The Figs of May - Carpe Testicularum

Chapter 11

The Story The Authors

FrMcCullough's knock, most untimely, penetrated their ringing ears.

He was due to bless the baby, and in their peccadillo-petting, they'd forgotten about the baptism. Neither had withdrawn enough cash to tip the good
father, to send him out with a bit of "trinkgeld" as the Germans say. "I'll say," said Bill, "the man would drink pitch dripping from a tree if it had fermented a bit in the sun. Let him do his own penances...! Pttttui!"

Joan sanpped into her former Catholic self at the thought of priests with babies, esp. her own baby, Bamboozle. She rushed upstairs to find... FrWhiskey

... that the "baby" -- in fact, a ragged, stuffed toy from her girlhood to which she had clung with ever more desperate and illogical fervor since Bill had woodenly carted her home from that last Mexican abortion, wrapped in a tattered serape smelling of horses, piss-soured straw and cheap mezcal, with that by-now familiar ache riding up all the way through her midsection and still stinging a bit with the clipped parting words of the bruja who had performed what was still an illegal operation in that vile dark winter of 1947 -- "You know, senora, each time you do dees ting, choo make a hole een to dee udder side -- mucho easier for dee fantomas to get eento dees mundo and no to go back -- all dee yanqui mujeres dey come to Mexico to get dey yanquitos sent back to dee place before leefing, soon dey make dee whole world filled weet ghosts. I escared I be sharing my hacienda weeth my whole ancestors, everybody muerto no longer muerto. An' dee worse part, damn fantomas gotta eat! Eat me to death myself, denn I come back a muerta too. Fucking loco ees what I teenk. Mujeres americanas gotta get dey own brujas up where dey come from -- eet's America what needs las fantomas, not Mexico -- Mexico got too many goddamn ghosts already..." --
"Shut up, ya old bag," growled Bill. "We already paid ya. What the hell else do ya want?"
But the bruja's words had stayed rattling around Joan's mind like a set of polished knucklebones the whole trip back, and once they were back in New York she had dug Mary Bamboozle, the favorite ragdoll of her girlhood, from a trunk at the back of the hall closet. Bill had a good dope source then -- he was bringing home real heroin suppositories that one of his co-workers' wives, a nurse, filched from the hospital dispensary via the crafty ministrations of her lover, the Chief of Pharmacology -- and so every morning after Bill left for work she would insert one of them, and fetch Bamboozle, and as the hroin dissolved into her bloodstream she would sit in the window and begin to rock, rock, rock the baby, crooning to it, singing songs her nursemaid Lizabelle had sung to her, Joan, when she was a girl... Bill would come home and find her completely nodded out that way, framed by the endless freezing rain of the dark weeks of a January which later calculations showed to have inexplicably taken over four months to complete its 31 days... And the more he teased her about it, the closer to her bosom she hugged the doll the instant he was out the door...
So now she climbed the steps and entered the "nursery" (a peeling walk-in closet with a wooden orange crate serving the function of crib) only to find it empty -- no Mary Bamboozle! Instantly she snapped 180 degrees to where Kit, Bill's beloved Spaniel as well as chief suspect for Joan's "child's" disappearance -- but Kit was snoring on the rug, and no shredded rag-doll hung between his speckled lips, and her heart speeded up a bit as she thought But who?, when she heard the tapping at the window.
She spun again. Branches rattled in the hail, sodden newspapers spun with limp brown leaves in a danse macabre, and rain ran vicious diagonals down the windowpanes... And there, in the midst of it, tap-tap-tapping on the windowglass...
...Was Mary Bamboozle. The doll. Her child. Floating. Beneath an umbrella which seemed somehow crazily logically the source of her aloftness. Tapping. "Mommy?" she purred through the thick glass. "Mommy are you coming with me Mommy? Mommy we have to fly. Today. Up. Over. Over there. Soon. Mommy."
"Oh my baby," said Joan and she could scarcely believe the emotions her voice betrayed as it broke and the sobs came. "Oh my baby of course I'm coming. Oh Mary Bamboozle let me just get my shawl and we can go..." And it wasn't until she was frantically prying the window open with a crowbar (Bill had nailed it shut)and felling the first freezing raindrops on her skinny wrists that she had time or mind to ponder just how they were going to get there, not to mention where it was they were headed. Philip

The Story	The Authors
FrMcCullough's knock, most untimely, penetrated their ringing ears. He was due to bless the baby, and in their peccadillo-petting, they'd forgotten about the baptism. Neither had withdrawn enough cash to tip the good father, to send him out with a bit of "trinkgeld" as the Germans say. "I'll say," said Bill, "the man would drink pitch dripping from a tree if it had fermented a bit in the sun. Let him do his own penances...! Pttttui!" Joan sanpped into her former Catholic self at the thought of priests with babies, esp. her own baby, Bamboozle. She rushed upstairs to find...	FrWhiskey
... that the "baby" -- in fact, a ragged, stuffed toy from her girlhood to which she had clung with ever more desperate and illogical fervor since Bill had woodenly carted her home from that last Mexican abortion, wrapped in a tattered serape smelling of horses, piss-soured straw and cheap mezcal, with that by-now familiar ache riding up all the way through her midsection and still stinging a bit with the clipped parting words of the bruja who had performed what was still an illegal operation in that vile dark winter of 1947 -- "You know, senora, each time you do dees ting, choo make a hole een to dee udder side -- mucho easier for dee fantomas to get eento dees mundo and no to go back -- all dee yanqui mujeres dey come to Mexico to get dey yanquitos sent back to dee place before leefing, soon dey make dee whole world filled weet ghosts. I escared I be sharing my hacienda weeth my whole ancestors, everybody muerto no longer muerto. An' dee worse part, damn fantomas gotta eat! Eat me to death myself, denn I come back a muerta too. Fucking loco ees what I teenk. Mujeres americanas gotta get dey own brujas up where dey come from -- eet's America what needs las fantomas, not Mexico -- Mexico got too many goddamn ghosts already..." -- "Shut up, ya old bag," growled Bill. "We already paid ya. What the hell else do ya want?" But the bruja's words had stayed rattling around Joan's mind like a set of polished knucklebones the whole trip back, and once they were back in New York she had dug Mary Bamboozle, the favorite ragdoll of her girlhood, from a trunk at the back of the hall closet. Bill had a good dope source then -- he was bringing home real heroin suppositories that one of his co-workers' wives, a nurse, filched from the hospital dispensary via the crafty ministrations of her lover, the Chief of Pharmacology -- and so every morning after Bill left for work she would insert one of them, and fetch Bamboozle, and as the hroin dissolved into her bloodstream she would sit in the window and begin to rock, rock, rock the baby, crooning to it, singing songs her nursemaid Lizabelle had sung to her, Joan, when she was a girl... Bill would come home and find her completely nodded out that way, framed by the endless freezing rain of the dark weeks of a January which later calculations showed to have inexplicably taken over four months to complete its 31 days... And the more he teased her about it, the closer to her bosom she hugged the doll the instant he was out the door... So now she climbed the steps and entered the "nursery" (a peeling walk-in closet with a wooden orange crate serving the function of crib) only to find it empty -- no Mary Bamboozle! Instantly she snapped 180 degrees to where Kit, Bill's beloved Spaniel as well as chief suspect for Joan's "child's" disappearance -- but Kit was snoring on the rug, and no shredded rag-doll hung between his speckled lips, and her heart speeded up a bit as she thought But who?, when she heard the tapping at the window. She spun again. Branches rattled in the hail, sodden newspapers spun with limp brown leaves in a danse macabre, and rain ran vicious diagonals down the windowpanes... And there, in the midst of it, tap-tap-tapping on the windowglass... ...Was Mary Bamboozle. The doll. Her child. Floating. Beneath an umbrella which seemed somehow crazily logically the source of her aloftness. Tapping. "Mommy?" she purred through the thick glass. "Mommy are you coming with me Mommy? Mommy we have to fly. Today. Up. Over. Over there. Soon. Mommy." "Oh my baby," said Joan and she could scarcely believe the emotions her voice betrayed as it broke and the sobs came. "Oh my baby of course I'm coming. Oh Mary Bamboozle let me just get my shawl and we can go..." And it wasn't until she was frantically prying the window open with a crowbar (Bill had nailed it shut)and felling the first freezing raindrops on her skinny wrists that she had time or mind to ponder just how they were going to get there, not to mention where it was they were headed.	Philip

Library | Contents | Next Page