List of the Lost (12 page)

Ezra's shadowy face falls into Eliza's breasts as they both curl half in yet half out of a sleeping-bag. The basement is always free of bothersome family fuss, and it is here that Ezra and Eliza are free to convey tender generosity without fear of intrusion into their lovers' bunker. The cyclone cosiness of this underground crib, with its teen-crap depository of big-box storage and a battered and blinking portable television set as it nags and nags and nags at low volume, was at least our fledglings' nest of snuggle and nestle, settled as they were watching the wrecked tension of the nightly news.

“Who … or what … is Ronald Reagan?” asked Ezra, stricken with exhaustion.

“He's the strongest of the weakest,” says Eliza, in a corny cornball American pretzel voice, “and they says he'll be our next president, which means he shall be our next president … because they says he will, and civilization runs its full-bellied porky course … Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, James Baldwin … ssh, they just didn't have what it takes when pitted against Ronald Reagan, Lordy no! Civil rights? Bullcrap! Social justice? Praise me, no! Angela Davis? Bless my heart alive! Gloria Steinem? Bullcrap! Bullcrap? Bullcrap! If you're black, get back! Greenpeace? Terrorist watch! Rosa Parks? Nuisance! Dick Gregory? Social pest! Cesar Chavez? Headcase! American Civil Liberties Union? Whacko! Separate but equal? Goofy! Hooray for oil, oil, oil! Hooray for State terrorism! Commercial whaling! Nuclear bombs! Deforestation! Toxic waste! Yee-haw! Arrest Joan Baez and Buffy Sainte-Marie … political prisoners you-know-where-and-when! Bob Dylan?”

“Er, point taken –” cut in Ezra, but Eliza continued anyway …

“Ronald Reagan … now there's the marrow of the American bone … he'll bomb Japan just to return a very private favor … and all American cops will make you beg … in the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

“When will there be a president that the people actually like?” asked a now-dozing Ezra.

“It's never necessary to go that far. As long as big business bankers like him, he's in. You don't actually believe that public votes are correctly counted, do you?”

“Of course not.”

“On appearance alone no one would vote for Ronald Reagan.”

“That must be a hairpiece?”

“No, the hair is real, but the rest of him isn't.” Eliza then began to reflect wistfully. “I remember as a child we would always say how politics is boring, and then you're led to believe that this is a somewhat unintelligent thing to say, and you are told that politics is life, and so on. But it's the politics of politics that is boring, not the mechanisms of human issues … but because you know very well that only slippery people can become successful in politics … disingenuous shitbags … yet never, ever anyone who cares about the people, or who listens to the people, or whom we could …”

“… call ‘darling'?” Ezra piped up.

At this, Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza's breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra's howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza's body except for the otherwise central zone. Both fell awkwardly off the bed, each tending to their own anguish yet still laughing an impaired discomfort of giggles whilst curving into a hunched disadvantage.

“Cojones are not the most useful accouterments at times like these,” groaned Ezra.

“Yes, I know. I traded mine in at a Tupperware party. I came away with a lovely butter-boat that was far more useful and much admired in New Bedford.”

Man looked at woman and woman looked at man with all the difficult dissimilarities and inequalities and arguments and varying obstacles now – and only now – harmonizing so beautifully as they unflatteringly coiled in carnage on the coarse basement rug.

“The reason why I love you the best is because I don't mind in the least if you see me at my worst,” said Eliza, with cushioned voice.

“Well hopefully it doesn't get any worse than this, because my stomach just couldn't take it …” and their fiendishly loving wrestle began once again, rolling across the floor as hot-tempered enthusiasts of lustful joy as both adorers' bodies did their sexual staccato heaving and barging into place, nothing forbidden, heartbeats uneven, the mind as naked as the body, weakened by exertion, only to shockingly lock with a halt at the astride legs of Sammy, younger brother to Ezra, as he quietly stood with satisfied slyness watching the debauched display of sensuous pleasure at the sweetness of living by seizing the initiative.

“Well, now!” said Sammy, looking down at the creature-comfort nudity. Sammy smirked with blackmailer's cunning. “I have never quite been this close to roadkill before,” he said, deliberately pursing his lips voluptuously.

“But you are roadkill,” said Ezra. Sammy raised his extortionist's eyebrows.

“This will cost you,” he said, but no sooner had the words formed when Ezra sprang to his feet with clenched fist ready to hit the spot and Sammy darted from the basement in fear of his life.

During this same evening Nails and Justy kept discreet watch across the street from the Helen Earth Drag and Supper Club, from where Dean Isaac emerged at 11 p.m., after the dragged-up machete cabaret of Wilma Dickfit, Ann Shandy and Connie Lingus had reduced a Judy Garbage audience to puddles of giggles. Living his own death, afraid of the future, belching at will, through it all Isaac could only hear Noah Barbelo whispering, whispering, calling and calling into Isaac's inner ear. The club valet, named Chesty Normous, was most forthcoming and handed Isaac a set of car keys, and the flashy Maserati swirled from kerbside and home to the cosy ecstasy of Isaac's inner climate, where all of his dreams were perfectly legal and a certain emotional dryness could only be served and saved by the love of books by authors long-since withered in overgrown graves. In militant action Nails and Justy followed intently in the battered El Camino, the suffering of Noah Barbelo having transformed their hearts into procurable, securable mission that, by reason of its being, meant that Noah might no longer be in torment. The surety of the positive mind! Noah may very well still win!

The world panics along on its inexplicable course, and the loss of the June tournament freed all three boys from the disenchanted pressure of what, after all, had only ever been a dissoluble pastime. Sport was only sport, for if it were religion it would instead be called religion. Noah's murder had united Nails, Justy and Ezra – and even Eliza. Far more than the slave-trade barks of Mr Rims, or the gesture of a juggler's trophy (which, in any case, they were not unquestionably certain to win). At the impressive home of Isaac, electronic gates threw open their arms as lord and master's Maserati sailed in and moved quickly up the darkened driveway. But the gate's mechanism paused and closed too slowly to notice the darting figures of Nails and Justy neatly nipping through the narrowing gap as they systematically launched their bodies sideways into shrubbery like high-jump masters swooping backwards over the raised bar. Even so, there would be no squandering of time, and as Isaac fumbled and fiddled about with door keys both boys allowed the graveled driveway stones underfoot to announce their arrival behind the slightly swaying fruit-fondler. He turned and hazily examined their determined, jockeyed temperament.

“Well, well,” beamed Isaac, “and there was I anticipating another night of that infernal Vicki Carr long player … ‘It must be him/It must be him/Oh my dear God/It must be him' … you'd think the wretched thing would just answer the phone, wouldn't you? God forbid she be surprised.”

“We noticed you at the club,” said Nails.

“I hardly think so. They'd never let you in wearing those clothes. Which is much to their loss, I might add,” eased Isaac, clearly a professional in situations of seduction.

“No, we're from the kitchen. We understand you enjoy company from time to time,” Justy offered, but not without some slight nerve deserting him. This particular ruse did not come easily to Justy, whose intended beating of Isaac might squeeze out a full confession yet could also quite messily lead to Isaac's death.

“Yes,” wheezed Isaac, “I'm prehistoric in that respect. Occasionally I even pay hard cash for it, as one must when the law decides that there is nothing natural about your nature. Nothing could have created what I am, apparently. I am beyond science. Well, we are fortunate enough to know more than whatever it was they thought they knew during the Bronze Age, aren't we? If God got it right from the beginning then surely he managed to get me right, too? I'm not a social coincidence. I look at young men such as yourselves, and that really is enough for me. Why the newspapers still get in such an amazed tizzy about it all is quite ridiculous, isn't it? You'd think they'd be used to it by now, wouldn't you? There's no record of Jesus getting hot under the collar over the girl next door, is there? But he certainly had his men around him. But then, he didn't write anything down … which was very remiss of him. Even to this day some people think that he actually wrote the Bible. He didn't write anything at all. Funny, isn't it? Please come inside.” Isaac spoke with a soft confidence.

Once inside, all three settled into the main reception room, with its elegant calmness of prosperity and contentment the likes of which Nails and Justy may have noticed in the films of Douglas Sirk but nowhere else (for it existed nowhere else). They eased into the restful comfort of Rockefeller richness; the buffed luxury of W. Buffett; mounted paintings of interest to Onassis, or Hughes, or Vanderbilt, or Rothschild … or perhaps not, but these were the jittery thoughts of Nails and Justy as tall glasses of vodka were thrust into their hardbitten hands and a settled Isaac tinkered by the drinks cabinet and prattled on – more for his own amusement than that of others.

“My personal fortunes are of considerable interest to many people – myself included, I should add. I once met an ill-tempered monarch in Europe, and I explained to him that I had no interest in the female form, and he found this to be far too confusing for the human mind to comprehend, or, at least, his own mind struggled with it – he said as much, anyway, and then I knew I was speaking to an illiterate. Being a monarch, of course, he felt he should secure full control over the thoughts of others. He was very religious and therefore completely racist and everything-ist, and he seemed preoccupied with punishment and hell damnation upon anyone who disagreed with him … you know how they are. The natural order is the one that essentially suits them, and they consider execution far too comfortable an end for people who don't share their very private lusts. ‘Don't shove it in our faces,' he warned me, and I thought, well, you've been married four times yourself … shoving it in our faces over and over again. I've lived with intolerance all of my life, of course, which is why I terrify ignorant people … since most of them have never had cause to use their brains. The Church is obsessed with everlasting punishment, or forgiveness, and I could never understand why. It's not enough to commit yourself to God – but you are quite unfairly obliged to commit yourself every single day, hour after hour. With every small action you have to keep letting him know how much you love and honor him. Why can't you just tell him once and be done with it? Why does he need to know every thirty minutes? Doesn't he believe anyone who ever says it? I don't want some dreadful priest forgiving me as I lie there in a coma, with no new things lurking ahead for me. They seem to think they have something that everybody wants. What a dangerous thought to have. I suppose Mengele felt the same way.” He now sat easily and tightly between the two boys on the lush sofa. “I gave it thought, of course; after all, whatever sexual impulse we have is not something we ever invented for ourselves, is it? If it were, then we would be our own God, I suppose. Don't you find that we are all physically designed to experiment with sex? Yet at the same time so much … prohibition … is placed on doing whatever comes naturally. The prohibition only comes from people who'd love to do whatever it is you're doing, but they just haven't got the nerve. Why would the Church have any interest whatsoever in what I do in the privacy of my own home? I don't poke my nose into anyone else's affairs … that often. You see, if you believe in a divine creator then you can …
not
… believe that he or she did
not
create what is monotonously known as sexual deviance … How can I be deviating from something that I hadn't ever felt in the first place … for there's no point in allotting a person with feelings that he would be condemned to enact. Imagine having two perfectly healthy legs yet never using them – forever sliding about on your belly. I am God's design just as much as anyone else – I wasn't created by Walt Disney ... I'd be far more exciting if I had been. When I was a child my uncle asked me what I'd like to be when I grew up, and I didn't say to him ‘Well, I'd like very much to be a sexual deviant, hounded for my thoughts alone, not having actually done anything yet hounded for having entertained the thought … which is apparently just as bad as action.' I have found, you see, throughout my rather silly life, that there is very little difference between religion and racism. Both are the exact same torrent of intolerance. Now,” he said, slyly glancing at his watch, “I really am not one to waffle on, and since the object of this night is … well, seduction … do you mind if we now talk in plain language? You wouldn't be offended? I could quote The Tempest until the cows come home, of course, but unfortunately the cows do, at some point, come home … if my bathroom mirror is anything to go by. Alas, Marjorie Main died in vain … but at least Marie Dressler, er … didn't. Now!” He gulped the last drop of his vodka. Isaac was now ready for a playful beating, and it scarcely mattered what with.