The Eternal Footman Read online

  P A R T T H R E E

  Little Myths

  Waiting for Lucido

  WITH ITS CRUMBLING PIERS, decrepit fishing boats, and unkempt beaches heaped with surf-borne trash, Coatzacoalcos Harbor partook of the abulic age as much as any vista in Nora’s recent experience. The only exceptional feature was the smoldering volcano in the distance. Anthony identified it as Catemaco, adding that while its vents had smoked, belched, and oozed continuously since 1914, no one believed it would ever actually blow. Catemaco, he said, was like an aging, fangless, junkyard Doberman whose deterrent value depended entirely upon intruders mistaking him for a younger dog.

  Only after they’d navigated the harbor and started up a murky jungle river called the Uspanapa did Nora fully grasp the incongruity that had marked their recent voyage. Sailing a flat-bottom boat across the Gulf of Mexico was like pressing a rubber band into service as a fan belt or using a fountain pen for an ice pick. Now, at last, the Queen was where she belonged, on waters strange but manageable.

  “Last night—was that a hallucination?” said Anthony, steering around a bend in the river.

  Raindrops fell, peppering the pilothouse windows. “What do you think?” said Nora.

  “Well, it felt real. Except that my guilt is still intact even though He forgave me.”

  “We probably weren’t hallucinating. People don’t hallucinate in tandem.”

  “Then you’ll obey the entrails’ command?”

  “Eventually, yes. It certainly won’t be the first thing I do.”

  “You’d defy God Himself?” said Anthony, eyebrows ascending. “I’m impressed.”

  “‘I would persist in my indignation, even if I were wrong.’ Ivan Karamazov.”

  As the jungle thickened, an embarcadero emerged from the drizzle, beyond which lay a cantina, La Sangre de la Serpiente, a two-story mass of rain-warped wood and corrugated tin. With only three sailors under his command, Anthony had trouble docking. It was the ultimate test of Nora’s competence at the helm—ten degrees right rudder, now seven degrees left, now fifteen right—but at last the boat lay snugged against the wharf. Because the Uspanapa was a tidal river, Anthony insisted that they tie the Queen up tight, lest the rising waters lift her onto the dock. Nora was pleased with herself. Bring on the next maritime challenge, she thought. Let me brave the wrath of Triton and the hazards of Scylla. Let me bear Odysseus safely home.

  The four travelers left the embarcadero and crossed the dusty yard, home to a dozen pigs, as many turkey cocks, three goats, and two donkeys. A charcoal-colored tapir observed the intruders suspiciously, decided that they intended no harm, and buried its snout in a pile of maize husks. Chickens clucked in wire cages. High in the treetops, a troop of howler monkeys roared their contempt at the Cranium Dei.

  Presiding over La Sangre de la Serpiente was Esperanza Vargas, a statuesque mestiza who, with the addition of a bandolier across her chest, would have looked wholly at home during the Mexican Revolution. She ushered the travelers through the doorway and into the dark smoky cantina, then set four cold bottles of Cerveza Moctezuma on the bar. Nora drank some beer, steeled herself, and asked Señora Vargas the supreme question: Did she know of a local treatment facility called the Lucido Clinic?

  “Know of it?” said Esperanza. “Every day a plague family parks their donkey cart in my yard, comes inside, eats my guisado, and asks me to point them toward the temples.”

  Delight filled the faces of the Queen’s company. Unless this woman was a better actress than anyone in the Great Sumerian Circus, Nora decided, the Church of Earthly Affirmation truly existed.

  Upon learning that two stricken boys lay aboard the sternwheeler, Esperanza began offering advice. Were Captain Van Horne and his party equipped with “valuable gifts”? Then they had no cause to enter the city, where every alley concealed mercenary bandidos, most of them employed by plague families seeking “gold, gasoline, and other donations acceptable to Lucido.” Instead they must go directly to the detention center—El Agujero, “the Hole,” gateway to the temple complex—but only after allowing her to feed them “the best lunch you’ve had since El Cráneo jumped into the sky.”

  “Do you personally know of anyone getting cured up at Tamoanchan?” Nora asked Esperanza.

  “Last week my cousin got admitted—no word yet, but in Coatzacoalcos there are many who swear Lucido drove out their demonios.”

  The rain stopped. Peering through the cantina’s solitary window, El Cráneo gleamed His brightest. Esperanza went to the stove and, dipping her ladle into a scorched pot the size of a whiskey barrel, provided the pilgrims with steaming bowls of ginger-root sopa. Nora found the meal delicious, her opinion persisting even after their hostess explained that among the tasty morsels floating in the stock were the indigenous slugs called gusanos de maguey. In payment, Esperanza happily accepted a box of latex condoms from the sternwheeler’s abundant stores. For a woman of “normal appetites,” she explained, the present world’s dearth of contraceptives verged on barbarism.

  Shortly after Esperanza pocketed her compensation, Cassie disclosed that these prophylactics held personal associations. They were Shostak Supersensitives, invented by the father of her ex-fiancé, Oliver Shostak, mastermind behind the failed attempt to sink the Corpus Dei during its Arctic voyage. Cassie had never really been in love with Oliver, but she would admit that the idea of marrying into incalculable quantities of money had momentarily beguiled her.

  During dessert, a stale banana pie, Nora inquired about Gerard Korty. Of course Esperanza had heard of the mysterious sculptor; how could Nora imagine otherwise? The man enjoyed celebrity, even mythic status, in Coatzacoalcos—not for carving a brain from an asteroid (Esperanza knew of no such project) but for fashioning the idols that adorned Tamoanchan. Korty’s studio lay at least forty kilometers upriver, a fact that strengthened Nora’s resolve to postpone her mandated mission until Kevin became an acolyte.

  Not only did condoms make acceptable lunch chits, Esperanza explained, they were also good for the transport service she provided between the cantina and El Agujero, nine kilometers away. Crock O’Connor elected to stay behind and make sure the incoming tide held no surprises for the Queen. The party left at 2:00 P.M., Esperanza’s bulk bowing the driver’s seat of her donkey cart, the parents and children crammed into the load bed. Nora took poetic satisfaction in the fact that her fragmented journey via panel truck, Gypsy wagon, and steamboat had in the end placed her on the humblest vehicle imaginable. The donkey’s name was Felipe, and while his stubby inelegance made him seem as disconnected from his equine ancestry as a Chihuahua was from a timber wolf, he got the job done, delivering the petitioners to the detention center in under two hours.

  Bereft of windows, shorn of cornices, El Agujero resembled nothing so much as a pre-plague weapons factory producing some unimaginably deadly chemical. A battered urban bus, now operating as a shuttle between Coatzacoalcos and the Hole, was parked beside the front steps, its engine idling. A Brahman bull nibbled the surrounding weeds. The pilgrims climbed out of the cart, Stevie hanging from Anthony’s arms, Kevin asleep on a litter borne by Nora and Cassie. Cautiously Nora opened the main door, a riveted iron slab. The foyer was cavernous and sterile, its appointments limited to a stone statue of a jaguar-headed man plus three metal desks ruled over by male functionaries in olive-drab suits. A line of exhausted plague families arced away from each desk toward the opposite wall. It took Nora but a minute to grasp El Agujero’s protocol. Approaching the first available bureaucrat, you identified your thected loved one (name, age, nationality, birth date) and outlined his medical history, then opened your luggage to prove that you’d brought a donation.

  The wait extended past 5:00 P.M., but at last Nora and Cassie stood before a squat middle-aged man who introduced himself as Roland Jackendorf, first assistant deacon of the Church of Earthly Affirmation. Both interviews proceeded efficiently, after which Jackendorf summoned a plump official whose name badge read SIMON BORK and
told him to take Kevin, Stevie, and their parents to room 301. Saying nothing, Bork ushered them out of the foyer, through a tangle of corridors, and up three flights of stairs to a damp cell lit by bare lightbulbs and furnished with straw pallets. A thected young woman, no more than twenty, cheeks marred by stage-four pocks, lay along the far wall, her bewildered father crouching at her feet Another victim, an elderly stage-three woman with cornsilk hair, sat catatonically in the corner beside her dozing husband. To Nora the cell felt like the waiting room of some backwater airport where the planes normally crashed on takeoff. Appearances don’t matter, she told herself as they laid their children down, gently resting each boy’s head on a pallet. If Jonas Salk’s accomplishment had been judged solely by the looks of his untidy Pittsburgh lab, humankind might still be suffering polio epidemics.

  “Welcome to room 301, known also as Limbo,” said the young abulic’s father. “It’s gray and gloomy, and nothing ever happens.”

  Pivoting toward Nora, Bork disdainfully brushed her knapsack, as if it might contain manure. “What do you have for us?”

  “Diesel fuel.”

  “How much?”

  “Two gallons.”

  “Only two?”

  “Only two,” echoed Nora, beating back a wave of despair.

  The official faced Cassie, massaging her knapsack in the same scornful way. “What about you?”

  “We’re a seafaring family,” said Cassie, upending the canvas bag so that its contents poured forth: sextant, compass, binoculars, telescope.

  “Anything else?”

  “No. The sextant has gold in it.”

  “I’ll relay that fact to Mr. Richter. He might accept these trinkets. Then again, he might not.”

  “The binoculars are powerful,” said Cassie, repacking the knapsack.

  “You can see the craters on the moon,” said Anthony.

  The fat functionary wasn’t listening. He scooped up both knapsacks, bobbed his head in a manner that tripled his chin, and silently left the room.

  Although Nora prayed that Simon Bork would soon reappear with a verdict on the diesel fuel—a plea she mentally broadcast to both El Cráneo and the divine entrails—they saw no more of him that night. Their only visitor was a frail, wrinkled woman who stopped by at 10:00 P.M., pushing a food cart laden with bean burritos, a complimentary but miserable snack that she disingenuously termed dinner.

  The veterans of Limbo had nothing good to say about Lucido’s lieutenant, Chief Deacon Hubbard Richter. Wilbur Loeb, devoted husband of Margaret Loeb for fifty years, had managed to reach Coatzacoalcos with his entire private collection of eleven Cézannes, the third largest such holding in the world. Every Friday for the past two months, Richter had summoned Loeb into his office and proceeded to belittle the pilgrim’s donation. “My five-year-old nephew paints better apples,” said Richter. “These people are supposed to be bathers? They don’t even look wet.” Norman Kitchen, whose comely daughter Elaine had become thected on her seventeenth birthday, told a much more troubling story. Although Kitchen’s donation, an invaluable set of antique clocks, had impressed the chief deacon, he would admit Elaine only if her father agreed to leave Richter alone with “Sleeping Beauty” for an hour. Kitchen refused. Richter sent him back to room 301.

  Shortly after dawn, an asthmatic but chipper young functionary breezed into Limbo: Mordecai Blassingame, son of Dr. Lucido’s college roommate and private secretary to Hubbard Richter. Hearing Blassingame’s announcement—“Deacon Richter intends to accommodate the Burkhart family today”—Nora’s spirits soared, but then she remembered that Wilbur Loeb had already seen Richter eight times without gain. She grabbed her shoulder bag, took Kevin in her arms, and allowed Blassingame to guide her along a dim passageway terminating in a musty cubicle whose only amenity was a folding chair. At Blassingame’s direction she sat down and waited, Kevin sprawled across her lap. Four hours went by. She exercised Kevin’s limbs. Hunger clawed at her stomach. Another four hours elapsed. The food vendor arrived, furnishing Nora with a half-dozen flautas. She fed three to Kevin, ate the others, and, thus renewed, performed her son’s physical therapy.

  Twilight was fast approaching when Blassingame reappeared and led Nora on a twenty-minute trek past room after room jammed with plague families. At length she found herself in an unpainted plasterboard office cooled by a ceiling fan, standing before a fiftyish administrator who claimed to be Hubbard Richter. Brusquely, wordlessly, Richter placed Kevin on the couch and, bending low, gave the boy a cursory examination, looking into his eyes with an ophthalmoscope and whacking his knee with a rubber hammer.

  “It’s abulia, all right,” said the chief deacon. He was a gaunt, cadaverous man, not many degrees removed from El Cráneo. “Occasionally we see a simple case of clinical depression.” He turned his inert gaze on Nora. “Mrs. Burkhart, that diesel fuel you submitted is worthless. We tried it in three different generators.”

  A bolt of dread cut through Nora. “I siphoned it myself, right out of a school bus.”

  “You got the fragrance right. What did you do, mix witch hazel with lighter fluid?”

  “I siphoned it myself!”

  “Of course,” said Blassingame snidely.

  “I’m telling the truth!”

  While Blassingame wheezed and Nora fumed, Richter repeatedly hit his open palm with the rubber hammer.

  “There’s an alternative,” he said at last. He massaged his stubbled jaw and winked at Blassingame, who immediately vacated the office. “Here in Tamoanchan,” Richter continued, “we have a goddess, Orgasiad, who blesses us with sexual gratification.” He shot a furtive glance heavenward. “But what is sexual gratification? Its boundaries are continually shifting. Remove your clothes.”

  “What?”

  “Remove your clothes.”

  When Nora was twenty-four, a man had come up behind her in a Cambridge alley—she was walking home after seeing Casablanca at the Brattle Theater—and thrown her to the ground. She screamed insanely. The stranger fled. The whole incident lasted less than a minute, but she still thought about it at least once a month.

  “You…fetch,” Nora muttered under her breath.

  “What did you call me?”

  Quivering, she pondered her options. They numbered two. She could assault the man, though that would surely ruin Kevin’s chances of admission. Or she could close her eyes, clench her teeth, and detach, thereby turning a rape into mere coercive sex.

  “Strip, Mrs. Burkhart.”

  Who was she kidding? There were no qualified rapes, any more than there were qualified thermonuclear explosions.

  She stripped, her molars grinding together as she mentally chewed Richter’s eyeballs to the consistency of fondue. The ceiling fan droned. Kevin snored. Richter hummed. The intermediate steps escaped her, each button, clasp, catch, and zipper erased from recollection, but somehow she reached the humiliating state her tormentor demanded.

  “The Cranium Dei does terrible things to a man.” Richter removed his shirt, unbuckled his belt, dropped his pants. “Dr. Lucido and I haven’t quite solved the problem.” His disenfranchised organ hung uselessly between his legs. “Orgasiad and I have a special relationship. Her priestesses understand my needs. They perform miracles with their mouths.”

  Nora didn’t know how the inspiration arrived, but suddenly she was fishing through her shoulder bag in search of her knee medicine.

  “Reliable miracles?” she asked.

  “Quite reliable.”

  “But not totally reliable.” She slammed the peanut butter jar onto Richter’s desk and unscrewed the lid. “It’s called glory grease, distilled from God’s tissues during the Arctic tow.” The room filled with the odor of Brussels sprouts boiled in molasses. “We must understand each other from the outset If this is the elixir you seek, you may keep the whole jar, provided you leave me alone and make Kevin an acolyte.”

  “It can help me?”

  “I think so.”

  “Might
it work better than the priestesses?”

  “If it does, will you admit Kevin?”

  “All right,” said Richter evenly.

  She pressed three fingers together, inserted them in the jar, and extracted a scoop of glory. “Go ahead. Don’t be afraid.” She extended her sticky fingers, transferring the glob to Richter’s open palm. “Rub it on.”

  “How do I know to trust you?”

  “Plague families don’t play games.”

  The grease proved efficacious. A mere thirty seconds after he’d applied the stuff, Richter’s hapless organ flooded, angling into space like a flagpole bolted to a door frame.

  “Now send Kevin to the temples,” said Nora, hitching up her bra. She pulled on her cotton jersey, then climbed into her underpants and jeans. “You promised.”

  For a full minute Richter simply stood there, worshiping his erection. The thing persisted even after he began to dress, so that the restoration of his pants suggested a man trying to get a kayak into a sedan.

  “Do you have any more?”

  “An adequate cache,” she said, telling Richter what he wanted to hear.

  “Where are you staying?”

  “On a steamboat docked beside La Sangre de la Serpiente.”

  “A first-rate donation, no doubt about it”—he buttoned his shirt—“but I’ll need Dr. Lucido’s approval.”

  “Then get it.”

  “In due time.”

  “Get it now.”

  Pocketing the glory grease, Richter summoned Blassingame and instructed him to take Mrs. Burkhart and her son down to room zero.

  Room zero, an ominous name—and appropriate, Nora discovered. The place was a musty dirt-floor cellar across which black scorpions and brownish-red cockroaches roamed at will. A wax candle burned atop an upended oil drum. Nora laid Kevin on the straw pallet, knelt beside him, and exercised his limbs, fully prepared to frighten away the vermin with the candle flame or crush them with her hiking boots, whichever defense proved more effective.