Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled (35 page)

For the first time in more years than she cared to remember--had it been only twenty years since all of it?--Lilian Goldbosch had a surge of desire. Not the gilded wastes she had substituted for caring: not the pathological attention to hair in the latest frosted style, not the temporal acquisition of goods to fill empty rooms, not the television with it gray images, surrogates of life. A want. A need to know. A desire to find out.

Born of an old fear.

Was it the same ... or something new?

She had to know. She was engulfed by desperation.

And with the desperation, a shocking realization that she could do something. What, she was not certain. But she had the sensation burning in her that if she could know this blond Gentile youth, could talk to him, this goy, could communicate with him, this stranger, she could find out the answers, know if the evil was coming again, or if it was just another lonely person, trapped within his skin.

"Will you boys do me a favor?" Lilian Goldbosch asked the two who had escorted her home. "Will you help me?"

At first they were confused, but as she talked, as she explained why she had to know, why it was important, they were drawn into a prospect of their times, and finally they nodded, a little hesitantly, the taller of the two saying, "I don't know if it'll do any good, but we'll try and find him for you."

Then they left. Down the stairs. While she went to wash the tears and streaked mascara from her young-old face.

Frank Amato was of Italian descent. He was a typical child of his times; transistorized, Sanforized, boss gear bomped groovy tuned-in on the music of the spheres, in a Continental belt-back slim-line hopsacking crease-resistant 14" tapered ineluctable reality that placed him in and of the teenage sub-culture.

Vietnam? Huh?

Voter registration in Alabama? Huh?

The ethical structure of the universe?

Huh?

Arch Lennon was a WASP. He had heard the term, but had never applied it to himself. He was a carbon-copy of Frank Amato. He lived day to day, Big Boy to Big Boy, track meet to track meet, and if there were sounds that went boomp in the night they were probably the old man getting up to haul another pop-top out of the Kelvinator.

Military junta? Huh?

Limited nuclear retaliation? Huh?

The infinitesimal dispensation of Homo sapiens in the disinterested cosmos?

Huh?

Standing down on the sidewalk outside Lilian Goldbosch's apartment, staring at each other.

"That was a smart move."

"Well, what the hell was I supposed to say? For chrissakes, she had aholda my arm I thought she was gonna bust it. That old lady's nuts."

"So why'd you promise her? Where the hell we gonna find that guy?"

"How should I know?"

"I gave my word."

"Big deal."

"Maybe not to you, but I gave it just the same."

"So we try and find that kid, right?"

"Uh ..."

"What I thought. I gotta do all the brain work again. Jeezus, man, you are such a nit."

"D'jou get the license number of any of those cars?"

"Don't be a clown. No, I din't get the number. And even if I did, what'd we do with it?"

"DMV, wouldn't they tell us who it was registered to?"

"Sure. We're gonna walk into the Motor Vehicle Department just like James Bond, a couple of guys our age, and we're gonna say hey who owns this VW. Sure, I can picture it real good. You're a nit."

"So that's that."

"I wish."

"You got something else?"

"Maybe. One of those VWs had a sticker on the windshield. It was an emblem. Pulaski Vocational High School."

"So one of those guys goes to Pulaski. You know how many inmates they got over there? Maybe a million."

"It's a start."

"You're serious about this."

"Yeah, I'm serious about it."

"How come?"

"I dunno, she asked, an' I gave her my word. She's an old lady, it won't hurt anything to look a while."

"Hey, Frank?"

"What?"

"What's this all about?"

"I dunno, but those bastards were lousy, an' I gave my word."

"Okay, I'll help. But I gotta get home now, my folks oughta be back by now, and we can't do anything till tomorrow anyhow."

"Stay loose. See ya."

"See ya. Don't get in any trouble, double-oh-seven."

"Stick it."

They didn't know which one they would find, or even if they would recognize him when they did find him. But one of the wearers of the swastika attended Pulaski Vocational, and Pulaski Vocational went all year round. Summer, winter, night and day, it turned out students who knew more about carburetors, chassis dynamometers, metal lathes and printed circuitry than they did about THE CANTERBURY TALES, scoria and pumice, the theory of vectors and the fact that Crispus Attucks, a Negro, was the first American to fall in the Revolutionary War. It was a great gray stone Coventry of a school, where young boys went in unmarked, and emerged some years later all punched and coded to fit into the System, with fringe benefits and an approximate date of death IBM'd by the group insurance company.

Chances were good the boy--whichever boy it turned out to be--was still attending classes, even though it was summer, and Arch and Frank were free. So they waited, and they watched. And finally, they found one of them.

An acne-speckled, pudgy-hipped specimen in a baggy orange velour pullover.

He came out of the school, and Arch recognized him.

"There, the pear-shaped one, in the orange."

They followed him into the parking lot. The car he unlocked was a Monza, a late model. If they watched for the VW they would have missed him.

"Hey!" Frank came up behind him. The pudgy turned.

He had beady little eyes, like a marmoset. The face was fleshy, with many small inflamed areas where he had shaved and the skin had broken out. There was a wasted look about him, as though he had been used up, and cast away. Even to Arch and Frank, the look of intense intelligence was missing from the pudgy's expression.

"Who're you guys?"

Arch did not like him. For a nameless reason, he did not like him. "Friends of a friend of yours."

Pudgy looked wary. He dumped his books into the back seat, not turning from them. He was getting set to jump inside the car and slam the door, and lock it, and pull out in a hurry. Pudgy was scared.

"Who's that, what friend?"

Frank moved slightly, to the side. It was almost a pavane, the maneuvering: Pudgy angled himself, his hand went toward the back of the front seat; Arch slid around the edge of the door. Frank's hand came up onto the roof of the car, near Pudgy's head. Pudgy's eyes got milky, fear bubbled up behind him, the taint was in his bloodstream.

"A tall kid, blond hair, you know," Frank said, his voice was deeper, a trifle threatening, "he was with you the other night at the movie, remember?"

Pudgy's right cheek tic'd. He knew what was happening. These were Jews. He made his move.

Arch slammed the door. It caught Pudgy at the forearm. He howled. Arch reached across and grabbed him by the ear. Frank sank a fist into Pudgy's stomach. The air whooshed out of Pudgy and left him flat, very flat, a cardboard cutout that they bundled into the front seat of the Monza, one on either side of him. They started the car, and rolled out of the parking lot. They would take him someplace. Someplace else. Pudgy would tell them who the blond Aryan had been, what his name was, where he could be found.

If they could pump enough air into him to produce sound.

Victor. Rohrer. Victor Rohrer. Blond, tall, solid with no extra flesh on his body, muscles very firm and tight, as though packed from the factory in plastic. Victor Rohrer. A face hewn from lignum vitae, from marble. Eyes chipped gray ice frost from lapis lazuli and allowed to die, harden into leaden cadaverousness. A body languinous, soft downy-covered with barely visible blond hairs, each one a sensor, a feeler of atmospheres and temperatures, each one a cilium seeing and smelling and knowing the tenor of the situation. A Cardiff Giant, not even remotely human, something cold and breathing, defying Mendelian theories, defying heredity, a creature from another island universe. Muscled and wired and gray eyes that had sometime never been blue with life. Lips thinned in expectation of silence. Victor. Rohrer. A creation of self, brought forth from its own mind for a need to exist.

Victor Rohrer, organizer of men.

Victor Rohrer, who had never known childhood.

Victor Rohrer, repository of frozen secrets.

Victor Rohrer, wearer of swastikas.

Patron of days and nights; singer of silent songs; visionary of clouds and nothingness; avatar of magics and unspoken credos; celebrant of terrors in nights of endless murmurings; architect of orderly destructions; Victor Rohrer.

"Who are you? Get away from me."

"We want you to talk to somebody."

"Punk filth!"

"Don't make me flatten you, wise guy."

"Don't try it; I don't like hurting people."

"There's one of the great laughs of our generation."

"Come on, Rohrer, get your ass in gear; somebody's waiting for you."

"I said: get away from me."

"We aren't goons, Rohrer, don't make us belt you around a little."

"It would take two of you?"

"If it had to."

"That isn't very sportsmanlike."

"Somewhichway, friend, you don't make us feel very sporty. Move it, or s'help me I'll lay this alongside your head."

"Are you from one of those street gangs?"

"No, we're just a coupla patriots doing a good deed."

"I'm tired'a talking. Get it going, Rohrer."

"You ... you're Jewish, aren't you?"

"I said get going, you bastard! Now!"

And they brought him to Lilian Goldbosch.

Wonder danced in her eyes. A dance of the dead in a bombed-out graveyard; a useless weed growing in a bog. She stared across the room at him. He stood just inside the door, legs close together, arms at his sides, his face as featureless as an expanse of tundra. Only the gray eyes moved in the face, and they did so liquidly, flowing from corner to corner, seeing what was there to be seen.

Lilian Goldbosch walked across the room toward him. Victor Rohrer did not move. Behind him, Arch and Frank closed the door softly. They stood like paladins, one on either side of the door. They watched--with intense fascination--what was happening in this silently humming room. As different worlds paused for an eternal moment.

They did not fully comprehend what it was, but so completely had the blond boy and the old woman absorbed each other's presence, that for now they--the ones who had effected the meeting--were gone, invisible, out of phase, no more a part of the life generated in the room than the mad little bird that dipped its beak in water, agonizingly straightened, rocked and dipped again, endlessly.

She walked up, very close to him. Where she had scratched him, his face was still marked. She reached up, involuntarily fascinated, and made as if to touch him. He moved back an inch, and she caught herself.

"You are very young."

It was said in appraisal, with a tinge of amazement, not a hue of poetry anywhere in it; an attempt to codify the reality of this creature, Victor Rohrer.

He said nothing, but a faint softness came to his mouth, as if he knew another truth. On another face, it might have been a sneer.

"Do you know me?" she asked. "Who I am?"

He was extremely polite, as if she were a supplicant and it had fallen to him to maintain decorum and form with her. "You're the woman who attacked me."

Her lips tightened. The memory was still fresh, an eroded fall on a volcanic hillside she had thought incapable of being ravaged again. "I'm sorry about that."

"I've come to expect it. From you people."

"My people ..."

"Jews."

"Oh. Yes. I'm Jewish."

He smiled knowledgeably. "Yes, I know. It says everything, doesn't it?"

"Why do you do this thing? Why do you walk around and tell people to hate one another?"

"I don't hate you."

She stared at him warily; there had to be more. There was.

"How can one hate a plague of locusts, or a packrat that lives in the walls? I don't hate, I'm merely an exterminator."

"Where did you get these ideas? Why does a boy your age fool around with this kind of thing, do you know what went on in the world twenty-five years ago, do you know all the sorrow and death this kind of thinking brought?"

"Not enough. He was a madman, but he had the right idea about the Juden. He had the final solution, but he made mistakes."

His face was perfectly calm. He was not reciting cant, he was delivering a theory he had worked out, logically, completely, finally.

"How did you get so much sickness in you?"

"It is a matter of opinion which of us is diseased. I choose to believe you are the cancer."

"What do your parents think of this?"

A hot little spot of red appeared high on his cheeks. "Their opinions are of very little concern to me."

"Do they know about what you do?"

"I'm getting tired of this. Are you going to tell these two punks to let me go, or will I have to put up with more abuse from you and your kind?" His face was getting slightly flushed now. "Do you wonder that we want to purge you, purify the country of your filth? When you constantly prove what we say is so?"

Lilian Goldbosch turned to the two boys by the door. "Do you know where he lives?" Arch nodded. "I want to see his mother and father. Will you take me there?" Again, Arch nodded. "He doesn't know. He doesn't understand. I can't find out from him. I'll have to ask there."

Flames burned up suddenly in Victor Rohrer's eyes. "You'll stay away from my home!"

"I'll get my purse," she said, softly.

He went for her. His hands came out and up and he was on her, hurling her backward, over a footstool, and they went into a heap, the woman thrashing frantically, and Victor Rohrer coldly, dispassionately trying to strangle her.

Arch and Frank moved quickly.

Frank grabbed Rohrer around the throat in a hammerlock, and without ceremony or warning, Arch lifted a marble ashtray from an end table and swung it in an arc. The ashtray smacked across the side of Victor Rohrer's head with an audible sound, and he suddenly tilted to the left and fell past Lilian Goldbosch.