Can and Can'tankerous (9 page)

“May I swim with you for a while?”

She dimpled prettily. There had been a husband, briefly, eleven years earlier. A passion or two since. Nothing more. “To be honest,” she said, “I’m naked. I wasn’t expecting anyone else. The doors were supposed to be locked and—”

How had he gained entrance? She wanted to ask him, but he was removing his clothes. “That should be all right,” he said. “No problem. And nothing to feel awkward about.”

He stood naked at the edge of the pool, almost aglow with his easy beauty. Then he seemed to lift from the tile edge, as if airborne; arched over her, and sliced into the pool as smoothly and cleanly as a paper cut.

She watched him stroke away from her, barely making a splash. He reached the deep end, tucked and rolled, and beat his way down to the shallow end. Then he came back. She watched, realizing she had been holding her breath.

And when he came to her, she laid her hand on his bicep and felt the blood beating beneath the skin. He reached for her, and took her hand and put it on his hip, and her hand slid between his legs, and she knew that there would be more than swimming.

He pressed against her, and her back went flat to the tiled side of the pool. She let her arms trail at her sides, and when he spread her legs and lifted them around his hips, her arms laid out in the overflow gutter, giving her the proper height. She felt him trying to penetrate, and she closed her eyes, her head thrown back; and then he was inside her.

And in that instant the kelpie changed shape. His sleek head of hair—which she now realized had been wet even before he had entered the water—seemed matted with weeds. She felt a terrible pain as he expanded within her, and the sound he made was that of an animal, a cross between a horse and a bull.

The kelpie went to its native form, holding her helpless. To be mounted, to be drowned, and her flesh to be eaten. The kelpie, servant of the Devil. Hester screamed…

And fought back. First she trapped his organ within her, held in a grip as tight as a walnut shell. Then she changed. Her body expanded, altered, flowed, and reformed.

Flesh was eaten. But not hers.

Love is a changeling. The kelpie: waterhorse. Hester: the sharkling. There are forms that are ancient, and there are natural predators. More recent.

The water was warm. And peculiarly tainted.

L is for LEVIATHAN

In what would have been the year 6250 BCE the crippled century-vessel from somewhere in the deeps of space fell through our galaxy, and entered the atmosphere at such a steep angle that only one pod of the great ship survived, crashing into the sea and vanishing.

On April 14, 1912, the
Titanic
struck a berg off the Grand Banks and went to the bottom, carrying 1517 souls to their death.

The race that had come to an unwanted new home in the deeps watched the poor ship die, and felt pity. In their compassion they went to the creature and mated with it; and they lived in harmony for almost seventy-five years, and the progeny of that union swam through the oceans of the Earth undiscovered and unimpeded.

Then the ghouls violated the tomb. They came to the shell of the mother and they stole. They ravaged the corpse.

And the children rose, and went in search of the entrepreneurs who had gone through the pockets of the shroud for pennies. And in New York harbor, in the stretch of water known as the Narrows, the first born of that metallic union rose with its gleaming sinewy length, and began exacting vengeance of the parasites that had so dishonored the memory of its mother.

Now the seacoast of the world is forbidden territory.

You can see their eyes glowing offshore every night.

M is for MUT

Osiris met her at the fresh fruit counter of the A&P in the Blue Nile Mall. She was squeezing pomegranates. He dallied, pretending to blight the figs, and finally was able to catch her eye. “Horus,” she said, when he returned the eye. “Lovely,” he replied, meaning the Eye of Horus and meaning
her
, as well, but basically too shy to say it without covering his verbal tracks. “And all-seeing, as well,” she added, dimpling prettily. He smiled; she smiled; and he asked her name. “Isis Luanne Jane Marie,” she said, “but my friends all call me Isis.” He went pink and stammered, and finally managed to say, “May
I
call you Isis?” and she said yes, that would be lovely, and did he come here often? And he said, oh only to practice a little resurrection in the meat department, and she gifted him with a giggle and a pirouette, and he asked her where she was from, and she said, “Lower Egypt, over that way,” and she motioned toward the parking lot. But Osiris’s heart turned to ash, as he noticed for the first time the cobra totem of Buto on Isis’s perky baseball cap, worn slantwise in the homeboy style so popular at the moment. He was glad he hadn’t worn his falcon’s crest Borsalino, the dead giveaway that he was from Upper Egypt. It would have shamed her immediately—coming from the wrong side of the tracks as she did—actually the
lower
side of the tracks—and he didn’t know what he was going to do. Because as surely as Aunt Taueret had made whoopee with a hippopotamus, he knew he had fallen in love with this Isis from Lower Egypt, and he knew that his mother was never going to approve of the relationship. He could hear her now:
You can’t be serious
,
Osiris dear
;
why
,
she simply isn’t Our Sort.

But they began dating on the sly, catching a double-bill during the Haya Harareet Film Festival at the Luxor multiplex, flogging
fellahs
and feeding the pieces to Nubian lions, sneaking out for a smoke behind the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut; and in general carrying on the way young people in love have carried on since Ra was only a twinkle in the cosmic egg.

And finally, it became clear to Osiris that he had to come clean; that he could not stumble through eternity without Isis Luanne Jane Marie at his side. So he sat her down one evening in front of the baboon paintings at Tuna Gebel, where they had gone to eat because they’d heard that Gebel made the best tuna in pita anywhere in the Twin Kingdoms, and he told her he was from this wealthy family in Upper Egypt, and his mother was Mut, and if they were ever to be as one they would have to go and see his mother to get her blessing.

At first Isis was beside herself. She wept and tried to run off, but Osiris held her and soothed her and told her he loved her more than sliced papyrus, and finally she was able to sob a question. “What about your father? Wouldn’t he intercede for us?” And Osiris thought about his dad, who spent most of his time worrying about wheat and barley, and figuring out ways to con Osiris into coming into the family business, and he replied, “Much as I love Amon, I think Pop ain’t going to be much help. Mom’s got him pretty well whipped. I don’t think he’s ever gotten past the vulture head. You know, they were sort of betrothed at birth kind of thing.”

But they knew what had to be done, and so they went to see Mut.

It had been a particularly shitty day for Mut, that day they came, what with the sun halting in the heavens again, and the plague of murrain, and so when Osiris appeared in the throne room with Isis, Mut gave a little shriek with two of her three heads, shaking her plumes of truth. “Where the hell did
she
come from?!” she demanded. She was clearly distraught.

“You
know
my beloved?” Osiris cried.

“Know
her…?” Mut screamed, “Of
course
I know her, you ignorant twit! She’s your goddam
sister
!”

“Oops,” said Osiris.

“Don’t tell me you
did it
!” Mut howled. One look at the young lovers was enough. “Oh, name of the Trinitarian,” Mut lamented, “no
wonder
I can’t get the sun to work properly. You useless brat. I
told
your father sending one of the twins away wouldn’t be enough, but oh no, not
him
, Mr. Soft Hearted!”

And she proceeded to strike Osiris dead. And Isis fell to her knees and tried to bring him back to life. And she tried real hard, she really did; but nothing. Naught. Zip. Yet her power was formidable, and she gave birth to their child right there in the throne room.

And Horus was looked upon by his grandmother Mut, and he was found comely in her eyes, and eventually she got it on with him, and when they cast the movie Mut was slapped around by Jack Nicholson till she admitted, “He’s my husband…he’s my grandson…he’s my husband…he’s my grandson…he’s my husband
and
my grandson,” and John Huston got off clean, no indictment at all, and the sequel lost a fortune.

N is for NIDHOOG

Amos Gaskill met the only tree on Skillet Six Mile Flats neck-first. It was a stunted, ugly thing, the only tree out there on Skillet Six Mile Flats: it came thrusting up out of the hardpan at a fifty-degree angle, its roots aboveground like a junkheap of a thousand wicker chairs broken and cast abandoned, black and tangled, clots of hairy dirt embedded in the coils, the roots twisted and joined the bloated ugly thick and oily trunk in gnarled sutures that could be imagined as charred open mouths sucking at pregnant bark; without leaf or bud, crippled limbs bent and flung in corrupt shapes against the gray sky; like a famously scorched corpse, all black and sooty, tormented in design, blighted in every particular; a single desperate shape gasping for life in blasted flatland.

They had to cut the rope by a third, and retie the knot, before they looped it over the topmost branch: at its original length, circling the black neck of Amos Gaskill, as black as the bole of the unlovely tree, he would have been standing on the chapped, cracked earth, the rope hanging limply past his shoulder. And even when they had cut it by a third, and retied the hangman’s knot, and pulled him up tight, the best they could get was the toes of his work-boots barely scraping the hardpan, making irregular slashes in the ground as he choked and struggled and swung himself to and fro trying to get his legs to stretch that quarter of an inch so he might stand, and stop choking, and not die. But all he got was a shallow furrow below each boot, and the spittle and gagging and swollen tongue.

They passed the bottle of McCormick bourbon from man to man, till all four had depleted the aquifer by half. They scratched and squatted and shifted from foot to foot, all the while fascinated by the dying. Amos Gaskill was their first activity, and for a black guy who’d had the misfortune to stop at an ATM while they were sitting in the bank’s parking lot around five in the morning, drinking and bragging about how they were going to make America a White Man’s Nation once again, he was doing the dying pretty impressively.

Amos Gaskill seemed determined not to choke to death. He kept swinging, kept gagging, twisted even though his eyes had rolled back to show elephant ivory, twisted around and then spun back again; but wouldn’t die. In fact, they had tied the knot so ineptly, had placed it so incorrectly, that even had they dropped him from a height, with his toes not scraping the gray claypan every time he moved, his neck would not have snapped, his breath would not have been cut off. They were simply too new at this business, and weren’t very good workmen to begin with. In fact, had they wanted to do it properly, they might have hired Amos Gaskill to assist them: he was a master carpenter, cabinetmaker, bricklayer, and all-around excellent, meticulous handyman. He would have rigged the garrote imperially.

They muttered among themselves,
why the hell don’t he die
,
but Amos Gaskill all white-orbed and tendon-stretched, continued to thrash and tremble and almost snarl around his swollen tongue. And then they heard the faint ratchet sounds of rats nibbling beneath them. Not rats, no, perhaps not rats, too strong and getting louder to be rats; probably a prairie dog or a family of prairie dogs, maybe a mole, or a snake moving in its tunnel. And the sounds grew louder, with a peculiar echoing quality, like a twopenny nail being scraped along the stainless steel wall of a wind-tunnel or caisson sunk deep in the earth; like a vibration from the core coming to the surface. And the ground trembled, and the claypan fractured in tiny running-lines like the smile wrinkles on an octogenarian’s face, and the rifts grew wider, deeper, and the dirt thrust up—a mound of it right under Amos Gaskill’s feet, and he was able to stand, gasping, his eyes reappearing—and the limbs of the tree writhed as the kraken woke and slithered up the well, Hvergelmir, and broke the surface first with its many-nostriled snout, sniffing the dry heat of the Skillet Six Mile Flats, and then one eye on a twisting, moist stalk, looking around wildly for what had done the quickening, what had done the awakening, and then a portion of the head, immense and lumpy and gray as the dust itself, and then the rest of it, Nidhogg, Nidhoog, Nidhug, the gnawing life at the root of life, and it came forth in full, cracking their faces like cheap plastic, letting the blood run down its jerking shape to water the roots, and it dipped the limb till the rope slipped off, and it stared balefully at Amos Gaskill, and considered diet for a heartbeat, and then withdrew, leaving spasmed earth in its wake.

And Amos Gaskill gathered the pieces of the leaders of the White Man’s Nation, and those that were not dry and could not be stacked by hand he spaded up with a shovel from the back of the little red pickup truck in which they’d brought him from the bank’s parking lot very early that morning, and some of the pieces were simply too small or soggy, so he left them to rot in the heat, and he drove away from the lone tree in the middle of Skillet Six Mile Flats.

To be canny rulers of the White Man’s Nation, one must know the answer to the question
why the hell don’t he die
, which is: never lynch a man on Yggdrasil, the ash tree that is the foundation of the universe, the life tree at whose roots forever dwells and noshes the insatiable Nidhug.

Only fools try to kill someone on the tree of life.

O is for ONI

From the NEW LAROUSSE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MYTHOLOGY: “Oni: invisible devil-demons, whose presence may be detected because they sing, whistle, or talk…”