The Amalgamation Polka (11 page)

Liberty accepted the proffered hand, sticky though it was—the telltale star in this imp’s pupil a beacon he would never be able to resist, vestige of the aurora that resided in all but was too often occluded by bad weather in the soul’s outer provinces.

“I’m Stumpy, the hoggee,” he declared proudly, emphasizing again the latter word as one would a title of no small distinction. “Take a gander at the tile,” indicating the high hat atop the man seated cross-legged on the foredeck below them reading a newspaper, Stumpy leaned over and from his puckered mouth let fall a juicy gob smack onto the center of the glossy crown. The man looked up, held out his hand as the boys scuttled back out of sight. “One of them fat Dutchmen,” gurgled Stumpy, trying to check his giggles manually by pressing all ten smutty fingers against his lips. “I’d whang him in the eye with a fending pole if he so much as laid a single hand on me. See ol’ Genesee Red over there?” He gestured toward the lanky somnam-bulent stumbling along behind the hayburners. “We’re the ones make this boat go. I spell him in about another hour. Pretty whangdang, doncha think? Watch out for Captain Whelkington, though. Don’t get in front of him. He’ll knock you down quicker than billy-be-damned. Times he and Red get into it so bad they got to stop the boat and take it out on the towpath. Passengers always seem to enjoy it, though. Everyone loves a good knockabout. But like I say, you don’t want to be in one yourself, so steer clear of the cap’n. He’s notional, that one. Listen, want to see something bunkum?”

With a conspiratorial leer, he led Liberty down into the dining salon where, the tables cleared, the mop run once across the floor, Mrs. Callahan sat at the bar, sodden rag in one hand, cup of forty rod in the other. “What mischief you up to now?” she muttered.

“Cap’n business,” mumbled Stumpy, moving on past the marathon whist game in the corner, serious men devoutly occupied, who hadn’t stepped outside or glanced up at a window since boarding at Troy, and forward into the cuddy, where he carefully pushed the door open and, grinning wickedly, pointed upward. Liberty had no idea where he was or what he was supposed to be looking at. This cramped, murky space contained four bunks, one stool, and smelled of mold and sweat and mule dung. Overhead a betty lamp hung on a chain, and in the rough planks of the low ceiling he could see crudely carved initials and untutored words and symbols of enigmatic significance. Then he noticed, bored into the peeling and splintered wood, a configuration of auger holes, some bright as noon, some dark as a well bottom, others winking mystically on and off or hovering suspended in a dim twilight state in between.

Stumpy positioned the stool and motioned for Liberty to climb up and take a peek. His eyeball jammed up against the hole, gamely squinting into a grayish obscurity impossible to puzzle out, he was about to step down when the shadows shifted, the textured light, though still dampened, seeped in from another angle and into view materialized a comprehensible form, long and pale and shapely, a human leg, a woman’s “limb” to be precise, revealed now in all its secret splendor beneath the protective tenting of ruffled silk.

Stumpy, tugging impatiently on Liberty’s pants, informed him in a confidential whisper, “They don’t wear no drawers under them petticoats,” teeth gleaming even in this uncertain light.

Liberty’s eye, traveling inquisitively up that turned column of tender muscle and opalescent skin, illumination steadily dwindling, endeavored to penetrate the beckoning mystery where leg met torso and it was very dark indeed. He was still seeking when the door crashed open, admitting Captain Whelkington and a couple of bachelors dressed like twins in matching cream linen suits and hats and brandishing identical segars of considerable heft and pungency.

“Piss in a bucket!” bellowed the captain. “What in the high holy hell are you two scrawns doing in here!”

Without awaiting a reply, he seized Stumpy by the ear and hauled him squealing through the door.

“And you, you little dawplucker!” he cried, advancing upon Liberty, who, having hastily jumped down from the stool, was feinting left, now right, striving to turn this lunatic’s flank, but the room was too small, the captain’s girth too wide. “I knew it were a monstrous misjudgement on my part to allow you and your nigger-loving father on my boat. Didn’t know you were a damn pervert, too. Now get the fuck out of here”—cuffing Liberty hard enough on the head to send stars and bells reeling through space—“afore I tell your pa just what article of boy you truly are.”

“Now hold on, Erastus,” declaimed one of the creamy gentlemen in a hearty baritone. “Don’t be too precipitate with your screed. Next thing you know, the old man’ll be down here applying for a position.”

“At which juncture,” replied the quick-witted captain, “I’ll be applying something firm of mine to something soft of his.”

And the door slammed shut upon their coarse laughter.

His father still entangled in the coils of the same monotonous conversation as when he’d left, Liberty ignored Thatcher’s concerned look and quietly reassumed his seat on the deck. Though it seemed to him as if he’d just been translated to another realm and back by means not yet officially recognized, scattered parts of him over there still trying to catch up, here topside, everything seemed exactly as before, the sky the same bleeding blue, the neighboring faces well padded and smug, all achingly familiar, the recurring vistas drab and undistinguished. He had the odd sensation he’d already been on board for several days. He was surreptitiously studying the women clustered unknowingly, like elegant and begowned dolls in the general vicinity of the tampered boards, attempting to determine which one it might have been whose veiled anatomy had been indiscreetly exposed to his aspiring gaze, and he’d just about decided on the pretty girl in the green dress with the high forehead and dimpled chin when abruptly she turned to look him full in the face, and all the skin from his neck up swelled with blood.

Mrs. Callahan came trudging up from the galley to toss a bucket of orts over the rail, cheese parings, potato skins, egg shells, animal bones, apple cores, congealed fat and the unidentifiable runoffs and leavings from the unsparing dinner meal to mingle with the other diverse ingredients of the canal this August day was industriously brewing into a memorably aromatic, rainbow-hued soup: traffic garbage and body waste, castoff clothes and discarded boots, missing traps and lost books, whiskey bottles and sheets of newspaper, hats and children’s tops and a wooden leg or two, rusted pistols and lensless eyeglasses and untold gallons of tobacco juice, and playing cards and lamp oil, and all the dead: the mules, the horses, the cows, the dogs and cats, the muskrats and the snakes, the frogs, the fish and, of course, the humans. Liberty had overheard the affable bowman amusing a couple of Jonathans from the North Country with gruesome yarns of the stiffs he’d personally seen dragged from the water just this year—one, near Little Falls, a hairless giant who’d looked more like a bleached pig; the other, west of Ganajoharie, a faceless greenish thing half-nibbled by the carp and the turtles, its bones protruding from the spongy flesh like the ribs of a scuttled ship.

Stumpy had replaced Red out on the towpath and somehow gathered behind him a taunting gang of local children who mimicked his swaggering gait and chanted loudly in unison:

Hoggee on the towpath

Five cents a day

Picking up horseballs

To eat along the way!

Flashing Liberty a knowing grin, he cracked his whip with great authority.

Sometime in the blazing heart of the endless afternoon the
Croesus
arrived at the village of Sparta, and while the packet was being passed through the lock its bored and overheated passengers, having spied on the bank an animated crowd collected in the shade of an impressively developed chestnut tree and desperate for novelty of any stripe, rushed from the boat en masse in hopes of even a few brief minutes of entertainment.

Nailed to the ragged bole of the tree was a gaily executed sign proclaiming: “Dr. Wilbur Fitzgibbon, Esq. Extractions 50¢.” And in the clearing at the center of the three-and-four-folk-deep throng of craning, clamorous spectators lined up like curiosities in a sideshow exhibit were the doctor, a lively, stout figure in a swallowtail coat and pipe hat; his assistant, short, bald and black and rigged out in a threadbare jester’s costume and clutching in his left hand a hard-used banjo; and, seated between them rather tentatively on a bare wooden chair, an anxious white gentleman who responded to the shouted encouragements and drolleries of the crowd with a mirthless grin and the frequent mopping of his brow with a voluminous checkered kerchief.

“Quiet! Quiet, please!” called Dr. Fitzgibbon, removing his coat and stepping confidently forward. “Before we begin I would like to remind the assembly that what you are about to witness today is neither an idle stunt nor a theatrical performance, but an authentic dental procedure of paramount consequence, particularly to our suffering friend here.”

“Bring on the fortifier, doc!” yelled a voice. “Calvin don’t look so good.”

Clapping a powerful hand upon the patient’s shoulder and lifting a cautionary finger to his lips, Fitzgibbon went on, “I would therefore entreat each and every one of you attending this afternoon’s operation to display an appropriate respect and consideration. Now, before we may properly proceed, we must verify the diseased tooth.” Slipping from his waistcoat pocket a long, slim, glittering instrument that tapered down to a fiendishly fine point, he leaned over the seated gentleman, tilted his chin, and, requesting politely, “Open, please,” began to probe the pink interior of the exposed mouth with an artistic delicacy.

The black man, his shining countenance a perfect blank, allowed his dark, impassive eyes to go roving among that encircling field of white faces, like upturned flowers really, basking in the unfailable light, his fingers idly plucking a few random notes from the banjo’s taut wires.

Liberty, once more disregarding his father’s injunctions, worked his way among a thicket of adult legs up to the front for a ringside seat on the grass amid an ungoverned pack of scruffy children, their synonymously narrow heads and vaguely fetal features testifying to communion at the the same polluted bloodline, as did their fondness for wrestling one another in preference to the big show the grownups were putting on.

Suddenly the patient let out a howl that sent sparrows wheeling from nearby trees and babies to crying and he bolted upright out of the chair as if his backside were on fire. A few nervous chuckles broke the awful silence that followed, but most of the crowd watched in mute apprehension.

“There, there,” cooed Dr. Fitzgibbon, patting his patient consolingly upon the chest as he eased him gently back down into the chair. He glanced at the audience. “I believe we have located the offending molar.”

General laughter of a relieved, temperate quality.

“Now,” continued Dr. Fitzgibbon, “if I may, I require two volunteers, preferably male and of excellent strength. How about you, sir, and, yes, your friend, too,” indicating a pair of brawny sunburnt youths who, though clearly embarrassed by the adverture, stepped dutifully forward.

“If one of you obliging gents would please position yourself behind the chair and firmly seize Mr. Turnbull’s rather generous biceps”—more appreciative laughter—“and the other kindly come around and grasp the ankles securely like so. And do not be timid with your strength. It certainly would not do to have our friend coming up out of the chair in the middle of the actual operation.”

“Now hold on a durn minute,” protested Turnbull, vainly searching the mob for signs of moral support. “I reckon I just might have changed—”

“This ain’t a hanging, Calvin,” called a voice. “You’re gonna walk away a better man.”

“Or carried by the handles by six of your best friends,” retorted a second.

“If you got any friends,” added a third.

Again Turnbull made an effort to rise though, checked by the grips of four mighty hands, he could do no more than squirm feebly in his seat.

“Tut, tut,” cautioned Dr. Fitzgibbon, wagging a horny finger in the man’s blotched and sweating face. “Heed the worthy advice of your compatriots. ’Twill be over in an instant. The pangs of this trifling affair are as airy nothings to the unimaginable agonies to be endured should the festering pit in your splendid ivories be permitted to go untreated. Corruption black as the grave yet vital as a blooming organism continues to breed in wanton frenzy, partaking of whatever sustenance comes to hand, in this particular instance the nourishing fare of your own pearly whites, which, once devoured to the root, leaves our unwelcome guest free to move on to the second course, the succulent roulade of your gums, from the gums to the bone, from the bone to the brain. And once settled within the gleaming nobility of the skull, what does our mischievous interloper find being served in that grand chamber but a veritable foie gras of inexpressible delights whose consumption, regrettably, terminates in the irrevocable loss of sight, sound, touch, taste and, eventually, dear auditors, the toppling of the very throne of reason, reducing the unfortunate Mr. Turnbull to a mere drooling pantomine of his former hale and hearty self, bereft of family, friends, cash and cabin, resembling perhaps a figure much like this!”

Reaching over, he twisted his signboard to reveal on its backside a hideously detailed rendering of a bug-eyed, black-tongued idiot with writhing scarlet lips and chartreuse flesh who was tugging out great yellow handfuls of his own mangy hair.

A collective gasp rose from the crowd.

“You don’t want to look like that, do you, Mr. Turnbull?”

The terrified man shook his head.

“Good,” Dr. Fitzgibbon declared. “Now we may begin.”

From a second waistcoat pocket he withdrew a pair of polished pliers he held aloft for public inspection. A hush had fallen over the mesmerized onlookers, the sole sound a mild breeze moving softly through the leaves.

“Gentlemen,” the doctor addressed his volunteers, whose hold upon Mr. Turnbull’s trembling limbs instantly tightened. “Open, please.”