The Water-Method Man

It was time to leave. At the car he even tried joking with Biggie and Couth, saying how nice it was to see them, but that he knew he was inhibiting them. He spoke German playfully to Biggie and had a mock boxing match with Couth. Then, to part on a note of lighthearted humor, he kissed Biggie goodbye and patted her ass. 'You're putting on a little weight, Big,' he chided.

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She hesitated and looked at Couth. Couth nodded, and Biggie said, 'That's because I'm pregnant.'

'Pregnant!' Colm repeated gaily. 'Yah! She's going to have a baby, so I'll have a brother or a sister ...'

'Or maybe both,' Couth said, and everyone smiled.

Bogus couldn't think of a thing to do with his hands, so he held out one to Couth. 'Congratulations, old boy,' he said, like a voice underwater.

Couth scuffed the ground and said he'd better see if the car would start. Trumper gave Colm another hug, and Biggie, her face turned away, but smiling said, 'Be careful.' To Couth? To Bogus? To both of them?

'I love seeing you, always,' Trumper said to everyone, and fled.

36

Akthelt Beset With Doubt!

Trumper Grinds to a Halt!

IN IOWA HIS old stitches fell out. A great new hole was in his penis. He wondered if Vigneron had meant to make the opening so big. Compared with what he'd been used to, he now had a bathtub drain.

He went to see a doctor, just any old doctor; there was no provision for specialists in his Student Health Policy. He feared the diagnosis; some former veterinarian amazed at his prick?

'You say this was done in New York?'

But the doctor was a young South American; all the foreigners in the medical school appeared to be given the lowliest cases. The young doctor was very impressed.

'That's a beautiful meatoplasty,' he told Bogus. 'Really, I've never seen such a neat job.'

'But it's so big,' Bogus said.

'Not at all. It's perfectly normal.'

That shook him; it made him aware of how abnormal he must have been.

That doctor's visit constituted his sole entertainment in Iowa. He lived in his library alcove with Akthelt and Gunnel and slept in a spare room in Dr Holster's basement. By his own choice he left and entered the basement through the cellar door; Holster would gladly have let him use the front door. Sunday dinners he ate with Holster and his married daughter and her family. The rest of his meals consisted of pizza, beer, sausage patties and coffee.

A girl in the adjoining library alcove was also doing a translation. It was from Flemish: 'a religious novel, set in Bruges.' Occasionally they'd look at each other's dictionaries, and once she asked him to dinner at her place. 'I'm a good cook, believe it or not,' she said.

'I believe it,' he said. 'But I've stopped eating.'

He had no idea what the girl looked like, but in their library and dictionary way they remained friends. There was no other way for him to have friends. He didn't even drink his beers at Benny's because Benny was always trying to drum up conversation about some half-mythical 'old-gang'. Instead, he drank a few beers every night at a shiny bar frequented by the residue of the fraternity-sorority set. One night, one of the frat boys asked Bogus when he planned to take a bath.

'If you want to beat me up,' Trumper said to him, 'go ahead.'

A week later, the same guy came up to him. 'I want to beat you up now,' he said. Trumper didn't remember him, and he executed a competent side leg-dive, picked up the guy's legs and ran him like a wheelbarrow into the jukebox. The frat boy's friends threw Trumper out of the bar. 'Christ,' Bogus said, bewildered. 'He was a nut! He said he wanted to beat me up!' But there were two dozen other bars in Iowa City, and he didn't drink much anyway.

He worked on the translation with a dull, enduring sort of energy. He went all the way through it to the ending before he remembered that there were a lot of verses in the middle section that were made up, and others that were not even translated. Then he recalled that even some of his early footnotes were lies, and parts of the glossary of terms too.

In the back of his mind was a harsh echo he referred to frankly as Tulpen. She had always been one for facts. So he simply started over again and went through the whole translation straight. He looked up every word he didn't know, and conferred with Holster and the girl who knew Flemish about the ones he couldn't find. He wrote an honest footnote for every liberty, and a flat, direct introduction explaining why he had not tried to put the epic in verse but had elected to use simple prose. 'The original verse is awful,' he wrote. 'And my verse is worse.'

Holster was enormously impressed with him. Their only argument was over Holster's insistence that Trumper make some introductory remarks 'placing' Akthelt and Gunnel in perspective in the broader picture of North Germanic literature.

'Who cares?' Trumper asked.

'I care!' Holster yelled.