Long, Last, Happy Read online

  Coots might have looked back up at Latouche’s apartment window, maybe swallowing a Bucet with a fresh cup of espresso if nothing better was to be had. He, just lately, knew where Latouche lived. He was very much on his case, narrowing. Latouche might have mistaken the gaunt, tall Coots in his suit for an owner, a big legitimate importer. Outside his addiction, morphine now beaten, Coots insisted on having his things in order. The shooting of his wife had finally convinced him deeply against sloppiness. The worst of it was the mess. He led a tidy, controlled life. He despised what controlled him. His books railed against control, didn’t they, despite the obliquity? Conspiracies of control were the target for his massed attacks, using stacked cords of bodies out front, behind, flanking. Up at seven for his stomach exercises; fruit, espresso, and pumpernickel toast; cold shower, then hot briefly, beating last night’s cigarette residue from his lungs like Tarzan with a habit; speed-reading the London and New York Timeses, especially for dire foreign and space alien occurrences, then more deliciously the personals; next perhaps a novel urged on him by some hopeful who’d pierced through his secretary, a matter of fifteen minutes (Coots had speed-read by sixth grade in St. Louis without realizing it was unnatural). His mind brilliantly plundered the book, storing entire sentences, shucking the rest like a piece of green corn, only a few nuggets in there. Coots cared very little for creative writing other than his own, and was blithely unconscious of any real American literary scene—a part of his charm to his adorers. He would write very slowly and often beautifully, clearheaded, trusting only hashish or a minor barbiturate, with his mild Benson & Hedges cigarettes. At times he would quit one or the other to exercise his control. Coots had lost a rough twenty years stoned, in Tangiers, New Orleans, New York and Mexico, filthy on a mattress, and he wanted to make them count.

  Some had called him a genius since the fifties. Now he was a man of adequate means and invited everywhere for very little reason except the sight of him, alive and gray and imperturbable, a miracle of crotchety survival, beyond space and time. By late afternoon, through with his “studies”—diseases, drugs, hieroglyphics (he had no facility with languages and was deaf to music)—he’d be tired, and walk off the funk in the company of his secretary on interesting streets, wanting to “see a death” near him. His cane, really a sheath for a long stiletto, tapped along merrily. New York was getting too expensive, but he had always loved the hate and Byzantine corruption not only as metaphor but directly inhaling them so as to store them as power. He had been among natives and occult literatures and believed in magic as flatly as in chemistry. He had experienced rare days when he could do no wrong. He would sail an envelope, eyes blind, and it would smack right into the wastebasket. He would drop his razor and the thing would tumble perfectly to his toe, clipping a nail that needed it. On his tape recorder certain meaningful phrases would rise in volume for no technical reason, and they would be important to his life and work. He could fast for a week and be stronger. On the streets he was almost sure that if the enemy were persuasive enough, he could cause “a death” and pass by as an innocent bystander. The evidence of this had come clear years ago when an absurdly rude landlady had looked at him and fallen dead right on the stair landing outside his door, the hexed “gash.” At night, eating with friends and admirers, some of them world-famous actors and musicians, he was polite and attentive. He would not lie, and he refused to be cajoled into being “strange” by some fresh fool who had misunderstood him entirely. Most of the world was perfectly obvious to him. He would not romanticize the “alien.” In his own case, he’d never romanticized being a junkie. Contemporaries in drug and drink had dropped around him like flies—into morgue or loony bin—but a certain dim ingeniousness and regularity had dragged him through, so that his gray eminence punched out like a face on Mount Rushmore. For several thousands worldwide, Coots was one of the true fathers of the century. And greatly tested by calamity. His wife, then their son shooting up like Pop (amphetamines), but lasting only till thirty, liver all gone. Coots was not stone. He fell in love with forlorn helplessness, even now, and would cry like a woman when penetrated by some dreams. Dr. Latouche was in his dreams—not love, not envy, but what? Coots was driven, as not in decades.

  When he found the billiards club, an establishment for the Arrived, he snorted. The Britishness. These atavistic beasts he’d had fun with in his violent satires, but even those books were old. He reckoned he looked MP enough to get in and was very pleased when the deskman, young, collegiate, recognized him and waved to the back rooms where all the fun was, offering him the place. It was dark green and woody, pungent with hearthsmoke, with jolly music from somewhere like England happening. Low voices drifted from separate parlors. Coots had no opinion of billiards at all, but the place made him a little homesick for St. Louis in the thirties: innocent American pool tables, the first taste of tobacco, the swoon. He was a boy then, just graduated from the neighborhood pond, with sun-browned cheeks, a string of bullheads, and a cane pole with black cotton line. Learning to be idle and mock, forever. The heft of the cue stick always made it seem like a good thing to knock with. Even Harvard never dragged that feeling from him. The pool hall had a real wood fire you could spit in and watch.

  The first players to his right were neither one Latouche. Coots could tell by their faces that they were dumbed by privilege and bucks, and he hissed straight at them, feeling the hidden stiletto in his cane. How a sweep of it across the throat would tumble them, gasping Why? Why? Queer angels would then move down on them with a coup de grace of quick sodomy. Coots’s grandfather was a rich inventor and Coots had never been without a constant monthly sum, but the frigid regard of certain wealthy raised a fire from balls to crown in him. And where was Latouche? In another parlor, vainly ignoring active grofft by placing himself in public at billiards. Coots had only, with delight, heard of grofft in his Central American travels, where he’d made himself fit enough to penetrate the wilds in search of a storied hallucinogen. The drug was a retching bust, but the grofft tales were very interesting. Latouche must have been there to contract grofft. Coots had never heard of a white man with it.

  A man near ninety could not have pushed into the deeps down there. Coots remembered the horrible misunderstandings with natives, the dangerous approach through a white-water creek, the malarial bottoms, where mosquitoes were the air. He had written solemnly about his explorations, but in the back of his mind he’d since wondered if he was thoroughly had by the tribesmen. Some foliage had moved, a barking human face emerged briefly, and the thing had run off lowly like a pointer, having smelled or seen that Coots was not the right thing. Grofft! shouted the natives, terrified. He didn’t understand what was going on, but he was alarmed too, near killed by a fer-de-lance before he snapped out of it. In the University of Mexico medical library he had looked up the pathology. But the entry on grofft read as if it didn’t belong, as if it had been written in dread by a haunted mystic of the seventeenth century. The cause: probably the bite of a grofftite—the breath or saliva. Etiology? Symptoms: lupine facial features and doglike barking and whining; quadruped posture; hebephrenia; extremely nervous devotion to a search, general agitation, constant disappointment; lethargy, then renewal. Treatment: Nobody of any medical skill had ever run down a grofftite. History: The skeletons of grofftites had been seen (and avoided) in places near and far from settlements; no uniformity in demise except bones of the fingers, forehead, and sometimes neck were often (twelve cases reported) fractured, the teeth broken; head in three cases planted to jaw depth in dirt, as if thrown violently from a high elevation. And this: Grofftites have lived up to fifty years after being stricken. It was claimed infants were taken off by grofftites but these might be mere Indian tales or manipulative responses to the urban interlocutors. N.B.: Indians have demanded money to imitate a grofftite.

  Coots, peering hard at old Latouche in the last parlor now, suspected it might be a powerful drug that induced grofftism. He was in the country of powerful brews,
and he could not shake the idea that it was a vaguely religious, maybe even saintly condition, drunk deliberately down by the devout, enough d’s to go direct to disease, the divine. The sight of noble old Latouche, cuing the ball and doing something smooth with it, was making Coots silly.

  Thinking back through the years, he had known very, very few people of pure virtue, if that was Latouche’s case. In his suit Coots felt rude and small. Latouche—another endearing trait—wore wonderful clothes, but he was a bit sloppy and misfit in them. They loved his rumpled way, his scuffed shoes, the speck of sauce on his tie. What an agreeable granddad of a guy.

  The doctor was playing a young man with a built-up physique. The young man wore a blazer. Ribbed socks—Coots noticed—with spangling black loafers. He acted familiar with old Latouche. Coots wondered if Latouche was the ward of this muscular stooge.

  “Good evening, our genius,” said Latouche, surprised. “You’re a billiards man too?”

  “Hardly. Just a watcher. Lifelong.”

  “Order you a drink?”

  “Too early. Perhaps a tonic with lime.”

  “We’re just talking about the rumors that God is a woman. What do the literary people say about that?”

  “When wasn’t it? It’s a neurotic hag demanding worship while it lays a pox down. An obtuse monster, a self-worshiping fiend. I know gods, Doctor.”

  “Should have guessed you’d have an opinion. This is Riley Barnes, Coots. Barnes, the author. Barnes knows your work. I’ve been reading you. Some difficulty, I confess, for an old sawbones. I liked the surgeon using the plumber’s friend in a heart operation. I’d suppose you’ve known some awfully bad doctors. So have I, but—”

  “You have literary interest?” Coots asked Barnes. “I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?”

  “Yes sir,” said Barnes, knowing Coots too. “I’m a stevedore. The docks.”

  “You know, I’d spotted Riley. Somehow I thought I must meet him. So I did. Very fortuitous circumstance. I watched him through a telescope. How could I have guessed he was a literary man and wild for billiards? The city always surprises you,” explained Latouche.

  Coots had written about men like Barnes, one of his physical type of boy. He had them falling through space, ejecting incandescent sperm while being hanged by the neck . . . Old duffer consuls would gobble it up. Sacrifice of the young to evil, entrenched needs. The way the world worked.

  “You and your friend bought . . . commodities down there. I was in different clothes,” said Barnes. “Didn’t think you’d recognize me, sir. Anyway, it’s an honor. I know people who’d pay to be here.”

  “Go on with your game, please,” said Coots to the young man. Was he in his late twenties? Coots wondered. Straight. Off a mural of American Labor in an old union hall, dusty hoarse Commies around being ass-fucked by shark-skinned fat union bosses with stogies. Brando, On the Waterfront. What we pansies would have given to jump his bones. Stop. Latouche is the mission. The doctor did seem a little depressed, anxious, behind the jolly front. In the old days I’d have shucked him for drugs. Exactly the kind of croaker we’d set up till thoroughly burned down. Some of them were so stupidly moral they believed they were helping my endless kidney stones. Could be literary because I was so good at those riffs. Multiple personalities I developed. Then no personality at all when sick—protoplasm, whimpering, completely dishonored. Working the subways for drunks, at my best. New York, New York! Never again, knock on wood. Paper cup of coffee dissolving at the edge with spit. Ketchup on crackers, free at the Automat, for weeks. Harvard education. Unfit to attack Hitler or Tōjō, thank God.

  “How’s your dog, Doctor? It isn’t here?”

  “No.” Latouche looked guilty, furtive. “Had to bury her. She got something, poor girl. They didn’t know what.”

  Coots came alive, took a seat in a padded drugstore chair copied from the thirties.

  “Was a Hungarian breed, something, wasn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t talk about the dog, Mr. Coots,” interjected Barnes. Latouche was his charge, then.

  “It’s fine, Riley. Really.” Latouche grasped the billiard table, his fingers going white over the felt edge.

  “I’m a cat man, myself,” said Coots. Could he now detect Latouche trembling, his eyes rolling back into his head? Delicious, better than his first horror movies with Lon and Bela in St. Louis.

  “Can’t stand them!” yelled Latouche. He shot back—reloaded, rather, thought Coots. “Sneaky, conniving! . . . the odor of cat piss! Doesn’t that tell you something?” Agitated, pushing the insane, this beat the medical libraries cold. (“A death”?) But I don’t have the full persuasion for a spell, really, Coots decided. What do I hate about the man? My own grandfather? Grand patricide? Biting the hand that.

  “I’ll have to ask you, Mr. Coots.” Barnes again. My word, so rapidly the nurse, all the jargon.

  “No. I want this resolved and confessed!” shouted Latouche. “Secrets are killing me!”

  The cue stick, released, fell over, plump, on the rug. Both his hands were on the table now.

  “I buried Nana, I had Nana buried with my wives, between them, in Forest Hills cemetery! Riley did it for me!”

  “That isn’t so bad, Latouche. Isn’t there a law, though? The Indians, you know . . . the Egyptians . . .”

  “We didn’t ask. I did it at night,” said Riley Barnes.

  “He’s got grofft, doesn’t he?”

  “How’d you know?” Barnes bolstered Latouche. “Oh yes. Your travels. Would you know how it’s treated? Dr. Latouche, bless him, believes he can just ignore it away.”

  Latouche was slavering and attempting to drop to the floor, while Barnes was resisting, gently, though all his big muscles were needed. The doctor certainly had his right man. Barnes seemed to care deeply for him. Coots smiled less than he wanted to, hands crossed on his stiletto cane in front, the boulevardier.

  “I don’t think this is a mind-over-matter case, Barnes”—Latouche actually whimpered like a dog now—“though by what I’ve observed, the doctor has civilized the disease. Perhaps strength of character. Or just being un-Indian, highly Western. I recall the smallpox didn’t kill that many of us, but wiped out whole tribes of the Sioux. We’ve antibodies, but—”

  Barnes sadly let the doctor go and raced to the door, pulling it to and locking. The doctor went around the table on all fours, sniffing and pointing, heedless of them. Why was this, Coots asked himself, so charming to him?

  Why did Latouche pique such high disgust? Was he an old lifetime closet fairy and Coots knew it? Many great professionals were, no great mystery. Then was it the hypocrisy Coots loathed? The laurels and friendships gained by an, at least, eighty-year false front? But he did not really think Latouche was gay. Some deeply sick, hidden gays were fascinated by weapons, especially on the right wing, the loud NRA and all that, but not Latouche, who loved the technology more than the blast. Latouche acquainted himself with past heroes in dangerous times, as did Coots, who owned in his locker one of Billy the Kid’s purported old irons. But Latouche liked to balance the loads, better.

  Latouche was all around the room now, scraping at the door and whimpering urgently. Something was out there he had to hunt. Coots thought of a feverish liver-spotted thing whirling in its cage, wanting the quail fields. He had witnessed that once in Texas when he was a failed marijuana farmer. The face of the doctor was working classically, too. His cheeks closed forward, lupine, more than could be done by a well man. Then came the barks and worried low growls, the mutter of need, almost ecstatic.

  “How did he get into the Honduran wilds?” asked Coots.

  “He didn’t. I went for him. The Indians were known for prodigious strength. Please don’t let on, Mr. Coots. You’re a man of the world, the cosmos. It shouldn’t shock you. I’d found a healthy young Indian, I thought. He’d had a fatal accident. I took his blood and brought it back chilled. We transfused Dr. Latouche.”

  “Extraordinary. Why?”
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  “It had worked for one of his old colleagues. The man’s ninety-five now, in glowing health. Down there, the laws . . . deep back in there, there are no laws. You can buy somebody. Never mind, I had the boat connections and the way, so I did it for him. There aren’t many Latouches in the world. Like there aren’t many of you. He’d been low, depressed, feeble, didn’t believe in drugs. This is corny, but he’s the grandfather I never had, and the father who left me. I didn’t want to lose him right after I’d found him.”

  “Commendable. So this is the ‘secret’?”

  “Yes.”

  “But, my God, boy, he’s a horror. How can you have him out here in public playing at billiards?”