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'No shit,' said Dante. 'Is that a crime?'
Dante tapped on the glass divider and finally roused Bogus Trumper into some form of recognizable stare. Then Dante decided to let it go; he just waved to Trumper through the glass. Trumper smiled and he waved back.
But Dante was warming up to this nut now; he was moved by him. Even before they'd left Maine, he'd changed his mind about the guy. He'd asked Trumper if he could stop at a gift shop along the road; he wanted to get some souvenirs for his wife and kids.
Trumper had let him stop, and when Dante went inside to browse through plastic lobsters and seacoast watercolors painted on driftwood logs, Trumper looked at the photographs Couth had given him as he was leaving. There was a whole stack of pictures of Colm, big eight-by-tens: Colm on the mudflats, Colm in a boat, Colm on the beach in a snowstorm (so they had already moved in with Couth during the winter!), Colm formally posed in Biggie's lap. They were all lovely.
But the last photograph shocked Trumper. Perhaps Couth had put the photographs together too quickly and hadn't meant to include it, for it was obviously from a rather different series. It was a close-up of a nude, distorted by a wide-angle lens. The shot was focused on the woman's crotch, and she was lying in a field in such a position that the texture of the grass between her spread legs nearly matched the texture of her pubic hair; in fact, that was clearly the idea of the photograph. The wide-angle rounded the world above her, and her face was small and faraway and not in focus. But her twat was in focus, all right.
Mother Earth? Trumper thought. He didn't like the photograph, but he realized that if Couth had not included it by mistake - if Couth had meant to give it to him - that the gesture was generous and well-meaning, like Couth. And also like Couth, in surprisingly bad taste. The nude was Biggie.
Trumper looked up and saw Dante coming. He opened the door of the back seat because he wanted to show Trumper what he'd bought for his children: three inflatable beach balls and three sweatshirts with MAINE! across the chest; under the letters a large lobster cocked his claws.
'That's nice,' Trumper said. 'Very nice.'
Then Dante saw the pictures of Colm, and before Trumper could stop him, Dante picked the stack up and started leafing through them. 'I want to tell you, sir,' he said, 'that's a fine-looking boy you got.'
Trumper looked away, and Dante, embarrassed, said, 'I knew he was yours. He looks just like you.'
Then Dante came to the crotch shot of Biggie, and though he tried to look away, he couldn't. Finally he forced himself to slip the photograph to the bottom of the stack and handed them all back to Trumper.
Trumper was trying to smile. 'Very nice,' Dante Calicchio said, his mouth a hard line, fighting a leer.
Then it was New York all around me, I could tell. And Jack Daniel's Old Time No. 7 Brand Quality Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey, 90 proof, wallowing there in my brain, its good burnt taste so thick on my tongue that I could have chewed it.
I could see them out there, wanting to get at me. They rapped the window and fucked around with the door latch, and they shouted at my big brutish good-hearted driver, 'Calicchio! Open up, Calicchio!'
Then they had my door open and I caught the first one smack on his forehead with that lovely squarish bottle Jack Daniel puts his whiskey in. Some others helped the man off the floor, and then they came at me again.
I was all right when they kept their distance, but when they moved in close, I'd lose the focus. I could make out Dante, though; that good man was begging them to go easy on me. He had a persuasive way of doing it; he would put his thick-fingered hands on their throats until they gargled a queer tune and danced gently away from me. 'Here, here,' he kept saying. 'Just don't anybody hurt him, he hasn't done anything. I just want to give him something, a little present. Now you let me do that, please.' Then he'd add something in a slightly lower key, like, 'You want to keep your teeth, or should I transplant them up your ass, faggot?'
They were tugging me one way and Dante was tugging me another. Then there was an awesome heave in one direction for a considerable distance, during which an unidentified man yelled out that he was being killed, and another stranger began bleating like a goat, and I was all alone and free for a minute. Then my guardian angel, Dante Calicchio, was reaching into his underwear - in his crotch, of all things - and from out of his crotch, of all places, he pulled a crinkled-up thing and stuffed it down my shirt front, saying breathlessly, 'Here, here, here, for God's sake ... I think you're going to need every bit of this you can hold on to ... Now take off, if you're smart at all: Run!'
Then we were in rapid motion once more, and faraway from me I saw Dante Calicchio playing with two toy men. They must have weighed no more than ten pounds each, because Dante tossed one of them through the windshield of a parked car and shook the other one upside down like a rag-doll puppet until I could no longer see, because all the other people swarming around seemed to be trying to get into the game Dante was playing.
Then they had me again. They drove me around in a car with the window open, and they made me keep my head hanging out; I guess they thought I needed air. But I was not so far gone that I couldn't recall the crinkled-up thing under my shirt front, and when they were riding me up in this elevator, I slipped it out and sneaked a peek at it. It was some kind of money - I couldn't read how much - and one of the men in the elevator took it away from me.
I think I was in an elevator; we were in a hotel, I think. But all I thought at the time was, what a funny thing to carry in your crotch!
33
Welcome to the Order of the Golden Prick
THROUGHOUT TULPEN'S HOSPITAL visit, I alternately dozed and stared, opening my eyes suddenly as if I'd been startled, gawking unfocused over my shoulder, acting a lolling stupor to perfection, though I had to pee something fierce.
Ralph came to visit later in the afternoon, pronounced me dead and asked Tulpen what my prick looked like. But she seemed genuinely worried and snapped at him. 'I haven't seen it,' she said. 'He's all doped up. He doesn't know where he is.'
Ralph circled the bed; he'd brought the mail, and under the pretence of looking for a place to put it, he peeked behind the drawn curtain at my roommate - the sloshing old gentleman with the erector set of intake and output tubes.
'Let's ask a nurse,' Ralph said.
'Ask her what?' Tulpen said.
'To let us see it,' Ralph said. 'Maybe we could just lift his sheet?'
I rolled my eyes and mumbled a little German to impress them.