Some Enchanted Place — Chapter Eight, Part Three

I turned back from the lack of Immaculada and gave my nemesis a good, hard stare. He’d delivered his line, but there was no mirth in it. His expression never changed. You could have put him in a window to sell a suit. He was a snake with a conspicuous bulge in the middle — not hungry right now. Still a snake. Always a snake.

I crossed a line just there. Angel was right; this place was some sort of mundane house of horrors. Not quite right. They tore the tags from mattresses, or were cannibals — or something in between, most likely. You could smell it on the breeze in the dooryard, a whiff of padlocked orphanage ablaze over the horizon somewhere. But Pecksniff had gone beyond the beyonds. He’d gotten familiar.

Pecksniff was a toady, no different than me. He had trotted out the one-way camaraderie to shame me a bit. He was wearing another man’s boots, but it was still on my neck. If we were any other place, I would have had to throw hands with him. Face.

My father told me he’d met Roosevelt once. Father was an old school Tammany Hall Democrat. He was slaving away at some defense plant and Roosevelt breezed through. Roosevelt clapped him on the back and called him by a singsong nickname, and told him what a swell job he was doing, asked him a question, turned his back on him without hearing the answer, and then disappeared in a cloud of flunkies.

Mom would always tell the story and the neighbors would ooh and aah and pop would glower. Once his friend pressed him on it, and I thought he’d explode. “No man has the right to treat me like a horse in a stable. I’ll not be given a joke for a name and patted like a beast by a stranger. No man. Why in the hell did we drag our sorry asses halfway around the globe? Not for this. Not for this.”

I knew the one-way familiarity when I saw it. Condescension masquerading as bonhomie. If my father had slapped Roosevelt on the back and called him Frankie in return, he’d have had his taxes reviewed twice yearly by J.Edgar Hoover, forevermore, while he was tied to a chair in Hoover’s office, probably. I learned a long time ago to beware any authority acting like your pal. It rarely is. Pecksniff was poking me through the bars. I was the fly and he was pulling off my wings. It was no less than that, and I knew it, and he knew I knew it. We came from the same place, he and I. So it was fight or flee — or grumble and take it, which is the most malignant kind of fleeing. Pecksniff knew there could be no fighting. I couldn’t even raise my voice or I’d never work another job within driving distance of this pile of bricks again.

It was a contest now. Angel was smarter because he wouldn’t play from the get-go, but I was in for a penny, so I had to go in for a Pound now. You’ll not chase me out of here, you creepy drudge. I’ll outlast you, you bastard, even if you call every person in every portrait on every wall in here back from the dead, and they climb down from the picture rail to pull at my sleeves while I work, and fill my dreams with dread.

I’ll pull up to the front door, Pecksniff. The front door. And I’ll take Immaculada out of here. I’ll spray you with peastone and we’ll wave to you like Roosevelt from a car. And someday, when you’re dead, we’ll come to your funeral, and Immaculada will wear a red dress, and I’ll throw rice in the hole you’re fitted for.

Some Enchanted Place — Chapter Eight, Part Two

I don’t know who the Secretary of the Interior is. I don’t know how to hit a curve ball. I don’t know how to do differential equations. I’m not sure exactly where Sri Lanka is, or why they didn’t want to be called Ceylon anymore, either. So maybe in the vast scheme of things, I don’t know very much — but I’m dead certain that if Pecksniff The Amazing Human Cattle Prod sends one more dose of his electricity through me, by turning up behind me unannounced, they’ll be able to bury him in a sponge.

I turned to face him and noticed my mistake right away. Never waste your time out in the prison yard by turning your face from the little blue tent of the sky. Pecksniff was the dripping stone walls, and the keeper, too; the moon, the stars and the sun were behind me now.

Pecksniff knew how it worked. I was powerless. If offered a chance to wrestle a rabid tiger to get a lottery ticket with a one in a hundred shot at winning a picture of Immaculada Doyle wearing a burlap sack, I’d have jumped at it. But no one was offering anything. The customer’s representative was speaking. I was unable to look away from him.

The Montessori kids would never understand this. They’re born and bred to go after everything in this life the way piglets go after the teats. Me first, second, and third. The rest of us go to Catholic School and line up and learn which cog in life’s machinery we might be, if we stand quietly in line long enough. It was a dark thing, and ancient. You might talk all sorts of treason in a pub, but you tipped your hat when the patrician passed by. It was involuntary, really; a rubber hammer to some kneecap in your head.

People would point to some preening Fitzgerald, and say: See? The Irish are just like the WASPS now. But they weren’t the same breed as us, really. Put us in charge and we just end up stealing the spoons from our own house. We were all born to be James Michael Curley, running for alderman from a jail cell. We won’t deny our crimes — if caught dead to rights — so we say “I did it for a friend,” instead. We can’t ever claim any privilege, just wallow in a kind of magnificent stubbornness. Refuse to be bloodless and your blood will never turn blue.

So Pecksniff knew he was no better than me, but that as long as he embodied the voice of who’s who, I was going to stand there listening to what’s what. Manners are a dreadful thing.

“The bannister leading down from the butler’s pantry shall want an additional screw in all of its brackets…”

Stop talking stop talking stop talking…

“…the previous mechanic sent by your patron neglected to fasten it properly…”

…Oh God stop talking like that and stop talking stop talking stop talking…

“… and although the master of the house has no truck with these stairs they are a constant necessary for we who labor here…”

… if you don’t stop talking right now I’m going to kill you with my hands I swear it …

“… and Miss Doyle has often remarked to me of her concern…”

Bingo! Rumpelstiltskin had uttered Rapunzel’s name for a change, the iron grip of decorum was lifted, and I turned back to see — the dining room door swinging back and forth in the frame.

Just then, Pecksniff did the unthinkable. He said something funny.

“Oh; you seem to have dropped your spear, Sir Lancelot.”

Some Enchanted Place — Chapter Eight

To read Some Enchanted Place from the beginning, click here and start at the bottom

What is cowardice? I dunno. My father said it was a kind of vanity. Every coward thinks they’re special. That they’re the very first one to feel afraid. They think that if brave people felt the way they did, they’d never do anything heroic. They figure intrepid people are simply too dumb to be as frightened as they should be. It’s a great way to claim to be superior while cringing in the corner.

Well, I always fancied myself smart, too, after a fashion. I went to school, but not enough to do myself any harm. I was never that into it. But my predilection to read everything put in front of me had an ugly step-sister: a sort of detachment, even from my own affairs. Daydreamer. But thinking wry thoughts is no substitute for action sometimes. Can’t help it.

I had a moment one could mistake for amusement right there. Benedict Arnold Dracula was lurking at the bottom of the stairs somewhere, the wildest thing my imagination could conjure up was snuffling and snorting in the kitchen, and I was practically zoned out, my mind filled with trivial absurdities.

Trying to make some sense of it all,
But I can see it makes no sense at all,
Is it cool to fall asleep on the floor?
I don’t think that I can take anymore

It’s not fear. Fear doesn’t make you stand daydreaming in a little mixing-bowl room like some Hamlet in overalls. Fear’s easy. Fear’s a monster doing bad things and you run away or don’t and he eats you or he doesn’t. This place would be simple if it was plain old fear. There was just something disquieting about this joint; metaphysical termites were gnawing at the entire rotten substance of the place, leaving only a veneer to look at. It straddled some line between awake and asleep, or past and future; maybe man and beast. Something. Innocuous enough to make you fear looking foolish if you didn’t play along, strange enough to keep you looking over your shoulder all the time. It wasn’t a machine-gun nest to be charged or anything. If he was a werewolf, Pecksniff was a mundane kind of werewolf. As far as evil goes, I could picture him doing Jack The Ripper’s taxes, but I couldn’t picture him owning a knife. Something makes a noise. Big deal. Man up.

Hanging on a hook on the wall was an implement that would confound a million people who’d never been in an old-money house. The closest they’d come to it was mistaking it for a boathook. It was a long, smooth, slender shaft of white oak, with a little brass cap with a curlicue like an “S” on top. The oak was harder than Chinese arithmetic, and worn perfectly smooth by the touch of a hundred thousand hands. Big houses had tall ceilings, and the servants needed something to reach up and cock the transom windows open and closed. The shaft wasn’t much thicker than a pool cue, but I knew I could beat a charging rhino to death with the thing and it wouldn’t break. I grabbed it off the wall, not afraid mind you, just … prepared. I kicked the door that led into the kitchen, and it swung into the room, and then back on the double hinges you’ll find on all the doors a servant has to pass through to put food on a table in a mansion.

At first, there was a massive blast of sunlight. The sun had reached some magic point in the sky, and transformed the dim morning light I remembered creeping through the wall of windows in the kitchen into a blinding sheet of white light. My eyes were gulled by the basement and the windowless room, and my rods and cones rebelled. I saw all sorts of things that weren’t there, and missed the very real door as it hit me square in the face.

Anger, or pique, or whatever you call the shitfit you throw after the application of a door to the beezer and God’s searchlight right in your eyes, is the sure cure for all fears. If a monster rings your doorbell at two AM, you feel like running away screaming. If a monster rings your doorbell at two AM and tries to sell you encyclopedias, you feel like punching him in the face. Rage beats three beers, money, and a medal for ginning up courage. I kicked the door back hard, whacked the oak stick against it to hold it open, and went into the room like a prizefighter coming off a stool.

Between the tears in my eyes from the blow on the nose, and squinting from the sunlight, everything in the room was gauzy and indistinct. It didn’t matter. There was someone hunched over the sink on the far side of the room. A hand reached for the faucet, and the hissing noise from the spray head suspended over the sink stopped, and the drumming of the water in the bottom of the big copper basin slowed, and then ceased altogether.

The door was swinging wildly in a back-and-forth half-moon through the doorframe, and I was standing a few feet in front of its arc with my feet apart and the staff held forward like some misplaced Quixote confronted with a real-life Dulcinea; without question, exaggeration, or any other embroidery, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on turned from the sink and looked at me.

No, not Dulcinea. Or Helen of Troy. Cleopatra? Uh Uh. Marilyn Monroe? Pfft. Pikers. This woman wasn’t attractive; she was literally awesome.

We were both dumbstruck, if for different reasons. I was frozen by the unexpected appearance of some sort of Aphrodite; she was left to figure out the buffo arrival of a strange man, puffing like a marathoner, ready to joust, all the while being fanned by the languid breezes from a butler’s door.

“I. I…”

I lowered the stick and tried to look somewhat more nonchalant. Unsuccessfully, I’m sure.

“We’re… I’m… I’m the carpenter. For the fixing. Of things — stuff. I… Do you… live… um, work here? What’s your name?”

There was a pause, and she drifted across the floor towards me. She was even more stupefying close up. Almost tall, but not quite. Delicate and athletic, if that’s possible. Her skin was so fair she appeared to glow in the sunshine, without the slightest hint of pastiness, and the effect of it was multiplied by the frame of her hair, lustrous black, thick as thatch, and cut straight across just above the shoulder. She had no hint that anything about her was massaged to perfection by the touch of a human hand. She must have been kicked out of Olympus without her purse for showing up the second-string goddesses. I began a weird sort of visual Easter-Egg hunt, trying to find some flaw, something asymmetrical, any little blemish anywhere on her face. It was a fool’s errand. I followed the line of her nose around the perfect curve of her eyebrow, a savage eying another tribe’s totem and wondering if I should steal it or worship it, until I settled on the striking green of her eye and ran out of gas.

There was a long pause, and she pursed her lips as if to say something, hesitated, and her eyes widened to a look almost like surprise. A clock ticked loudly somewhere.

“Miss Immaculada Doyle is our housekeeper,” Pecksniff said, as my makeshift lance clattered to the floor.

Some Enchanted Place, Chapter Seven

If you just stumbled in, I’m apparently writing a book or something. Start here: Some Enchanted Place
Then here: Some Enchanted Place, Part Three
Then here: Part Three, Episode Two
Then here: Part Three, Episode Three
Then here: Episode Four
Episode Five
Chapter Seis
Chapter Six Second Part
Chapter Six Part Three

A man chained to an oar is not responsible if the ship runs aground. Hell, if you run aground, the guys in loincloths and shackles riding in involuntary steerage should get a raise the farther up the beach you end up. It just means they’re pulling hard.

I was way, way up on the beach at this point. Standing in a dank cellar with a weirdo, abandoned by Angel and the angels. I looked at old Pecksniff, and knew any small-talk approaches to smooth things over I had left in my bag of tricks were going to stay in there. I had stuck with the program long enough. Angel was a coward, but he wasn’t wrong. The place was creepy, and the weird waxwork dude running the place was getting creepier by the minute. Time for action.

But it’s an interesting kind of “action” you’re allowed in this life, at least if you’re born into the traces. You can’t just do whatever you want. Life for me and my friends was something of a lark, it’s true. We felt we were lucky to be spared a real career. Upward mobility was a term of art for us. The nuns would turn and point to the picture of Kennedy they all kept on the wall, and intone: “See, children, anyone can be president if they want to.” Yes, we all have the right to be born rich and well-connected. Or shot in the head. Or something. They might as well have told us we could all have a baby because we were all human.

“Action,” for people that drift through life with a boss in their ear, a Guinness in their bellies, a song on their lips on a Friday afternoon, and ten cents in their bank accounts at all times, consists of cooperating as little as is required, bumping along, and only actively dragging your heels when things have gone south already. No frontal assaults on the established order ever pay off. “You’re not the boss of me” doesn’t work when the object of your scorn most decidedly is. And most everyone is, in this world — or knows the judge. So you learn through painful experience not to telegraph your punches. What did dad call it? Keep your own counsel. Talk all the time; say nothing.

Well, this place had gone south to the Goddamned equator as far as I was concerned, but I wasn’t dumb enough to tell Pecksniff that if he was planning on making an oil portrait of me, he should hurry up because he was going to be doing it from memory from here on in. I was going to fib as little as necessary to get to the property line and never darken this already stygian doorstep again. If I even gave him an inkling I was abandoning my post, he’d be on the phone to young Charlie in an instant, the receiver would be handed to me, and I’d have to hold it two inches from my head or go deaf. And stay. I had to do unto others as Angel had done to me. Tag is an Olympic sport in the building trades.

“This area is fine for setting up shop.” I backed toward the stairway leading up. ” I’m going back to the shop and help my friend with gathering… um, gathering the materials for the list.” Halfway up the stair now, Pecksniff standing at the bottom, looking like he’s not believing a word of it, but, who cares? “Someone from our office will call to… to… confirm our… us… when we’re coming back.”

I was home free at the top of the stairs now. I couldn’t picture Pecksniff running up the stairs to catch me in the driveway. I’d call in sick or find some other nonsense to tell young Charlie, and he wouldn’t believe me any more than Pecksniff would, but so what? He’d have to send someone else, and the deed would be done.

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly…

I froze. Something was not right. That’s really saying something, in a place where nothing was right. I was in the little roundabout room, and I looked at all the doors leading out, and recognized the kitchen in an instant. There was a noise in there.

I looked back down the stairs, and Pecksniff was gone. Back to his shrine, to atone for my intrusion? Who knows? Maybe he was tired from a long morning of tormenting contractors and needed to hang upside-down for a while to refresh himself. The noise couldn’t be him. It was a sort of drumming sound, down in the bass register, and a nasty, high-pitched hissing, muffled and indistinct, and it was coming from the kitchen.

Some Enchanted Place – Chapter Six, Part The Third

If you just stumbled in, I’m apparently writing a book or something. Start here: Some Enchanted Place
Then here: Some Enchanted Place, Part Three
Then here: Part Three, Episode Two
Then here: Part Three, Episode Three
Then here: Episode Four
Episode Five
Chapter Seis
Chapter Six Second Part

Hmmm.

History is just tribes. We’re all in great big tribes now, and belong to all sorts of smaller ones simultaneously — you’re in a bowling league and the National Guard and a book club at the same time; stuff like that. The importance of the original race tribes are waning fast now, and the fellow-traveler voluntary associations are nearing their place on the meridian. You’ve got more in common with a Mongol on your dart team than a professional golfer you saw on television that looks like your brother.

But don’t let it fool you. All sorts of vestigial tails accompany you into the bassinet. Later maybe you pick up more obscure signals through osmosis, or more directly. Dad might make an offhand comment at the dinner table, or maybe goes the point-blank route and just beats it into your head with a belt. Maybe the preacher slips it in your head when you’re not looking. Maybe your country hands you a rifle and tells you it’s A-OK to let it rip over there, but not over there, and you do the math. Perhaps someone looks at you funny in the schoolyard, and you really don’t know what or why it was funny, but you’re shirtless and throwing hands in no time.

People that live close enough to the railroad tracks to have their dishes rattle always come up with a variation on the same bit of bosh: I’m the descendant of kings! The black kids in high school would talk about the proud Ashanti warriors they had falling out of their family trees, and of course we dumb Micks claimed Kings as thick as poison ivy all over our miserable half-remembered patch of the Ould Sod. In your heart of hearts you never believed a word of it, even as you were saying it, and knew a king in Ireland was probably the king of this rock here to that pile of dung over there anyway, and even that was only because no one was around to claim otherwise. Your semi-notable surname just means your great-great-great-great grandmother got knocked up by a slightly better class of lord that happened to be passing through. We’re all nobodies or we wouldn’t be talking — or fighting — over nothing much. The somebodies are always elsewhere.

The sum total of my inculcation into the Irish tribe hung behind those damp towels in the bathroom. Dad could tell you, chapter and verse, the difference between the Fianna Fail and the Fine Gael, and many of his drinking buddies would go home angry from some party because someone said De Valera couldn’t hold a candle to Collins — or vice versa, depending on how many drinks they had. Me? It seemed very far away and trivial. The Polish and Italian girls in my High School class tested the limits of their blouse buttons, and I plumbed the depths of diversity peeking at them.

But still. Angel went a little overboard, but Pecksniff certainly did exude something creepy; radiated it. His little disclosure pushed me past wanting to wet myself and around the bend in a way it was hard to explain for someone that really didn’t give a fart about being Oirish. But this was beyond the beyonds, as my grandmother used to say if you dared swear at the dinner table, which you didn’t.

I don’t know the Royal Black Knights of the Camp of Israel from the Apprentice Boys of Derry, or any of the dozens of clubs my father would mention with his eyebrow lowered and set on stun. I don’t know one from another, or any particular one from a hole in the ground. But that vestigial tail of my race, the faint imprint of my ancestors left in my bones, told me that all my squabbling tribes forget everything between them in an instant, then coalesce into one big angry Green tribe, whenever the Orange tribe shows up.

Pecksniff was standing there in this gloomy hole in the ground, beaming with pride to announce that he had turned his back on his brethren, and gone to carry water for the Orange team.