'Drunk again, Josef Koller?' the mayor said. 'Having wrecks and beating your horse?'

The milkman was so muddy it was hard to see his fabulous neck-welt. But the mayor moved closer and examined.

'Taught a small lesson?' he said; he poked around the welt, and the milkman drew himself in like a turtle. 'Perhaps a bit more than you had coming,' the mayor said.

'And my milk is all froth,' said Auntie Tratt.

'Then, Josef,' the mayor said, 'you'll leave an extra can?'

The milkman tried to nod, but his jowls knotted and he made a winced-up face.

'He's a madman,' I told the mayor.

'Bitten on the

neck,' the mayor said, 'and bitten hard enough to break the skin and raise a welt the size of my fist! And who's a madman? Running nude in the courtyard! Riding a man! Biting a man! And dallying about in a bathtub, locked in! An exhibitionist and a flagellant!' roared the mayor.

'Worse!' Auntie Tratt said. 'A pervert!'

'A screwdriver!' bellowed the pink man. 'Just a screwdriver would get you in that bathroom. And if you'd only gotten the dogs here on time, there'd be no mess now.'

Then the upstairs policeman appeared on the stairs - the toes of his boots so perfectly together he looked as if he would fall.

'He's still in there,' the policeman said. 'He sang me a song.'

'What did you find?' the mayor asked.

'Saltshakers,' said the policeman.

'Saltshakers?' the mayor said - his voice like the high-pitched gnaw of the rain on the castle's hollow-tiled roof.

'Fourteen,' said the policeman. 'Fourteen saltshakers.'

'My God,' the mayor said. 'A pervert, for sure.'

Fetching the Details

WHAT'S GOING ON? These interruptions! They're what happens when you stand still long enough to let the real and unreasonable world catch up with you. And listen, Graff - that's not standing still very long.

My father Vratno, Vratno Javotnik, born in Jesenje before there were wheels in that part of Yugoslavia, moved to Slovenjgradec, where he fell in with the Germans - who were doing things with wheels no one had seen before; and with them rolled to Maribor, where a good road ran him straight across the border into Austria. And by himself, for he was sly.

Young Vratno followed the tank-trodden way to Vienna, where my mother was starving, stoically and beautifully, and waiting to fall in with someone as sly as him - and not expecting, I'm sure, to play a part in the conception of anyone as born to wheels as me.

Young Vratno, who said across his soup to me, 'Harder and harder it's getting, to have a thing going for yourself that isn't somehow the apprenticeship to something that's gone before; and not yours and never will be. And never a thing to make you happy.' That's just what the poor fart said, I'm told.

Oh, my father was a splendid, melodramatic troll for mischief all his own; and so am I. And so are you, Graff. And so this world might yet be spared the cool, old drudge of death-by-dullness.

*

But these interruptions! Digressions. Oh, it's repetitive death every time you let the world catch up with you!

Young Vratno, the ladling spoon a part of his lip and the soup becoming a part of his speech - he said, 'Listen, you've got to move in the split-second interim between the time they find you out and the time they decide what to do with you. Just a hop ahead and you're a cut above!' So he said, or so I'm told.

Siggy's note. Pinned to the bottom sheet of my bed, where my bottom found it - a starchy crumple to make me grope for the light. And I hadn't seen him leave any note.

In fact, when the mayor had me try my hand at getting him out of the bath, and when I'd come into the room again, Siggy was tub-slicked and dressed - all except the duckjacket, to which he was applying the last, thick rubs of saddle soap.

And the mayor's voice came up from the lobby: 'If you can't get him out of there, he'll have to pay for the door!'

Tags: John Irving Fiction
Source: readsnovelonline.net