The Caveman's Valentine (17 page)

A rusty seeder. A pair of motorbikes. A pool table. A big walkin freezer. Romulus walked in. Bare. He turned back to Moira.

“Where’s the beef?”

“No more. He used to have these
huge
barbecues, you know. But he’s too sick now for that kind of diet. I gave away all the meat. You should have seen it all. Donated it to the men’s shelter in Poughkeepsie. Feed them for years.”

But Romulus scarcely heard her—he had his eyes on the pool table. Something about the pool table made him uncomfortable. He sniffed. No stench of Y-rays. But still,
something.

Was this it? Was this the clue? Was this the source of the stench that his music tonight had been searching for?

He went over and lifted the plastic cover. Peeled it back.

Moira shrugged. “He doesn’t even play pool anymore. It’s a beautiful table, though, isn’t it?”

That green again. That sea color. Except—

“Except, Moira—what’s this brown stain here? On the felt.”

“I don’t know. I’ve never noticed it before. Barbecue sauce?”

He tried to think—or
not
to think: he tried to feel, in his heart, what the story was here. It was a bloodstain, he was sure. A Rorschach stain of blood, right in the dead center of the table. So if Scotty had been strapped down here, the bloodstain would have been just under his genitals. . . .

Some rite of sacrifice?

Some kind of crucifixion?

On a fucking pool table?

But if they had done anything to Scotty’s genitals, Matthew would have noticed. Matthew would have told him about that, for sure.

For a long while Romulus rummaged in his heart for the key. Moira stood by patiently.

Nothing. He put the plastic back.

“Ready?” Moira said.

“Ready.”

T
here was a narrow hall, and on the other side of it another huge room, and this was her studio. And taking up fully a third of it was a perfect replica of a woodlands cave.

“Jesus” said Romulus.

“I’m just finishing it,” she said. “Go ahead. Go on in.”

He stepped inside the cave. There was a faint bluish light he couldn’t find the source for, and by that light he saw the drawings. Drawings all over the walls.

A herd of aurochs. A feast, a celebration. You let the drawings lead you in, the narrow passage curving you into the cave’s bowels. Pentangles. Sketches of crudest eros. A snake with a two-pronged phallus. The blue light flickering.

Fire.

Torture.

Crucifixion.

A man with no face, wearing a white hood.

And then he saw that the cave walls were stained as that pool table had been stained. The walls of the passage closed in and the air grew heavy, and he saw a naked victim with bleeding crotch, and there were willow-limbed women tossing his vitals among them, and then the blue light fluttered out.

He was in utter darkness.

A heave of panic.

He turned, felt along the walls. Found light, stumbled forward into the bright studio. Moira was sitting on a stool with her knees up. She giggled. She looked into his face and she broke out laughing.

“Did it spook you?”

“Light went out.”

“It’s supposed to. Supposed to flicker out.”

“My Lord.”

“Oh. You’re too tired for this, aren’t you?”

“I may be. But as far as I’m concerned, you’re a better artist than your brother.”

“I’ll vote for that. Also wilder. Take more risks. Take lots of wild risks. Come upstairs with me.”

H
e had his shirt off and his pants, and was dressed in only the silken undershorts that Bob and Betty had given him, and he lay facedown on the fluffy old bed. He had showered in her bathroom, he was squeaky clean, and now he lay on Moira’s bed and she was applying an ointment to his cuts. An ointment she’d mixed herself, with her oils and herbs. The active ingredient being essence of slippery elm bark. Moira said that if it was no good at warding off rumors, it was still great for cuts. She said it was what doctors in the Revolutionary War had used on battle wounds. She rubbed it in gently, with her thumbs.

It did seem to ease the sting.

He had asked her a question, and she was pondering it.

“Uh-uh,” she said, “I don’t think so.
Stuyvesant?
I thought he lived a long time ago.”

“Not this Stuyvesant.”

“Well, I’ve never known
any
Stuyvesant. That I can remember. Anyway, the priest-figure in my cave—he’s got no face because—well, that’s just the style of the drawings. He’s got a white hood because I based him on the Druids. So who’s Stuyvesant?”

He tried to tell her. About Stuyvesant and his tower and the Y-rays. Meanwhile, outside, a long ways off, a barred owl kept asking over and over, “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for
you
-all?”

Moira worked a long time and as tenderly as she could at the big gash on his neck.

“This was a thorn did this, Rom?”

“Or a bunch of thorns. I don’t know, it was dark. Felt like about fifty yards of barbed wire.”

“You’re in bad shape.”

“I’ve survived though. I’m just beginning to grasp this.”

“Turn over.”

He did. She went to work on the cuts in front.

She had an ungodly beauty.

“So what I want to know is, Rom, I mean this is a great story, this wicked guy in the tower—but you know it’s not
reality,
don’t you?”

“Sure,” he said.

“I mean, not the reality of, well, say, this cup of ointment, or the cigarette burn on this nightstand—Stuyvesant’s not real in
that
way?”

“Oh shit, no. No, of course not. Stuyvesant’s not real at all.”

“OK,” she said.

“Stuyvesant’s much truer than reality.”

“Oh.”

“Stuyvesant
invented
reality.”

“Oh.”

“In the spring of 1913. Though in truth the man who did most of the work was a chemist by the name of Lem Mulkhoo. I suppose you never heard of him.”

“I haven’t.”

“He was my great-grandfather’s cousin. He had a lab in Harlem. He was a genius, and he was working on this drug to cure old age, and in those days, who was Stuyvesant? Stuyvesant was just a two-bit snake-oil salesman. That’s all.

“See, Stuyvesant sold patent medicines to the black folks that were just coming into Harlem then. And he hated Lem Mulkhoo because Lem Mulkhoo’s cures truly worked, and so Stuyvesant couldn’t make any money selling his quack shit. Right?”

Moira nodded. “Right. Do you think Stuyvesant sold any essence of slippery elm bark?”

“No. He only sold remedies that were of no value at all.”

She went to work kneading his shoulders.

He said, “So one night Stuyvesant snuck into Mulkhoo’s lab. He found the vat where Mulkhoo was brewing up his new elixir. Oh, and I forgot this part, but this is very important—Stuyvesant loved Lem Mulkhoo’s daughter. She was . . . a
vision,
you know what I’m saying? She was like a Nubian princess, you know?—and Stuyvesant thought about that girl’s pussy all day, that’s
all
he thought about. And he had plenty of charm, he thought he could have charmed that girl right into his bed, but Lem Mulkhoo wouldn’t let him
near
her. You with me?”

Moira nodded.

“So Stuyvesant, he sneaks into Lem Mulkhoo’s lab one night, and he pours
hemlock
into the vat. So Mulkhoo will make this drug that’s poison, and have to go out of business. Maybe it wasn’t hemlock. Most sources say it was hemlock, but there’s this other guy, this historian Hodovitch, he says it was this chemical compound,
triarsenium coagulatene
I think he says. Anyway, whatever it was, Lem Mulkhoo came back to the lab unexpectedly, and he saw what Stuyvesant was doing and he tried to stop him. They wrestled, and then Stuyvesant threw Lem Mulkhoo into the vat.

“And when Mulkhoo came out of the vat, he was the same, only
defeat
was all over him, just this gray color of defeat and the sound of the spirit in chains, that’s a gray sound, chink-chink, right, and the smell of degradation, and Stuyvesant says, ‘Hoo hoo—I got something here!’

“And now he had power over Lem Mulkhoo, and he put him to work. He had Mulkhoo make his concoction into a vapor and one day Stuyvesant let that vapor go. That was August 14, 1913. He let it waft over the city. And he called it the
real,
which is Spanish for the royal fuck-over.”

“But he still, he still couldn’t get Lem Mulkhoo’s daughter. She was immune somehow to the
real.
And Stuyvesant got angry, and he put Mulkhoo to work again, and Mulkhoo came up with a concentrated version of the stuff, a beam, a wave, and it made people say
yes
to all Stuyvesant’s shit, and so Stuyvesant called them
Yes
-rays. Or Y-rays, right?

“But even the Y-rays didn’t get to Mulkhoo’s daughter, and I saw her once, she was a very old woman and I was just a kid, and she was my second cousin twice removed, and this was in the Bronx. Long time ago. She was still tall, and she didn’t take no shit, and she was nearly blind. When I saw her, she was crossing the street. I didn’t see her too well, ’cause the sun was in my eyes. But I was looking right at her, and I saw this white car come out of nowhere and it ran her down. Usually, you know, Stuyvesant sends a goon. But not that time. This job he did himself. I saw his no-face, his white cowl. That’s the truth. And he didn’t stop, he just roared on out of there. My mama was screaming, and she just picked me up and got me out of there.”

“Did your mother know it was your cousin that was run over?”

“No, I figured it out on my own. When I grew up. I just put all the pieces together, bit by bit. That feels good, where you’re rubbing. Thank you. But the thing is, there’s many who are still immune. Immune to this reality poison. More blacks than whites are immune, but some whites, too. So Stuyvesant hasn’t won yet. Stuyvesant could still be overthrown. But never underestimate him. He’s clever. You could never outclever him. You can only put your heart out in front of you, and pray for that son of a bitch to fall.”

By now, of course, Romulus smelled the smoke. It was pouring out of their loins, so how could he miss it?

F
rom Moira the smoke was pure and had the fragrance of the sun in North Carolina. From him it was incinerator smoke, sooty, a lot of trash smoldering, lot of stuff that wouldn’t burn right, and when she brought her fingers down his clavicle he couldn’t help but close his eyes and linger on a flash of his wife, of sweet Sheila, long ago, getting out of the tub in her folks’ apartment when her folks had gone to visit relatives, and all of her was smooth as glass except the elbow he was kissing, which was whorled and knobbled like tree bark and dripping bathwater.

He opened his eyes and Moira was just as lovely as she had been, despite that she was not that woman in the bathtub.

He enveloped Moira’s hand in his own. He had not taken a woman’s hand in his own for more years than he could count. She took her hand back. She spoke solemnly.

“Rom, were you telling the truth? When you say you could hold a lighted match inside your mouth and make yourself look like a jack-o’-lantern?”

“Do you have a match?”

“Just a minute.”

She ran downstairs.

He lay there and listened to the owl. The owl laughed maniacally.

He could have fallen asleep.

It occurred to him that he might not get out of here alive and he smiled at that.

Then Moira came back and he lit a match and motioned for her to turn off the light. She did. He drew breath very slowly, because that was the secret, maintaining an even, constant flue. He aimed the flame toward him and gently put the match inside his mouth, and closed the gate of his teeth over it. Moira laughed. She said she had never seen a holy man do
that
before. He knew what she was seeing, because he had practiced the trick before many mirrors. He knew she could see the light right through his translucent lips and nostrils. And that he looked a flaming beast of skullish dark.

His lungs started to ache a little and he coughed the flame out.

He struck another match, and relit the candle beside the bed.

He sat up, and they were still laughing, and he kissed her.

She didn’t embrace him, but drew him to her with her claws resting lightly on his back. The kiss was all lips, no tongue. Just a rocking of dry lips. He breathed in the air she had just breathed out. He ran his fingers along her side, where her stomach dipped in, where her hip flared out, where her short dress ended, and then he was sweeping along the skin of her thigh, his fingers sparking. He looked into her eyes. Even up close they were skewed. With a wild hedgerow of lashes. He pressed those lashes between his lips and tugged at them.

Then she moved till she was on her knees on the bed, and she pushed him back. Her hair flowed over his cheek and neck and chest and wrapped around him. The tip of his tongue surveyed the space between her gums and her lip. With her finger she wrote something in his palm. He felt the moisture of her panties against his thigh. Heard her hoarse breath. The wind spiraling down through her pipes. He stroked the back of her thigh. Slight marbling of cellulite there, and he traced circles around the puckers. All the while her hands were grazing on his back.

His great grizzly-back.

She was careful to touch him lightly but sometimes her fingers did drift over a thorn scratch, and it might have smarted somewhere in his brain stem, but the news was not sent on upstairs.

They moved again. She reached up her arms, and he slid the dress off her. Then he was on his back, and she pulled at his shorts. But his cock had come through the fly, had hooked the elastic waist, and the shorts wouldn’t come down. She did something that involved shifting his cock with her cool fingers, which involved bolts of amok electricity, and then she drew off the silk shorts. They moved, she rolled onto her back and he was above her. She lifted her ass and he wobbled her panties down to her knees, her ankles, they were gone. Removing them released a cloud of smoke in the room and he breathed it in and nearly lost his balance.