The Water-Method Man

But this night Mr Fitch doesn't get up. Gently pushing his ear to the war-built screen, Trumper hears a sudden dry rush of leaves, and in the yellowing streetlight sees a small scattering of dead autumnal rubble flicker upward in the wind around Fitch's house. Mr Fitch has died in his sleep! His soul momentarily rebels, once more raking over his lawn!

Bogus wonders if he should ring up the Fitches just to see who answers.

'Mr Fitch just died,' Trumper says aloud. But Biggie has learned to sleep through his voice at night. Poor Fitch, thinks Bogus, genuinely moved. When asked, Fitch had said he used to work for the Bureau of Statistics. Now have you at last become one, Mr Fitch?

Trumper tries to imagine some excitement in Fitch's long career in the Bureau of Statistics. Poised over the microphone, he thinks that the bureau would want him to be brief and objective. Vowing to limit himself only to the most vital statistics, he flips the record switch and begins:

'Fred "Bogus" Trumper: born 2 March 1942, Rockingham-by-the-Sea Hospital, Portsmouth, New Hampshire; delivered by his father, Dr Edmund Trumper, a urologist and substitute obstetrician.

'Fred "Bogus" Trumper was graduated from Exeter Academy, 1960; Vice-President of Der Unterschied (the school's German-language film society); Poetry Editor for the Pudendum (the school's underground literary magazine); he lettered in track (pole-vaulter) and in wrestling (a problem with his concentration span: he would be beating his opponent, and well ahead on points, when he would find himself inexplicably pinned

). Trumper's grades and College Board scores? Undistinguished.

'He attended the University of Pittsburgh on an athletic scholarship (for wrestling); his potential was considered "vast", but he must learn to conquer his regrettable concentration span. His scholarship was revoked at the end of the academic year when he left Pittsburgh. His wrestling performance? Undistinguished.

'He attended the University of New Hampshire. Major? Undeclared. He left at the end of the academic year.

'He attended the University of Vienna, Austria. Field of concentration? German. Span of concentration? Well, he met Merrill Overturf.

'He reattended the University of New Hampshire and was graduated with a B.A. in German. His aptitude for foreign languages was referred to as "vast".

'He was accepted at the State University of Iowa, in the Graduate School of Comparative Literature. He was granted full academic credit for a research-absence, in Austria, January through September 1964. He was to discover and prove that the dialect ballads and folk tales of Salzburgerland and the Tyrol were descendants, via an early North Germanic tribal movement, of Old Low Norse. He found no such thing to be true. He made further contact with Merrill Overturf, however, and in a village in the Austrian Alps called Kaprun, he met and impregnated a member of the US ski-team. Her name was Sue "Biggie" Kunft, of East Gunnery, Vermont.

'He returned to America and presented this large pregnant athlete to his father at Great Boar's Head; father fond of referring to Sue "Biggie" Kunft as "that great blonde German ship"; father unrelenting, even when told that Biggie's father was a German Vermonter.

'Fred "Bogus" Trumper was cut off by his father, "until such a time as responsibility toward the future is demonstrable".

'Married in East Gunnery, Vermont, September 1964. Sue "Biggie" Kunft was forced to split her mother's (and her mother's mother's) wedding gown with a razor and insert a flap of suitable material, expandable, to conceal some months of gestation. Biggie's father was only upset that a skiing career was wasted. Biggie's mother thought that girls shouldn't ski anyway, but she was upset about the dress.

'Trumper returned to the State University of Iowa with an acceptable M.A. thesis on the connection between the dialect ballads and folk tales of Salzburgerland and the Tyrol with Old Low Norse. He received permission to return to Austria to follow up this interesting information. He did so, after the shocking birth of his first child (he was treated at the State University of Iowa hospital in March of 1965 for a fainting spell, following the first look at his gory, swaddled son. "It's a boy!" the nurse, fresh and dripping from the delivery room, informed him. "Will it live?" asked Trumper, sliding gelatinous to the floor).

'He actually returned to Austria to relive his romance with his wife and to find his old friend Merrill Overturf. Failing both, he returned to Iowa and announced that he had disproved his M.A. thesis and would select a new topic for his Ph.D. He thus began the translation of Akthelt and Gunnel from Old Low Norse. He has been doing this for almost four years ...

'He still seeks reconciliation with his father's income. He still wonders if his child will live. And he considers the advisability of being married to a former professional athlete who can do more sit-ups than he can. He is, for example, afraid to wrestle her, for fear that he will be handily beating her and suddenly find himself inexplicably pinned. And when he told her that he used to be a pole-vaulter, she told him she had tried that once too. He is afraid to ask for comparative heights ...

... at which point, dramatically, the tape whips to an end, whirs and frays off the empty spool, tzikity tzikity tzikity tzat!

'Bogus?' Biggie groans from the bedroom.

'Nothing, Big.'

He lets the sleep come back to her, and then quietly replays his recorded statistics. He finds them lacking in objectivity, brevity, honesty and sense, and he realizes that Mr Fitch and the Bureau of Statistics will reject all information concerning this fraudulent Trumper, and make no entry of his name. Looking out his window at Fitch's dark house, he recalls that Fitch is dead. Strangely relieved, he goes to bed. But in the morning, with Colm bouncing on his chest, he turns his head on the pillow and squints out his bedroom window. Seeing the ghostly vision of Fitch at work on his lawn, Trumper lets his child bounce on the floor.

'My God, Bogus,' Biggie says, stooping down to the wailing child.

'Mr Fitch died last night,' Bogus tells her.

Looking blandly out the window, Biggie says, 'Well, he looks better this morning.' So it's morning, Trumper decides, trying to wake up; he watches Biggie lie back down on the bed with Colm.

And if Biggie isn't at the hospital, he thinks, then it's Saturday. And if it's Saturday, then I sell football pennants, pins, buttons and cowbells. And if Iowa loses again, I'll change to a school with a winning team ...

There is a sudden thrashing and general upheaval of child and wife on the bed beside him; Biggie is getting up again. He turns to nuzzle her breast before she can go, but it's her elbow.

He opens his eyes. Nothing is as it seems. How could there be a God? He tries to remember the last time he thought there was one. In Europe? Surely God gets to travel more than that. It wasn't in Europe, anyway; at least there was no God in Europe when Biggie was with me.

Then he remembers Merrill Overturf. That was the last time God was around, he thinks. Therefore, believing in God went wherever Merrill went.

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