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Chapter 26: Nights in the Wicked of Heart Nights in the wicked of heart summon dawns of the darkest gray, of good faith in decay from basest volonté. The very bad, the very sad, the very cad himself, Olney Garkle, drank and smoked all night, until his head and lungs felt fissioned and fused. He paced from kitchen to living room and back. No self-tauntings and double-dare-ya's could get him down the hall to the toilet, to their half of the apartment; he was forced to piss in the kitchen sink. Often. Every ten minutes his bladder quaked from fear and remorse. It took an hour to clean up the mess from Maggie's fury. Two million billion square miles of soaked carpet! Olney on his knees with sponges, rags, a bucket, the electric heater from the kitchen. Bloody carpet nailed to the floor, he fumed to himself, how'm I supposed to get it dry? Dutroncs return to lichenesque jungle, moldy mossthings leaping for their throats. Well, dependable Garkle be long gone by then by golly, tough tittie, 'Troncs! "World Cup rotter!" he cursed aloud. Pacing again, blubbering quietly at the insynchronicity of his life. Nothing seemed to work in the worst of ways. Here he was in Paris, the city he loved most, where he would gladly live for years on end. So what's wrong? I'm in the wrong place, that's what's wrong. Should have stayed in Nothing Gulch with William, Jack and Averell. Lucky Luke is a breeze compared to Maggie, the cunt! She's been with girls before. Even tried a triad once, so she said, hah! Giving a good time to some turkey who didn't deserve it, some bush zombie'd rather chop trees than fuck. So why not now? Because she loves me, so she'll say. What bullshit. Can't remember her saying it before, not once. Incapable. Fucking Aquarius. Make great waitresses, though. Joke with 'em all day and night, but just try to unlock their heart and soul at home! She loves me, hah! Rhonda's a threat, ho! No threat. The wife's one thing, sex object's another. Ach, that'll never hold up in court; another case lost. Ouaip! This lifetime nothing but holes in defense. The shit and God damn of it all! Another run to the sink. Bladder relieved, cock stirring, still excited. What's in the fruit basket? Green apple, Anjou pear eternally unripe, an orange, lemons. No bananas. Yes, we have no bananas aujourd'hui-c'soir. No long, fat ones, luscious yellow with just a blush of pubertal green left. Cock stirs again, throb. Too bad for Olney "Bananas" Garkle. A milestone moment it was when first he learned to fornicate Chiquita. How do? Lop off the stem, slice down opposite sides to within an inch of her bottom, pry out the meat, eat or throw-it-away-who-cares, slip the slick skin into a cellophane bag, fold a pillow over it, cinch up with a belt or two or put between mattress and box springs, and, well, just coit away. A-1 sexual aid, squishy as any backtalking vagina. And cheap. Eh, but. Bananaless now. And now my lover is loverless. And would-be mistress on her pillow pitiless. He rummaged through Gaston's collection of old Photoplays for the picture of a naked lady. Thumb-flippety: "Hmmm. Naw." Too creative: lovely bodies in shadow on sand dunes, sort of thing. Black and white too. Olney liked the fashion mags best: Elle, Glamour, Mademoiselle and the like. Soft porn for aesthetes, they put those touched up crotch-gapers in Penthouse and Playboy to shame. He wondered if Rhonda had played with herself after fleeing. Probably not, poor girl. But then, maybe did. Mortified or eroticized? No one, especially he, would ever know. Older man certainly mishandled things. God, what if she decides to move out? But no, Maggie will be making that move, no-o-o doubt about it. Oh, heavy repartee looming! He rifled through the rest of the magazines, selecting a ravaged copy of Mon Tricot, bought, to be sure, by Subji in one of her fits of domestic new-leafery. Unfortunately it was a winter edition; all the models were fully clothed. "Typical," he griped, coming on the sweater's pretty face. Pacing again, but too weak to go on, woozy Garkle sat down. The chair dumped him forthwith. "God damn these morceaux of merde!" cursed despair, but not too loudly. "Goddamn Godforsaken, Satanforsaken shithole!" He lay on a dry part of the floor, lungs gasping from cigarettes and self-loathing. After awhile he fell into a reverie of the first few weeks in the apartment. Not even three months ago. One night, while he was reading in bed, Maggie had awakened with a start. She looked at him with the same crazed expression she'd come out of the bedroom with tonight: struggling to make the changeover from that other, alien world of sleep. She snuggled against him. "I'll try to be better," she murmured, falling asleep instantly. He held her for a long time, his stricken conscience paralyzing every cell of his body. In his arms her body was like a small animal, the littlest of living things. And his tyrannies, his prideful attacks on her way of being were invading her dreams. Instead of helping Maggie overcome her fear of inadequacy he was terrorizing what little self-confidence she still possessed. Base, vile man. Now, as he lay on the floor, utterly degraded, the memory stabbed at his heart. He wept for his fragile Pootie and the awful things he had done to her. He wept for the awful things that happened to all lovers. Fine, sensitive people randomly crushed like insects for no good reason. Horror. He leapt to his feet, the blood rushed to his head. Sat down again ... oh, no. "Cockfuckingsucker!" he raged epenthetically. He wanted to machine gun the chair, looked around for something to beat it with. "What am I doing?" he sobbed. "I have no idea what I'm doing!" Up from the floor again, pacing back and forth, muttering aloud. "What's going to happen, what, what? Everything I touch segues to caca. And now Maggie is going to leave me, I know it, and where will I go? Back on the road with the usual funds: zip! Lloyd be praised, I'm in Europe at least. Imagine walking through Seattle feeling like this. Terminate ma vie's'all there'd be to it. Middle of the night trying to find a dry place, get a few hours sleep. Better to die in Limoges." He actually cheered up for a moment. Olney had spent too many years walking through both cities looking for that unharassable spot out of the elements and away from the police; he preferred Europe. When the forces of law and order found you huddled in a corner there, at least they didn't oink with a drawl. He plugged in the head phones and put on Sibelius' En Saga, borrowed only a week ago from the British Library. How different it all was then. For the duration of the solemn, legend-evoking music, he left his worm's existence and it's seemingly bio-astrological denial of the hero's life. "It's the heldenleben for me," he'd been saying for years. Now, as the tone poem quietly disappeared in the mists of nullifying time, and he filled his glass, emptying the bottle, he realized he'd never moved a finger to make that possible. It was dawn when he finished Maggie's birthday cognac, a dawn of the darkest gray. Reeling and exhausted, he crossed the line into enemy territory and quietly entered his study. With difficulty, he fell asleep on the cot that was to be home until the end. §§§ Chapter 27: Call of the Wild |