Coney (9 page)

“Mine are soft, full of life, where armies nurse to
gloire.
You
seins
give muscles and sweat. Ze odor of a man.”

“And what, pray tell O rotund oracle, is wrong with the odor of a man?” Albert-Alberta said, cocking his head coquettishly. “It is a sign of manhood, just as shit and semen are the smells of a boy.”

Otto stood up and flexed his biceps which rose like a camel's hump from the hem of his short-sleeved shirt.

“
Ach
,” he said, pointing to Albert-Alberta, “this call itself man. A man has strength. You say you half-woman. I say you all woman.”

Albert-Alberta nodded and replied: “Ergo of no possible use to you.” He sang: ‘
Tell me Lord Montague, How many hairy assholes did you screw? Was it one or ninety-two? Oh, tell me, Lord Montague.
”

Fifi applauded vigorously, requiring her to extend her arms so that her palms could collide beyond her breasts.

Harry slowly lifted his head and, receiving no reprimand, swiveled his neck.

Lohu raised his hand and shook it like a schoolboy bursting with the right answer.

“I pity all of you,” he said.

His brother added: “All of you understand nothing.”

The others took no notice, except for Albert-Alberta, who made the sign of the Cross, and whispered:

“Buddha two, Jesus nothing. But it's a great match, folks.”

“But we forget our guest,” Fifi said. “'Arry, you like Otto do strong trick for you?”

Harry remembered Mike Mazurki in a movie.

“Could you tear a telephone book in two?”

Everyone laughed. Fifi patted him on the head.

“
Mon petit
, zat is wonderful.
Alors
, Otto, our guest make request.”

“Zere is no book in zis shithouse.”

Albert-Alberta ran to the foyer and returned with a Brooklyn phone directory. He bounded up to Otto, bowed low and, sweeping his arm grandly in the style of a Shakespearean fop, laid the book on his lap. Otto, staring straight ahead, spread his knees. The book fell to the floor.

Jo-Jo slid off his chair, disappearing under the table, and surfaced back at his seat holding the book. He opened it and, whelping with strain, tore it in half along the binding, Everyone but Otto applauded. Tensing his biceps, the strong man said:

“Yah, yah, is funny. Now we go out and lift cars.”

“Why is to be ashamed of trick? If not tricks, how we make living?”

Otto chomped on his cheeks.

“'Arry,
écoute
, Otto, he can tear book like in show. But he is like chef. He need time to bake book in oven. Zen is
très simple.”

“Lie,” Otto shouted.

“Fifi,” Jamie said, rolling his eyes, “you promised us the Boze Art today.”

The room froze. Harry thought of the wax museum. Fifi patted Harry's head.

“Alors, porquoi pas
, ze boy needs education. I explain:

“'Arry, in
Paris
, once in ze year, we have
Beaux Arts Ball
. All
étudiants
of ze arts invited. At midnight all doors locked and each must
remove clothes. Of course one can depart before midnight, but who do such
faux pas
? The doors locked till six
matin
. Not even
gendarmes
can enter, and ze
étudiants
amuse zemself with much pleasure. I tell
mes amis
zis and they have
envie
for Beaux Arts even more zan once in year. You go with us. Zere is no harm,
mon petit
, I promise. Because you ze one
vrai étudiant
here, you have honor to disrobing
moi, la reine.”

She turned her palms in a lifting motion. Otto tugged her to her feet. The others savagely tore at their clothes. Shirts, underwear and socks flew and floated over agitated inmates of a madhouse.

Olga, on all fours and gasping like a breath-starved football player, wiggled while accepting leisurely strokes from a kneeling Albert-Alberta, whose hands conducted a symphony orchestra. Spotting Otto sitting sullenly, he pointed to the twins, joined at the hip by what resembled a large fish scale, who were masturbating each other, as if a coxswain were setting a frenetic beat, and shrieked:

“Take a lesson from them, Otto!”

Jamie, seemingly guided by an enormous erection, came to a kneeling rest before Olga, who licked his penis with a pitted tongue.

A lion roared. Olga collapsed.

“Glad to have been of service,” Albert-Alberta said, turning his conducting to Lohu and Mohu, who were watching parabolas of semen land like disabled parachutes.

Fifi moved in front of Harry. She was about his height. A white cotton blouse hung loose over a pleated blue ankle-length skirt. Her bare feet, astonishingly small, seemed inadequate to their task.

“Alors, gentil gosse
, is not polite to refuse hospitality. Disrobe me and you, zen do as you wish. No harm will come.”

She placed his hand on the top button of her blouse. He unbuttoned her. His penis was stiff. Otto, behind her, removed the blouse. She wore no brassiere. Her skirt fell. Her hand on his head
guided him to his knees. He tugged her pink panties to her ankles. She kicked them away. His eyes were level with a tiny patch of blond pubic hair barely visible against the milky dunes of flesh. The odor of Woolworth perfume burned his nostrils like the vaporized mists Bama unleashed to cure his cold.

“Now remove you clothes. Ze
règles
of
fête
.”

Harry piled his clothes before him like a sandbag. His erection throbbed with virginal ecstasy of finally
knowing
, but nausea claimed his stomach.

Fifi turned a sweating face toward Harry, shut her tiny blue eyes, and nodded understanding.

“Such fear,
mon petit
, is only life. You do not wish, you may go now, if zat please you.”

Harry grabbed his clothes and ran through laughter. He was desperate to wash. On the steps, wearing only his knickers, he finished dressing. The door opened. Fifi, nude, held out the betting slips. Her other hand gripped his bike.

Harry stretched out his hand to accept the papers. Fifi squeezed it gently.

“Not forget ze
cheval
, brave knight.”

He caught his bike as it bumped down the stairs.

S
TANDING ON THE PEDALS OF HIS BIKE, PUMPING AND ROCKING VIOLENTLY
, Harry measured speed by the pain of the cutting wind. He flashed over the grave of Dreamland and skidded onto the sand beneath the boardwalk. Carrying his bike to the ocean's edge, he eased into a prone position and submerged his face in the lapping residue of once-surly waves. The frigid salt water stung his eyes and pricked his skin. The scourging, he hoped, would unclog his mind and allow it to answer questions that were lodged there.

Why had he wanted to bury his head in Fifi's sweating breasts?

Why had he wanted to bite her pubic hair?

Why, during his panicked flight from the room, had he cursed himself for the loss of Fifi's stinking mystery?

Why, in a world that encompassed many worlds as different from each other as day from night, did freaks, poets, dwarfs, his mother, his father, share a common obsession?

He remembered a joke he had overheard his father tell:

The grandmother of a large family dies. The grandfather, who worshipped her, is grief-stricken and dazed. The family, sitting shivah at home, notices that the grandfather has disappeared. Alarmed that in his confused state he may have wandered off and come to harm, they frantically search for him. He is discovered in a bedroom atop the young housemaid.

“Zadeh,” the family screams, “how could you?”

The grandfather replies: “Oy, in such a terrible time, do I know what I'm doing?”

Harry tried to visualize his grandfather in that position, but couldn't get his clothes off. He laughed. Another question relieved him of the unanswerable ones:
Was his grandfather crazy and, if so, how did that affect his own sanity?

Lifting his head from the water, he looked toward the twenty-five-yard-long fishing pier that jutted into the Atlantic from Steeple Chase Amusement Park. There, memory placed his grandfather, whose resemblance to Albert Einstein provoked double takes, standing beside seven-year-old Harry.

Though twenty feet above the nearest water, Zadeh wore hip-high rubber boots. He was furiously reeling in a line. When the hook breached, it might hold a bait worm, but nothing more. Zadeh had never had caught a fish.

Harry began a sanity inquiry.

Zadeh worked as a tanner in a leather factory, a trade he had learned in his native Poland. The profession was temporary, to be endured only until the world recognized his stature as a Talmudic scholar. His approach to fishing was properly Talmudic:
If idiots can catch, surely I can.
The premise was lost on the ignorant fish.

He escalated the battle, drafting seven-year-old Harry as aide and purchasing sophisticated rods, reels and lures. The fish were unimpressed. He became a nuisance to anyone on the pier with a catch in a bucket.

“What bait you use?” he would demand.

“Worms.”

“Special?”

“Worms is worms.”

“How far you cast?”

“Who knows?”

“You got a favorite spot?”

“Where they're biting.”

Eventually his Talmudic mind informed him that Harry's baited
hook alongside his presented a choice that confused and immobilized stupid fish. He ordered Harry to withdraw his line, but to stand poised to plunge a gleaming scaling knife into a catch. It was now eight years that Harry had been at the ready but never challenged, for which Harry was thankful, because neither he nor Zadeh had the vaguest idea of how to clean a fish.

The end of the first nibbleless day set the pattern for all subsequent catchless expeditions. Lifting his eyes to the heavens, Zadeh gloomily conceded by reciting Goethe's rhymed German: “Man thinks and God laughs.” He then leapt up, brought the heels of his boots together and added: “Sometimes man can laugh at God.”

At a fish store specializing in
just-caught fish
, Zadeh bought the last laugh.

Appropriately bloody catch in bucket, they had insisted that Bama immediately clean and fry the hard-won prize. None of them particularly liked fish, but they were no less vengefully ravenous than cannibals at the flesh of captured enemies.

The last bite cued a bowel movement lecture, followed by the lecturer's long absence that taught by example. When Zadeh, glowing with health, returned from the bathroom, he would head for his desk and open his Old Testament. Harry would pull up a chair beside him.

Zadeh maintained an unblinking stare while reading the black Hebrew letters of the Torah, moving his head, rather than his eyes, from right to left. Harry considered those fixed eyes as unfathomably powerful as Buck Rogers's ray gun.

Soon Zadeh would sound a salivaless expectoration and reach for his shiny, black Waterman pen, whose circumference nearly matched the fat Upmann cigars he sometimes smoked. Unscrewing the cover and jabbing the point downward to loosen the flow of ink, he would launch a closed-mouthed vibrato growl of disgust for the offending passage. The fourteen-carat gold-plaited nib then glided along the margins of the Torah, leaving hairline strokes of blue ink which at first seemed a meticulously copied musical score but, when
completed, formed a perfectly even block of a midget Hebrew army commanded to attention. The error set right, he would again spit it out and swivel his head in search of the next abomination.