrop, what a position for you to be in! Even though he has succeeded in getting far enough down now so that only his legs protrude and his buttocks heave and wallow just under the level of the water like pallid domes of ice. Water splashes, cold as the rain outside, up the walls of the white bowl. "Grab him 'fo' he gits away!" "Yowzah!" Distant hands clutch after his calves and ankles, snap his garters and tug at the argyle sox Mom knitted for him to go to Harvard in, but these insulate so well, or he has progressed so far down the toilet by now, that he can hardly feel the hands at all…

Then he has shaken them off, left the last Negro touch back up there and is free, slick as a fish, with his virgin asshole preserved. Now some folks might say whew, thank God for
that,
and others moaning a little, aw shucks, but Slothrop doesn't say much of anything cause he didn't
feel
much of anything. A-and there's
still
no sign of his lost harp. The light down here is dark gray and rather faint. For some time he has been aware of shit, elaborately crusted along the sides of this ceramic (or by now, iron) tunnel he's in: shit nothing can flush away, mixed with hard-water minerals into a deliberate brown barnacling of his route, patterns thick with meaning, Burma-Shave signs of the toilet world, icky and sticky, cryptic and glyptic, these shapes loom and pass smoothly as he continues on down the long cloudy waste line, the sounds of "Cherokee" still pulsing very dimly above, playing him to the sea. He finds he can identify certain traces of shit as belonging definitely to this or that Harvard fellow of his acquaintances. Some of it too of course must be Negro shit, but that all looks alike. Hey, here's that "Gobbler" Biddle, must've been the night we all ate chop suey at Fu's Folly in Cambridge cause there's bean sprouts around here someplace and even a hint of that wild plum sauce… say, certain senses then
do
seem to grow sharper… wow… Fu's Folly, weepers, that was months ago. A-and here's Dumpster Villard, he was constipated that night, wasn't he-it's black shit mean as resin that will someday clarify

forever to dark amber. In its blunt, reluctant touches along the wall (which speak the reverse of its own cohesion) he can, uncannily shit-sensitized now, read old agonies inside poor Dumpster, who'd tried suicide last semester: the differential equations that would not weave for him into any elegance, the mother with the low-slung hat and silk knees leaning across Slothrop's table in Sidney's Great Yellow Grille to finish for him his bottle of Canadian ale, the Radcliffe girls who evaded him, the black professionals Malcolm touted him on to who dealt him erotic cruelty by the dollar, up to as much as he could take. Or if Mother's check was late, only afford. Gone away upstream, bas-relief Dumpster lost in the gray light as now Slothrop is going past the sign of Will Stonybloke, of J. Peter Pitt, of Jack Kennedy, the ambassador's son-say, where the heck is that
Jack
tonight, anyway? If anybody could've saved that harp, betcha Jack could. Slothrop admires him from a distance-he's athletic, and kind, and one of the most well-liked fellows in Slothrop's class. Sure is daffy about that history, though. Jack… might Jack have kept it from falling, violated gravity somehow? Here, in this passage to the Atlantic, odors of salt, weed, decay washing to him faintly like the sound of breakers, yes it seems Jack might have. For the sake of tunes to be played, millions of possible blues lines, notes to be bent from the official frequencies, bends Slothrop hasn't really the breath to do… not yet but someday… well at least if (when…) he finds the instrument it'll be well soaked in, a lot easier to play. A hopeful thought to carry with you down the toilet.

Down the toilet, lookit me, What a silly thing ta do! Hope nobody takes a pee, Yippy dippy dippy doo…

At which precise point there comes this godawful surge from up the line, noise growing like a tidal wave, a jam-packed wavefront of shit, vomit, toilet paper and dingleberries in mind-boggling mosaic, rushing down on panicky Slothrop like an MTA subway train on its own hapless victim. Nowhere to run. Paralyzed, he stares back over his shoulder. A looming wall stringing long tendrils of shitpaper behind, the shockwave is on him-
GAAHHH!
he tries a feeble frog kick at the very last moment but already the cylinder of waste has wiped him out, dark as cold beef gelatin along his upper backbone, the paper snapping up, wrapping across his lips, his nostrils, everything gone and shit-stinking now as he has to keep batting micro-turds out of his eyelashes, it's worse than being torpedoed by Japs! the brown liquid tearing along, carrying him helpless… seems he's been tumbling ass over teakettle-though there's no way to tell in this murky shitstorm, no visual references… from time to time he will brush against shrubbery, or perhaps small feathery trees. It occurs to him he hasn't felt the touch of a hard wall since he started to tumble, if that indeed is what he's doing.

At some point the brown dusk around him has begun to lighten. Like the dawn. Bit by bit his vertigo leaves him. The last wisps of shit-paper, halfway back to slurry, go… sad, dissolving, away. An eerie light grows on him, a watery and marbled light he hopes won't last for long because of what it seems to promise to show. But "contacts" are living in these waste regions. People he knows. Inside shells of old, what seem to be fine-packed masonry ruins-weathered cell after cell, many of them roofless. Wood fires burn in black fireplaces, water simmers in rusty institutional-size lima-bean cans, and the steam goes up the leaky chimneys. And they sit about the worn flagstones, transacting some… he can't place it exactly… something vaguely religious.… Bedrooms are fully furnished, with lights that turn and glow, velvet hung from walls and ceiling. Down to the last ignored blue bead clogged with dust under the Capehart, the last dried spider and complex ruffling of the carpet's nap, the intricacy of these dwellings amazes him. It is a place of sheltering from disaster. Not necessarily the flushings of the Toilet-these occur here only as a sort of inferred disturbance, behind this ancient sky, in its corroded evenness of tone-but something else has been terribly
at
this country, something poor soggy Slothrop cannot see or hear… as if there is a Pearl Harbor every morning, smashing invisibly from the sky… He has toilet paper in his hair and a fuzzy thick dingleberry lodged up inside his right nostril. Ugh, ugh. Decline and fall works silently on this landscape. No sun, no moon, only a long smooth sinewaving of the light. It is a Negro dingleberry, he can tell-stubborn as a wintertime booger as he probes for it. His fingernails draw blood. He stands outside all the communal rooms and spaces, outside in his own high-desert morning, a reddish-brown hawk, two, hanging up on an air current to watch the horizon. It's cold. The wind blows. He can feel only his isolation. They want him inside there but he can't join them. Something prevents him: once inside, it would be like taking some kind of blood oath. They would never release him. There are no guarantees he might not be asked to do something… something so…

Now every loose stone, every piece of tinfoil, billet of wood, scrap

of kindling or cloth is moving up and down: rising ten feet then dropping again to hit the pavement with a sharp clap. The light is thick and water-green. All down the streets, debris rises and falls in unison, as if at the mercy of some deep, regular wave. It's difficult to see any distance through the vertical dance. The drumming on the pavement goes for eleven beats, skips a twelfth, begins the cycle over… it is the rhythm of some traditional American tune… The streets are all empty of people. It's either dawn or twilight. Parts of the debris that are metal shine with a hard, nearly blue persistence.

Now don't you remember Red Malcolm up there, That kid with the Red Devil Lye in his hair…

Here now is Crutchfield or Crouchfield, the westwardman. Not "archetypical" westwardman, but
the only.
Understand, there was only one. There was only one Indian who ever fought him. Only one fight, one victory, one loss. And only one president, and one assassin, and one election. True. One of each of everything. You had thought of solipsism, and imagined the structure to be populated-on your level-by only, terribly, one. No count on any other levels. But it proves to be not quite that lonely. Sparse, yes, but a good deal better than solitary. One of each of everything's not so bad. Half an Ark's better than none. This Crutchfield here is browned by sun, wind and dirt-against the deep brown slats of the barn or stable wall he is wood of a different grain and finish. He is good-humored, solid-set against the purple mountainslope, and looking half into the sun. His shadow is carried strained coarsely back through the network of wood inside the stable-beams, lodgepoles, stall uprights, trough-trestlework, rafters, wood ceiling-slats the sun comes through: blinding empyrean even at this failing hour of the day. There is somebody playing a mouth harp behind an outbuilding-some musical glutton, mouth-sucking giant five-note chords behind the tune of

red river valley

Down this toilet they say you are flushin'- Won'tchew light up and set fer a spell? Cause the toilet it ain't going nowhar, And the shit hereabouts shore is swell.

Oh, it's the Red River all right, if you don't believe it just ask that "Red," wherever he may be (tell you what Red means, FDR's little asshole buddies, they want to take it all away, women all have hair on

their legs, give it all to them or they'll blow it up round black iron in the middle of the night bleeding over Polacks in gray caps okies niggers yeh niggers especially…)

Well, back here, Crutchfield's little pard has just come out of the barn. His little pard of the moment, anyway. Crutchfield has left a string of broken-hearted little pards across this vast alkali plain. One little feeb in South Dakota,

One little hustler in San Berdoo,

One little chink run away from the railroad

With his ass just as yellow as Fu Manchu!

One with the clap and one with a goiter,

One with the terminal lepro-see,

Cripple on the right foot, cripple on the left foot,

Crippled up both feet 'n' that makes three!

Well one little fairy, even one bull dyke,

One little nigger, one little kike,

One Red Indian with one buifalo,

And a buffalo hunter from New Mexico…

And on, and on, one of each of everything, he's the White Cocksman of the
terre mauvais,
this Crouchfield, doing it with both sexes and all animals except for rattlesnakes (properly speaking, "rattlesnake," since there's only one), but lately seems he's been havin' these fantasies about that
rattlesnake,
too! Fangs just tickling the foreskin… the pale mouth open wide, and the horrible joy in the crescent eyes… His little pard of the moment is Whappo, a Norwegian mulatto lad, who has a fetish for horsy paraphernalia, likes to be quirt-whipped inside the sweat-and-leather tackrooms of their wandering, which is three weeks old today, pretty long time for a little pard to've lasted. Whappo is wearing chaps of imported gazelle hide that Crutchfield bought for him in Eagle Pass from a faro dealer with a laudanum habit who was crossing the great Rio forever, into the blank furnace of the wild Mexico. Whappo also sports a bandanna of the regulation magenta and green (Crutchfield is supposed to have a closetful of these silken scarves back home at "Rancho Peligroso" and never rides out into the rock-country and riverbed trails without a dozen or two stashed in his saddlebags. This must mean that the one-of-each rule applies only to forms of life, such as little pards, and not to objects, such as bandannas). And Whappo tops off with a high shiny opera hat of Japanese silk. Whappo is quite the dandy this afternoon in fact, as he comes sauntering out from the barn.