Then there is a flash of light. I'm afraid that I've come all the way to Hollywood, just to be nuked. Was it world war? Terrorism? Foreign? Domestic? It doesn't really matter when you're being vaporized . . .
My eyesight comes back, and dingy, old Hollywood now looks like a Technicolor dancing cartoon backdrop. The street people, hookers, and bus passengers are all now cartoon characters.
I look at myself.
I am a cartoon character.
There's a spooky laugh, like the Indian's. I turn and see . . . Coyote!
He's a cartoon Coyote, in a three-piece suit, wearing sunglasses and smoking a cigar.
"Hey, kid," he says, "how do you like it? And this is only the beginning. There's a lot of work to do. We can use a few good cartoonists. Ya want a job?"
I say yes.
And now, in real present tense, because it isn't the tick-tock whiteman's time anymore, but something like a cross between Indian time and Einstein's space-time, with the past and future happening now. The myth and dreamtime happen before my very eyes, as I draw it. I'm doing my part in Coyote's new, improved mythotech trickster business.
Fade out, but not to black – fade to brightness.
Spicy Detective #3
Je
rey Ford
On the bleary-eyed, whiskey side of midnight, when even the shadows have shadows and ghosts die of loneliness only to return as pale, flypaper memories of their former selves, when triggers are cocked and cocks are triggered, and all the dames left standing after sleep has swamped the world have a pile of bleached coif like a hair hive abuzz with stingered schemes of revenge and lust and greed, before the lipstick melts into a trickle of blood and the mascara mixes with tears to write lines of graveyard poetry on pancake masks (elegies of regret to be read by the first rays of a sun that might never rise), after the dirty cash has passed hands and the whispered promises are made with fingers crossed and gams uncrossed, leading to the split-tongued French kiss of Mephistopheles, Rent Johnson, of the square jaw, the doublebreasted pinstripe and existential malaise, private eye, sniffer out of the why of treachery, the how of betrayal, the who gives a flying fuck of good gone bad and bad gone worse like a shiv in the kidneys, a brass knuckle sandwich for grandma, a pair of concrete galoshes for a sad sack on a losing streak, whose present case was the search for Sammy Anole, the Lizard King, a stout dwarf of a heinous killer with serpent eyes and twin six-foot iguanas in his basement that cleared the flesh from his victim's corpses like two green-scaled Hoover uprights with needle teeth and blood colder than the beer at The Swan Dive, cleaved, with his flesh, snub-nose special, the hair-rimmed portal of soft wetness belonging to Winter Darling, Anole's current squeeze, spelunking her well-traveled cavern path, in and out, like one of those dying ghosts caught between coming and going, the bed springs in the flop house dive overlooking Pork Chop alley, bathed in blue neon from the Pabst sign across the street, squealing out a half-assed version of the "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy (of Company B)," and caught, in the reflection of Miss Darling's glass eye, Sammy's dragon stare in the doorway, which made him reach, with lightning speed, for his ankle-holstered piece, and shoot over his left shoulder, while shooting down below, directly drilling the thimble heart of the Lizard King, whose first sound heard through ghostly ears was the gasping, passionless sob of Winter.
Auspicious Eggs
James Morrow
Father Cornelius Dennis Monaghan of Charlestown Parish, Connie to his friends, sets down the styrofoam chalice, turns from the corrugated cardboard altar, and approaches the two women standing by the resin baptismal font. The font is six-sided and encrusted with saints, like a gigantic hex nut forged for some obscure yet holy purpose, but its most impressive feature is its portability. Hardly a month passes in which Connie doesn't drive the vessel across town, bear it into some wretched hovel, and confer immortality on a newborn whose parents have grown too feeble to leave home.
"Merribell, right?" asks Connie, pointing to the baby on his left.
Wedged in the crook of her mother's arm, the infant wriggles and howls. "No – Madelaine," Angela mumbles. Connie has known Angela Dunfey all her life, and he still remembers the seraphic glow that beamed from her face when she first received the Sacrament of Holy Communion. Today she boasts no such glow. Her cheeks and brow appear tarnished, like iron corroded by the Greenhouse Deluge, and her spine curls with a torsion more commonly seen in women three times her age. "Merribell's over here." Angela raises her free hand and gestures toward her cousin Lorna, who is balancing Madelaine's twin sister atop her gravid belly. Will Lorna Dunfey, Connie wonders, also give birth to twins? The phenomenon, he has heard, runs in families.
Touching the sleeve of Angela's frayed blue sweater, the priest addresses her in a voice that travels clear across the nave. "Have these children received the Sacrament of Reproductive Potential Assessment?"
The parishioner shifts a nugget of chewing gum from her left cheek to her right. "Y-yes," she says at last.
Henry Shaw, the pale altar boy, his face abloom with acne, hands the priest a parchment sheet stamped with the Seal of the Boston Isle Archdiocese. A pair of signatures adorns the margin, verifying that two ecclesiastical representatives have legitimized the birth. Connie instantly recognizes the illegible hand of Archbishop Xallibos. Below lie the bold loops and assured serifs of a Friar James Wolfe, M.D., doubtless the man who drew the blood.
Madelaine Dunfey,
Connie reads.
Left ovary: 315 primordial
follicles.
Right ovary: 340 primordial follicles.
A spasm of despair passes through the priest. The egg-cell count for each organ should be 180,000 at least. It's a verdict of infertility, no possible appeal, no imaginable reprieve.
With an efficiency bordering on effrontery, Henry Shaw offers Connie a second parchment sheet.
Merribell Dunfey. Left ovary: 290 primordial follicles. Right
ovary: 310 primordial follicles.
The priest is not surprised. What sense would there be in God's withholding the power of procreation from one twin but not the other? Connie now needs only to receive these barren sisters, apply the sacred rites, and furtively pray that the Fourth Lateran Council was indeed guided by the Holy Spirit when it undertook to bring the baptismal process into the age of testable destinies and ovarian surveillance.
He holds out his hands, withered palms up, a posture he maintains as Angela surrenders Madelaine, reaches under the baby's christening gown, and unhooks both diaper pins. The mossy odor of fresh urine wafts into the Church of the Immediate Conception. Sighing profoundly, Angela hands the sopping diaper to her cousin.
"Bless these waters, O Lord," says Connie, spotting his ancient face in the baptismal fluid, "that they might grant these sinners the gift of life everlasting." Turning from the font, he presents Madelaine to his ragged flock, over three hundred natural-born Catholics – sixth-generation Irish, mostly, plus a smattering of Portuguese, Italians, and Croats – interspersed with two dozen recent converts of Korean and Vietnamese extraction: a congregation bound together, he'll admit, less by religious conviction than by shared destitution. "Dearly beloved, forasmuch as all humans enter the world in a state of depravity, and forasmuch as they cannot know the grace of our Lord except they be born anew of water, I beseech you to call upon God the Father that, through these baptisms, Madelaine and Merribell Dunfey may gain the divine kingdom." Connie faces his trembling parishioner. "Angela Dunfey, do you believe, by God's word, that children who are baptized, dying before they commit any actual evil, will be saved?"
Her "Yes" is begrudging and clipped.
Like a scrivener replenishing his pen at an inkwell, Connie dips his thumb into the font. "Angela Dunfey, name this child of yours."
"M-M-Madelaine Eileen Dunfey."
"We welcome this sinner, Madelaine Eileen Dunfey, into the mystical body of Christ" – with his wet thumb Connie traces a plus sign on the infant's forehead – "and do mark her with the Sign of the Cross."
Unraveling Madelaine from her christening gown, Connie fixes on the waters. They are preternaturally still – as calm and quiet as the Sea of Galilee after the Savior rebuked the winds. For many years the priest wondered why Christ hadn't returned on the eve of the Greenhouse Deluge, dispersing the hydrocarbon vapors with a wave of his hand, ending global warming with a Heavenward wink, but recently Connie has come to feel that divine intervention entails protocols past human ken.
He contemplates his reflected countenance. Nothing about it – not the tiny eyes, thin lips, hawk's beak of a nose – pleases him. Now he begins the immersion, sinking Madelaine Dunfey to her skullcap . . . her ears . . . cheeks . . . mouth . . . eyes.
"No!" screams Angela.
As the baby's nose goes under, mute cries spurt from her lips: bubbles inflated with bewilderment and pain. "Madelaine Dunfey," Connie intones, holding the infant down, "I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." The bubbles break the surface. The fluid pours into the infant's lungs. Her silent screams cease, but she still puts up a fight.
