Gravity's Rainbow (107 page)

The place never got requisitioned. Nobody has ever seen the owner, or even knows if
“Putzi” is anybody real. Bodine drives the truck right on into what used to be the
stable and they all get out, Shirley hoorahing in the moonlight, Krypton mumbling
oboy, oboy through big mouthfuls of that frau bait. There is some password and security
hassle at the door, on account of the pig getup, but Slothrop flashes his white plastic
knight and that works. Inside they find a brightly lit and busy combination bar, opium
den, cabaret, casino and house of ill repute, all its rooms swarming with soldiers,
sailors, dames, tricks, winners, losers, conjurors, dealers, dopers, voyeurs, homosexuals,
fetishists, spies and folks just looking for company, all talking, singing or raising
hell at a noise level the house’s silent walls seal off completely from the outside.
Perfume, smoke, alcohol, and sweat glide through the house in turbulences too gentle
to feel or see. It’s a floating celebration no one’s thought to adjourn: a victory
party so permanent, so easy at gathering newcomer and old regular to itself, that
who can say for sure which victory? which war?

Springer is nowhere in sight, and from what Slothrop can gather from random questioning
won’t be by till later, if at all. Now this happens to be the very delivery date for
that discharge they arranged sailing in with Frau Gnahb to Stralsund. And tonight,
of all nights, after a week of not bothering him, the police decide to come after
Slothrop. Oh yes, yes indeed NNNNNNNN Good Evening Tyrone Slothrop We Have Been Waiting
For You. Of Course We Are Here. You Didn’t Think We Had Just Faded Away, No, No Tyrone,
We Must Hurt You Again If You Are Going To Be That Stupid, Hurt You Again And Again
Yes Tyrone You Are So Hopeless So Stupid And Doomed. Are You Really Supposed To Find
Anything? What If It Is Death Tyrone? What If We Don’t Want You To Find Anything?
If We Don’t Want To Give You Your Discharge You’ll Just Go On Like This Forever Won’t
You? Maybe We Want You Only To Keep On. You Don’t Know Do You Tyrone. What Makes You
Think You Can Play As Well As We Can? You Can’t. You Think You’re Good But You’re
Really Shit And We All Know It. That Is In Your Dossier. (Laughter. Humming.)

Bodine finds him sitting inside a coat closet, chewing on a velvet ear of his mask.
“You look bad, Rocky. This is Solange. She’s a masseuse.” She is smiling, quizzical,
a child brought to visit the weird pig in his cave.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Let me take you down to the baths,” the woman’s voice a soapy sponge already caressing
at his troubles, “it’s very quiet, restful. . . .”

“I’ll be around all night,” Bodine sez. “I’ll tell you if Springer shows.”

“This is some kind of a plot, right?” Slothrop sucking saliva from velvet pile.

“
Everything
is some kind of a plot, man,” Bodine laughing.

“And yes but, the arrows are pointing all different ways,” Solange illustrating with
a dance of hands, red-pointed fingervectors. Which is Slothrop’s first news, out loud,
that the Zone can sustain many other plots besides those polarized upon himself . . .
that these are the els and busses of an enormous transit system here in the Raketenstadt,
more tangled even than Boston’s—and that by riding each branch the proper distance,
knowing when to transfer, keeping some state of minimum grace though it might often
look like he’s headed the wrong way, this network of all plots may yet carry him to
freedom. He understands that he should not be so paranoid of either Bodine or Solange,
but ride instead their kind underground awhile, see where it takes him. . . .

Solange leads Slothrop off to the baths, and Bodine continues to search for his customer,
2½ bottles of cocaine clinking and clammy against his bare stomach under his skivvy
shirt. The Major isn’t at any of the poker or crap games, nor attending the floor
show wherein one Yolande, blonde and shining all over with baby oil, dances table
to table picking up florin pieces and sovereigns, often hot from the flame of some
joker’s Zippo, between the prehensile lips of her cunt—nor is he drinking, nor, according
to Monika, Putzi’s genial, cigar-smoking, matelassé-suited madame, is he screwing.
He hasn’t even been by to hassle the piano player for “San Antonio Rose.” It takes
Bodine half an hour before colliding with the man finally, reeling out the swinging
doors of a pissoir, groggy from a confrontation with the notorious Eisenkröte, known
throughout the Zone as the ultimate test of manhood, before which bemedaled and brevetted
Krautkillers, as well as the baddest shit-on-my-dick-or-blood-on-my-blade escapees
from the grossest of Zonal stockades, all have been known to shrink, swoon, chicken
out, and on occasion vomit, yes right where they stood. For it is indeed an Iron Toad,
faithfully rendered, thousand-warted and some say faintly smiling, a foot long at
its longest, lurking at the bottom of a rank shit-stained toilet and hooked up to
the European Grid through a rheostat control rigged to deliver varying though not
lethal surges of voltage and current. No one knows who sits behind the secret rheostat
(some say it’s the half-mythical Putzi himself), or if it isn’t in fact hooked up
to an automatic timer, for not everybody gets caught, really—you can piss on the Toad
without anything at all happening. But you just never know. Often enough to matter,
the current will be there—piranha-raid and salmon-climb up the gold glittering fall
of piss, your treacherous ladder of salts and acids, bringing you back into touch
with Mother Ground, the great, the planetary pool of electrons making you one with
your prototype, the legendary poor drunk, too drunk to know anything, pissing on some
long-ago third rail and fulminated to charcoal, to epileptic night, his scream not
even his own but the electricity’s, the amps speaking through his already shattering
vessel, shattered too soon for them even to begin to say it, voice their terrible
release from silence, nobody listening anyhow, some watchman poking down the track,
some old man unable to sleep out for a walk, some city drifter on a bench under a
million June bugs in green nimbus around the streetlight, his neck relaxing and tightening
in and out of dreams and maybe it was only a cat screwing, a church bell in a high
wind, a window being broken, no direction to it, not even alarming, replaced swiftly
by the old, the coal-gas and Lysol, silence. And somebody else finds him next morning.
Or you can find him any night at Putzi’s if you’re man enough to go in piss on that
Toad. The Major has got off this time with only a mild jolt, and is in a self-congratulating
mood.

“Ugly ’sucker tried his best,” wrapping an arm about Bodine’s neck, “but got his warty
ol’ ass handed to him tonight, damn ’f he didn’t.”

“Got your ‘snow,’ Major Marvy. Half a bottle shy, sorry, it’s the best I could do.”

“That’s all reet, sailor. I know so many nose habits between here ’n’ Wiesbaden you’d
need three
ton
’n’ that wouldn’t last the ’suckers a day.” He pays off Bodine, full price, overriding
Bodine’s offer to prorate for what’s missing. “Call it a little lagniappe, goodbuddy,
that’s Duane Marvy’s way o’ doin’ thangs.
Damn
that ol’ toad’s got my pecker to feelin’ pretty good now. Damn ’f I wouldn’t like
to stick it inside one them little whores. Hey! Boats, where can I find me some
pussy
around here?”

The sailor shows him how to get downstairs to the whorehouse. They take you into a
kind of private steam bath first, you can screw right there if you want, doesn’t cost
any extra. The madame—hey! ha, ha! looks like some kind of a dyke with that stogie
in her face! raises an eyebrow at Marvy when he tells her he wants a nigger, but thinks
she can get hold of one.

“It isn’t the House of All Nations, but we do aim for variety,” running the tortoise
end of her cigar-holder down a call-sheet, “Sandra is engaged for the moment. An exhibition.
In the meantime, here is our delightful Manuela, to keep you company.”

Manuela is wearing only a high comb and black-lace mantilla, shadow-flowers falling
to her hips, a professional smile for the fat American, who is already fumbling with
uniform buttons.

“Hubba, hubba! Hey, she’s pretty sunburned herself. Ain’tcha? You got a leetle mulatto
in there, a leetle Mayheecano, honey? You sabe español? You sabe fucky-fucky?”

“Si,” deciding tonight to be from the Levante, “I am Spanish. I from Valencia.”

“Va-len-cia-a-a,” sings Major Marvy, to the well-known tune of the same name, “Señorita,
fucky-fucky, sucky-sucky sixty-ni-i-ine, la-lalala
la
-la
la
-la laaa . . .” dancing her in a brief two-step about the grave center of the waiting
madame.

Manuela doesn’t feel obliged to join in. Valencia was one of the last cities to fall
to Franco. She herself is really from the Asturias, which knew him first, felt his
cruelty two years before the civil war even began for the rest of Spain. She watches
Marvy’s face as he pays Monika, watches him in this primal American act, paying, more
deeply himself than when coming, or asleep, or maybe even dying. Marvy isn’t her first,
but almost her first, American. The clientele here at Putzi’s is mostly British. During
the War—how many camps and cities since her capture in ’38?—it was German. She missed
the International Brigades, shut away up in her cold green mountains and fighting
hit-and-run long after the Fascists had occupied all the north—missed the flowers,
children, kisses, and many tongues of Barcelona, of Valencia where she’s never been,
Valencia, this evening’s home. . . . Ya salimos de España. . . . Pa’ luchar en otros
frentes, ay, Manuela, ay, Manuela. . . .

She hangs his uniform neatly in a closet and follows her trick into heat, bright steam,
the walls of the seething room invisible, feathered hairs along his legs, enormous
buttocks and back beginning to come up dark with the dampness. Other souls move, sigh,
groan unseen among the sheets of fog, dimensions in here under the earth meaningless—the
room could be any size, an entire city’s breadth, paved with birds not entirely gentle
in twofold rotational symmetry, a foot-darkened yellow and blue, the only colors to
its watery twilight.

“Aaahhh, hot damn,” Marvy slithering fatly down, sleek with sweat, over the tiled
edge into the scented water. His toenails, cut Army-square, slide under last.
“Come
on, everybody in the pool,” a great happy bellow, seizing Manuela’s ankle and tugging.
Having taken a fall or two on these tiles, and seen a girl friend go into traction,
Manuela comes along gracefully, falling hard enough astraddle, bottom hitting his
stomach a loud
smack
, to hurt him, she hopes. But he only laughs again, loudly abandoned to the warmth
and buoyancy and sounds encompassing—anonymous fucking, drowsiness, ease. Finds himself
with a thick red hardon, and slips it without ado into the solemn girl half-hidden
inside her cloud of damp black Spanish lace, eyes anyplace but on his, aswing now
through the interior fog, dreaming of home.

Well, that’s all reet. He isn’t fucking her eyes, is he? He’d rather not have to look
at her face anyhow, all he wants is the brown skin, the shut mouth, that sweet and
nigger submissiveness. She’ll do anything he orders, yeah he can hold her head under
the water till she drowns, he can bend her hand back, yeah, break her fingers like
that cunt in Frankfurt the other week. Pistol-whip, bite till blood comes . . . visions
go swarming, violent, less erotic than you think—more occupied with thrust, impact,
penetration, and such other military values. Which is not to say he isn’t enjoying
himself innocently as you do. Or that Manuela doesn’t find herself too, in some casual
athletic way, liking the ride up and down the stubborn red shaft of Major Marvy, though
her mind is on a thousand other things now, a frock of Sandra’s that she covets, words
to various songs, an itch below her left shoulderblade, a tall English soldier she
saw as she came through the bar around suppertime, his brown forearm, shirt rolled
to the elbow, against the zinc top of the table. . . .

Voices in the steam. Alarms, many feet clopping in shower shoes, silhouettes moving
by, a gray cloudy evacuation. “What in thee hell,” Major Marvy about to come, rising
on his elbows distracted, squinting in several directions, rapidly getting a softoff.

“Raid,” a voice going past. “MPs,” shivers somebody else.

“Gaaahh!” screams Major Marvy, who has just recalled the presence of 2½ ounces of
cocaine in his uniform pockets. He rolls, walrus-heavy, Manuela sliding away and off
his limpening nervous penis, hardly aroused but enough of a professional to feel the
price includes a token
puto
and
sinvergüenza
now. Scrambling up out of the water, skidding on the tiles, Duane Marvy, bringing
up the rear, emerges into an ice-cold changing-room to find the last of the bathers
fled, the closets stone-empty except for one multicolored velvet something or other.
“Hey where’s my uniform!” stomping on the floor, fists at his sides, face very red.
“Oh you motherless bastards,” thereupon throwing several bottles and ashtrays, breaking
two windows, attacking the wall with an ornate umbrella stand, feeling better for
it in his mind. He hears combat boots crashing overhead and in rooms nearby, girls
screaming, a phonograph record knocked screeching into silence.

He checks out this plush or velvet rig, finds it to be a pig costume complete with
mask, considers slyly that no MP would bother an innocent funseeking pig. As humorless
limey voices move closer through the rooms of Putzi’s, he rips frantically at silk
lining and straw padding to make room for his own fat. And, struggled at last inside,
whew, zipped up, mask hiding face, safe, clownish-anonymous, pushes out through bead
curtains, then upstairs to the bar, only to run spang into a full division of the
red-hatted ’suckers coming his way, all in step, swear to God.

“Here’s our elusive swine, gentlemen,” pocked face, blunt and ragged mustache, pointing
a pistol right at his head, others moving up quickly. A civilian comes pushing through,
spade-shape blazing dark on his smooth cheek.