Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales & (32 page)

Customers came in all day waving the
Telegraph
like a flag. "Hooray for us!" they crowed. "Where's Po?"

Po didn't come in all day. And what's more, the snake-serpent-whateveryoucallit had disappeared. I'd been too preoccupied to pay any attention to Majka when she'd asked about both the day before. Po had always packed it in its case and left it in the shop before.

~

When I got home Sylvia was there to meet me at the door, a frothy glass in her hand and a smile as big as a house on her face.

I pasted a smile on my face, but couldn't face the drink.

The next day the girls were frantic. Still no Po. I served the crowd of customers at the counter and then told the girls I'd go find him, and to take the day off.

I closed the shop and walked the three blocks to the rooming house where we'd both lived till I got married. The manager went to Po's room at my request, but Po didn't answer the door. He was paid up to the end of the week so it was like pulling nails from ironwood to get the manager to open up his room, but finally he did when I said I'd leave and come back with the coppers. 

Inside, a neat room greeted us, with nothing personal in it except what he left in the wastebasket: a magazine of physical culture—something of a surprise. A powder-blue envelope with no writing on it, but it had once been sealed. A balled-up clipping from, you guessed it before I did: The
Melbourne Courier
. And a dried-up applecore.

I felt sick.

While I scouted round the room, I remembered what it was like living in the one next door. Alone in your room, you'd hear other men breathing, turning the pages of magazines, and the rest. The back of each door had a sign on it that said, "NO women" topping a lot of other NO's. The view from the window was a brick wall with a painted ad:
Bonds
.

I went home to Sylvia, not knowing what to do. We put the kids in the old Morris and drove all over Adelaide, even out to Snake Gully, looking, like lost farts in a haunted shithouse.

"He's gone," I said after two hours of this.

"Where would he go?"

"How should I know?"

We took the kids back. They were crying. I left her and them in the house, and went out again. I didn't know where, but I had to go out.

I walked till my feet were blistered. I hadn't walked this much for years. He could walk, I remembered. He never groused like the rest of us at the length of those tramps in mud.

When I felt so lost that my eyes were getting misty, I made my way back to my own house, and Sylvia.

Our stereo ran hot that evening so that music took the place of talk. We didn't have too many records, so she had to play her Benny Goodman twice. That was fine by me. Any noise would do, because nothing would do.

We went to bed early and I looked at the ceiling for hours. I wanted to strangle whoever those people were—the nasty ones. He had protected me, and what had I done for him?

"You need your sleep, Mal," came Syl's voice through the darkness. She'd been pretending to sleep, too.

"I'll be right," I said to Syl.

"Shh!" she said.

"I was," I said, miffed. It was Syl who had spoken, not me.

"Shut up, Mal. Listen!"

I heard it. A voice—high and thin as the night. One long note. It swelled ... and then died away.

"How beautiful!" whispered Sylvia. "Shh!"

She didn't need to shush me. I felt my ears stretch, I was straining so hard to hear.

Again and again—that voice, and each time, further away.

"There's no words," she whispered, "but then there aren't really in opera, are there?"

She wasn't wanting an answer, so I didn't give her one. She shut up again.

"If only I could sing like that," Sylvia finally sighed when the voice was too faint to catch any more.

When dawn came, I heard her ladylike snores.

~

When I opened the door of the Pococurante only a few hours later, Majka and her sister came in as usual, but we each had our jobs to do, so we nodded to each other and got on with it.

A crowd of customers was already waiting, sounding like a flock of galahs: "Did you hear her too? My word! I wonder who ..."

And they must of breakfasted on radio waves to come up with
Call of the Soprano
,
Phantom Lady of the Night
,
Dame Melba's Ghost
,
Heavenly Disturber of our Peace
and such rot.

Well, Sylvia had been taken in completely, but I couldn't let it stand. All the customers got an earful of my correction, as I explained that the
lady
was a bull. After about an hour of this, an old guy who was quietly waiting, holding a hoary jacket, backed me up. "A bull's call is unmistakable," he said.

Finally, at that slack time just before noon, I was alone in the front, so I went to the back and told the girls that I was sorry they'd been too far away to hear that bull, living in their migrant camp, but they said that just around dawn the whole camp heard it, too.

"Papa say no bull," Maj said. And just then, a ghost tweaked three sets of lips.

"Pococurante" copyright © Anna Tambour, was originally published in
Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories
edited by John Klima, Spectra Books, NY, 2007

The Onuspedia

An expert is someone who always makes sure of the spelling.

(some ripped-out excerpts)

stolen from the University of Utah. This theft coincided with a rebirth of interest in the Aemetic language and culture. There are today, no popular translations. The most respected texts are the Harvard edition by Cunningham (out of print) and his
Skwandro Concordance
(out of print). Sir Geoffrey Gyre's 1929
Cambridge Comprehensive Aemetic Lexicon
is now being revised, according to the publisher. T.E. Lawrence's
Sahan-ro: A Thousand and One Wars
is out of print.

For a discussion of the theft, see Lt. Col. Brewster ("Bud") Langley's "The Skwandro Prediction" in
Armor, the Magazine of Mounted Warfare
, Volume XI, no. 4, July 2002

SLEEDOORN, WALTER ("TINKER")
-
see
Felix Catfood, LaundRite, Rainbow Chews, Cowboy Pete's Razor in a Jar, Love-Me-Dear Chocolates

Walter Pense Sleedoorn II (1898-1937) was born into one of the original Old New York families.  His father was a banker who never learnt to read but was such a brilliant manager of men that he became the head partner of Schuip, Sleedoorn & Blythe two years before his marriage.

When Walter was four years old, his mother Emmaline (née Schueuller) was invalided out of society, due to her weakness for laundry starch. She pilfered so much from the housekeeper's store that, on the morning of July 15, 1902, the
Around Town
column in the
New York Post
mentioned Walter Sr. as "limpy", a reference to his limp collar just hours earlier at the Metropolitan Opera's opening night of Franco Alfano's
Risurrezione
. The delicacy of the
Post
ensured that only those who knew about the collar, knew.

The first action Walter Sr. took within minutes of his secretary reading the news to him was to send his wife, Walter's mother, to the Sleedoorn estate in Schenectady, from which she never returned. It can only be imagined what little Walter felt that day, or if he saw his mother at all from his nursery window. Walter Sr. walked with a limp from that day on. Although he never mentioned the reason to anyone, his physique, manly demeanour, and idiosyncratic language all contributed to his reputation, which only grew in stature to its culminative apogee, his funeral at which his heroism in the Indian Wars and the stoicism with which he bore his wound were lauded. Subsequent historians found no evidence that Walter Sr. had even taken so much as a European tour.

Walter Jr. was sent the next day to board at Habsley's in Long Island, where he soon came under the eye of Mr. Habsley himself. The boy didn't last long in that institution, as his interest in ink was not appreciated. When Walter was seven, his father died without warning, and the boarding school that Walter was in at the time evicted him as a debtor. He quickly fell into a life of petty crime. His brilliant mind and passion for chemicals would have allowed him to swindle many small traders, but he preferred to cheat larger businesses by sleight of hand. At this time, he never had a job but led a hand-to-mouth existence, sleeping rough on the streets. It was inevitable that he was caught, and he served his first sentence when he was only nine.

Walter Sleedoorn's incarceration was invaluable as a character-shaper. Amongst his fellow inmates were sons of some of the top criminal families in New York. He last served under lock and key when not yet old enough to shave. He was discharged from the Bowery Home for Intransigent Boys in December 1911, and entered immediate and stable employment. Under the patronage of the Case and Kroeter families, he was the brains behind what we now know to be an empire of consumer goods,  some of which are still infamous. The sensational trial (
see
The State of New York
vs.
Your Custom Corporation, 1936-1937) of Charles "Pinks" Case and Orville "Inky" Kroeter never ended satisfactorily as far as the public was concerned. On the 4th of July, 1937, the bloated, rope-entangled body of Walter Pense Sleedoorn II (nicknamed "Tinker" by Charley Graham of the
New York Post
) was spotted by a five-year-old boy who was fossicking the banks of Sheepshead Bay.

Bibliography

Hadwigger, K.H., and Romano Bacchi,
Chemistry and Crime: A Love Affair
, Franklin Medical Publishing,     1963, Lexington, Mass.

Dravid, S., and  T. MacGreggor. 2004. 'Pica as a Signifier',
Journal of Neuropsychological Studies
204; 1177.

American Enterprise Institute. 1980
The Costly Consumer: Adulteration and the Witchhunt Mentality
. Washington D.C.

"Found!", "Tinker Fixed Up Good" (etc.),
New York Post
, pg 1-3, July 5, 1937 (see also July 6, 7, 8)

"Prosecutor Struggles in Your Custom Trial",
New York Times
, pg. 2, July 7, 1937

S'AU TZO-HU

This is the Bowdlerized term for what in Mandarin, was called the Sixth Taste, and by Octave Mirbeau, author of "Le Jardin des supplices" (The Torture Garden),
la truffe de la bonne femme
. It is the taste of the tender folded-over inside of a bound foot.

SZECWIEKIWIC, GOLBUZ —
see
WoT

Golbuz Szecwikiwic (1972-) was president of the International Society of Watch Fob Collectors between 1994 and 2004. The ISWFC is a splinter-group of the International Watch Fob Association. The groups gained a measure of fame in 2008 when the yellow globe and red background of the IWFA was mentioned in a US Senate subcommittee hearing.

SZUYR -
see
Boza

A type of small beer once made in southeastern Turkey. In his
Travels in the Ottoman Empire
published by Richard Hakluyt in 1601, G.B. Halbutt, who was a member of the Guild of Master Victuallers and a minor poet, wrote
,"Wouldst thou, couldst thou, see into their crafty souls? O for a hundred eyes, wherewith to watch and pry the lid from the soul of that ruffian, Hakim Bey. I could only delve his drop. Yet as my eyes, mere two, peered into the golden meer, I met his match in my own reflection. Hail to our Guild. We are, barring the sea's worth, peerless."

The grains Halbutt smuggled out of Turkey had to be dumped at sea as carriers of smut. It is thought that they were a type of long-grain "gooseneck" amaranth once cultivated in the province of Siirt.

TACCHIA, NUNO -
see
Fruits, preserved; Cornlake, Iowa

Nuno Tacchia (1920-1958) is the inventor of the tacchia net, a skimming seine used to capture fruits and vegetables at sea. A former fisherman, he realised the potential one day after flash-floods on the Portuguese coast, when he couldn't sink his herring nets under the floating mass of  citrus fruits, olives, tomatoes, pumpkins and zucchini. His son Fernando changed the name of the company, Tacchia Nets, to Tacchia International in 2002 when he significantly expanded the company, bringing into use his father's other invention, the bottom trawler (1957), designed to salvage sunken fruit. There was at that time, no market for salt-laden produce. Fernando has been so successful with his exports to China that he is now growing and sinking liquorice roots to flavour Tacchia Mixed Fruits further to the Chinese taste. The changing patterns of rainfall have only benefited the company. Grapes, cherries, and stone fruits constituted the company's main exports in 2015, as fishing grounds at that time covered the Danube, Rhine and Po regions.

TELLIOPE

A coin-operated toy sold by the Tell Bros Express Toy Emporium. The toy was a monkey amusingly grinding its own organ. Sales were by mail order, and promoted by advertising sheets stitched into the October and November 1865 (the last two monthly episodes) of Dickens'
Our Mutual Friend
. The Telliope Instructional Organ Grinder was a sell-out success for the Tell Bros 1865 Christmas season.
"Teach your child thrift with this pennysaving gift"  the
advertisement read,
"and you'll never have to Tell them a thing!"
If the child put a coin in the monkey's opened hand, the hand dropped to an organ-grinder's wheel, where the coin disappeared. There was the sound of the coin dropping, and then the monkey turned the wheel and the "organ" played a little tune. The actual music came from a music box cleverly located inside the metal monkey, because the organ was the coinbox. The advertisement showed a greatly muscled man with hair down to his waist, wielding a giant hammer at a strongbox.
"You can't teach Uncle Edworth to restrain from indulging your tots, but with the Telliope, you can be sure that every penny they get, they spend, and once they pay to hear the Telliope, their money is kept Safe from the mightiest Sampson!"
The coinbox's "organ" was so thickly walled and heavily secured with welded seams that the angriest boy could not bash it open. There is no record of the toy being sold in 1866, possibly because there was no opening to the little money bank, save the slot that the coins dropped into.

This toy would have been as forgotten as the Tell Me No Lies Electric Belt and the Future ForTeller Machine, and even that other forgotten but once popular Tell Toy, the Picture Worth a Thousand Tastes Book of Nursery Meals, but for the three famous people who were educated by the Telliope Instructional Organ Grinder. J. B. Livesay, creator of the most popular American travelling act of the 1880s, Livesay and D'Yousay, credited his skill as a ventriloquist to the dedication he put into retrieving coins from his Telliope by the action of his tongue through the coinslot of his Telliope, while having to, "in my dark, cold nursery, say my prayers and my goodnight wishes loud enough that my dear mother could hear them on the other side of the door." His act always ended with someone in the audience asking
"Why'd you talk to the Almighty and yur Ma when you got yur mouth open?"
at which point, he'd turn his head and say,
"Ask D'Yousay."
And for once in the act, the wooden boy on his lap had nothing to say. D'Yousay only shrugged.

Brisco "The Beast" Shugars was also famous in the 1880s, but not for performances anyone willingly attended until the day he was put in an electric chair, for which event the State of Louisiana sold lottery tickets. The Beast's daring daylight robberies left a trail of blood, which was his literal trademark. He'd walk into a bank on a rainy day, and suddenly shed his overcoat. Underneath, his clothes would be as bloody, as Jim Jessup, the
Chicago Sun's
crack crime reporter wrote,
"as if he'd just butchered the twenty wives of Mormon John Smith, and all his children. The Beast then doffs his hat, see, and from his hair, blood Niagaras down his face. 'Yur life or the bank's money,' he snarls like the Beast he is, and tellers, bank managers, whoever's on the other side of that visage with the Face of Hell just up and hands him bags of money fast as hail falls on a ripe peaches on the bough, in Damnationland. May his soul rot for all the innocents he's sent to early graves."

Shugars was captured one overcast morning when he choked on one of the free potatoes with butter that patrons got when they ordered a beer at William McGillin's Philadelphia taproom, The Bell in Hand. William's wife Catherine (fated to be known in the
Philadelphia Enquirer
, and then everywhere, as "the Amazon") picked up the writhing customer from the saw-dust laden floor,
"and ripping open his heavy overcoat, exposed the bloody mess that covered his evil, hairy, barely clothed hide."
Only after Shugars was electrocuted was it discovered that the people who claimed to have seen him murder and burn bodies in four states were all perjurers, and that the blood that he used for his robberies was, in the spring, pig's blood for making blood pudding that he'd buy at local butcher shops. When pig killing season was over, he'd mix cornflour, water, and cochineal, the same dye (made from beetle cases) used then by confectioners to make "cherry" syrup. During the trial he "cried like a baby", said he was "plumb sorry", and claimed, "I never hurt a fly. I don't even touch ham." He interrupted the cross-examination many times with a strange, garbled cry, reported by Jessup as
"The inhuman, animal cry of the Beast,"
but what was, after his death and the unpacking of his few, spare belongings and a heart-wrenching diary, interpreted as (Hewson, Larnik P. and Oliphant, Roy, "Hearing or Hearsay: Nouns or Nonsense? Effectual Retardant Structures as Stratifying M-h Inhibitors",
Journal of Linguistic Jurisprudence
, Vol. 12 [3] July-Aug, 1956, Belvedere University, Schenectady, New York) "Blame the monkey grinder monstrance."

Still, by 1917, the Telliope Instructional Organ Grinder would have been well and truly forgot, if not for Margaretha Geertruida "Grietje" Zelle, who called herself Mata Hari. Henry Sales, the British reporter who covered her last days, claimed to have been told by her that when "in 1991 when this seductrice-to-be was 15, she was sent to live with her uncle Visser at Sneek, the Netherlands, where her uncle gave her the mysterious toy that, with a wicked grin, she referred to as 'ze monkey met ze zlotted box.' " The mechanism that made a tune must have long since ceased to function, but the box clinked with mysterious treasure.
"Ziss little toy! It teached me to make later, Villyam, ze Crown Prince ov Djermany, a very happy poy,"
Sales wrote in a small illustrated "autobiography" that he had printed at Grub Street, London, at his own expense for private subscription.

T'JAIME

A unisex brand of perfumes and depilatories.

TSEVERENKO PHENOMENON

An occurrence named by and after Yuri Tseverenko (1945—), a physics professor at the University of Chicago. The phenomenon refers to his posit that colour is a conditioned response. His bestseller
Green?
set off a storm of interest in the treatment of colour in extraterrestrial photos, thus on our own planet. The existence of the Tseverenko Phenomenon has been hotly disputed by sceptics, but they cannot disprove it.

UANORRA -
see
Folk remedies

Common name given to the bushy-tailed marsupial rat (
Dasyuroides tiffanyei
) discovered in Tasmania in 2008 by F. Wylie Chapman of the University of Washington's Medical School. Compared to the more heavily studied crest-tailed rat (
Dasyuroides byrnei
), whose mucous cells have come under scrutinisation by scientists from the Institute of Laboratory Animal Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Kagoshima University, the uanorra is of interest for many reasons, as it was thought to be a myth until its discovery.