CHAPTER ELEVEN

"...hieroglyphs?"

D's question hung on the breeze. The breeze caressed the exterior of the Daimler with a fine, warm stroke...its susurration, as so much else, was lost on the ears of the assembled company. Nor did they hear the song-thrush warbling amid the conifers. The wash of the waves upon the beach at Lions Bay was likewise out of their auditory field. But not their entire perceptual field. The dark blue, slight rollers formed a pretty sight indeed on the left side of their route as they rolled smoothly along in the direction of Squamish. D shuddered. Squamish! What rough beast might that be? He had never set foot in Squamish. But earlier in life, he had set foot in Bralorne, and Cache Creek, and North Battleford, and old Battleford, the old town across the narrow bridge, on the south bank of the North Saskatchewan River, and White Bear, Sask., on the north bank of the South Saskatchewan River, where in the White Bear Hotel one squatted to take a dump and heard the turds plummet a full three stories from the second floor into the basement... What a day that had been! Hornet had stolen an apple pie from a farmhouse that stood too close to the highway for the safety of its inhabitants. He had shoved it up under his shirt and of course it had leaked sticky stuff all over the front of his pants. What mirthful remarks that had occasioned among his companions, drunk as they were and fit to be horsewhipped, young scalawags and rascals all, scum of the earth and proud of it... No, D didn't want to go back to the boonies. Life for him had begun in a city, and a big one at that; and if he had declared London off limits for his own convoluted "reasons" (dark and deep, dark and deep, run the thick waters where Psyche must weep), then Vancouver would have to do. Personally speaking, as he had confided in Liam Chutney only the other night, he wouldn't mind never setting foot outside of Vancouver again. Oh, he might like to see San Francisco... private thoughts echoed in his ears in this way. Probably a phenomenon caused by the stress he must be under, kidnapped by crooks and I don't know what-all. He decided to try some more. He thought about the boonies, the years he had lavished upon them, gratifying his own need to go as far as the system of transportation reaches, staggering through the blizzard to Edna's shack with a mickey of Seagrams under his dumb Brit dufflecoat flapping open because his fingers were too cold to stick the pieces of wood into the rope loops that fastened it... He recalled strolling through Bralorne with Jimmy Parks, primo comedian of the UBC Players' Club, and how Jimmy had indicated a rope looped like a noose on the side of a barn, and had fingered at his own neck nervously as he expressed a fervent hope that the locals would find this evening's performance of "Charley's Aunt" entertaining...

D began unconsciously to finger his own collar. "Seattle...San Francisco." Funny, that should have been "Battleford...Bralorne." But no, there it was again, "Seattle...San Francisco." Was someone in the car actually saying those names? They weren't emerging full-blown from his own psychic depths? Someone in the car was saying those names. D was disappointed. But manfully he struggled to recoup the context.

He was prevented from remembering what else might have been said to him by his captors because one of them now demanded of him, "Take it or leave it, jerk. You deef or sumthin?"

"I beg your pardon," D said to his interrogator, the beefy man with a wart on his cheek. "Were you replying to my question concerning hieroglyphs?"

D regarded the wart more closely. It was a dilly! It had five distinct lumps, and was brick-red: from a flea's point of view, crouched there amid the stubble, it must have looked like one of those rock formations you see in westerns. The kind of bastion with a mesa up top that has been, god knows how, brought thence, wild stallions ranging its gullies, and bad hombres stalking them. And the heroine in the picture somehow, dimpling demurely in her dirndl... Beef-o was by now unmistakably snarling in his ear (er, ears): "You're a goddam idjit if you don't take it!"

"Take what?" D was ingenuous.

"Fuck you," said Beef-o , who thought D was being disingenuous. (This was always happening to D. People thought him aloof and ironic and condescending while he was actually susceptible, gullible and lost. Well, as Blake said, or leastways wrote, "Go love without the help of anything on earth.") "It's no use trying to up the ante. That's our final offer and that's flat. "

"Right," inserted another. "That's flat our final offer."

"Yeah," put in a third. "Work for the CIA in Seattle or San Francisco and retire a millionaire in thirty years."

"Or," resumed Beef-o, "disappear somewheres out there." He indicated with a vague flourish a million square miles of British Columbian wilderness. "Out there in Brutish Columbia."

The Hobbesean echo startled D. His interrogators had hidden depths?

"Haw haw haw," put in the driver ("They called him Al"). "Nasty, brutish, and endless. "

"Really, 'Al'," sneered another, putting quotes around that name with his voice. "Thanks loads for regaling us with the sum total of your recollections from Philosophy 100. Steve - uh, 'Al', spent a semester at Berkeley," he confided to D. "Next he'll tell us about how trapped he felt in the Berkeley human loch. It's his favorite pun."

"It's his only pun," said Beef-o.

"It may be my only intellectual pun," said Steve-Al. "But I know other puns." He turned to look at D, causing the Daimler to cross the midline of the coast highway and sending a doctor in his Volvo careening into Howe Sound. Or so D perceived. "Knight, back when chivalry was in flower, goes forth on quest. Big storm comes on. Here's a castle. 'Let me in for the night.' Done. But the storm doesn't lift, and the knight gets antsy. He's had dinner, chicken giblets and boar's brains, he's - "

"He's had the baron's daughter - " (thus Beef-o)

" - He's had the baron's daughter, okay, so now he goes to the baron and he says, 'Baron, I must resume my quest for the Holy Grill'."

"Grail."

"Gray-all, Shmay-all, so he says to his host, 'Hey, I gotta get on with it, my homeland is laid waste by a plague and a murrain lieth upon my cattle, so storm or no storm, thanks for the meal, the dry suit of armor, now I gotta get going. So just give me a fresh horse like nobles have to for one another and I'll be on my way. ' And his host tells him, 'Horse? I haven't any horses.'

"'Dont have any horses? What the fuck kind of noble host are you?' says the knight."

"Wait a minute, wait a minute, which knight? Is this the first knight or the second knight?" Beef-o's impatience was palpable.

"It must be the foist knight, because I'm feelin' noivus,"Al-Steve put in.

"I know what you mean," D intruded pleasantly, "I've been a Person of the Theatre myself - Ooff!"

Beef-o removed his elbow. "Pray continue," he said to his colleague sarcastically.

"Your colleague's name is Sarcastically?" D queried in mock surprise. "Ooff."

"Hey, I like the way dis guy never quits," said someone. "He's our kinda material."

"Yeah, well, I'm tellin' a joke," said the one who was. "So the second knight, the baron, says to the first knight, the knight who's just said 'What the fuck kind of noble host are you' - "

" - For Krrzzssake, look out where you're going!" Beef-o quoted Robert Creeley without knowing it, possibly, thought D. He quoted from "I Know A Man" [For Love, Scribners, 1962, but available earlier in which one of the poet's six or seven previous slim volumes D couldn't just at this moment recall: possibly in A Form of Women? If you know, please write us]. [I would tell you, but I'm proof-reading this in Denmark. G]. He quoted it (not Robert Creeley, but Beef-o) at Al-Steve, their driver, who had been headed more-or-less straight at a Greyhound, which swung wide as it rounded one of the many curves on the Squamish Highway. Al-Steve yanked on the wheel and the Daimler, white walls squealing, scraped a fiftieth of a metre of paint off the mighty silver bullet.

"Hey, kid," someone said to D, "You'll be able to get back to town easy. Just ride the Dawg."

"That was likely the last one today. If he don't give us the answer we want, he'll have the spend the night there - in Squamish."

D's mind reacted feverishly. What should he do? What should he do?? He knew the punchline of the joke - should he say so or keep quiet???

Also, he needed to go to the bathroom. Should he mention this?

Also, it had been a while since the topic "Hieroglyphs" had been broached. Would it be rude to re-introduce it?

Also, what should he do about their offer? It was the kind one could hardly refuse. It was thirty years in the States, or a night in Squamish... A shot rang in and D realized he had left it too late. Procrastination had always been his strong point, only to be countered by blind impulse; but now it was too late for blind impulse. He had been shot.

Once M had watched the Daimler with a D in it turn a corner and vanish from his sight, he realized he needed to do some fast thinking. He sat down on a wooden bench, produced his yard of apfelstrudel, and absent-mindedly tried to light it up. Who had kidnapped D? Where were they taking him? And was there anything on TV that night that he might want to see badly enough to go visit his parents?

Then he remembered Serena Rapt.

Serena was a prodigy who was flunking tenth grade. So the Rapts had looked around for a tutor. Cosmic justice had brought M within their purview. M was bidden to their mansion in Shaughnessy for a bout of mutual inspection. SR turned out to be model-tall, with hot blue eyes and white lipstick.

"It must take forever, sliding one's hand slowly up her leg, even to reach her knee," M said to D.

D knew deferral was important to M, who had eight times attempted Russian 100.

"Felicitations," he replied.

Now M recalled he was invited to dine chez Rapt this very day. Their cuisine was rumored to be haut. Putting aside all thoughts of D, he hurried home to shower and trim his beard. He would wear the stovepipe pants purchased at Frederick and Nelson's together with a black turtleneck. Serena had let her fingers linger in his when they had shaken hands. A scent of fresh apples had wafted from her neck. And her hair - her hair had smelled of grilled sea bass au gratin. M was going to enjoy brushing up her Latin.

A turned over in the narrow cot and went on waiting for G to come back. It often took him up to five minutes to find the newspaper in the heavily wooded yard (Beautiful British Columbia, fertile as all get-out and tended by Brits, Dutch, Germans), especially on a Sunday after a heavily woolly Saturday night. But today, he was being even longer than usual. And with G, usual was already impressively long. Smiling to herself like a model who had one hand on a unicorn, A stretched languorously, not easily spelled before breakfast. This was A the young beauty, Northern European Ice-Goddess, eyes green as the ten thousand and one lakes of Finland, graceful in gait as a white swan that swims upon one; meanwhile A the one who watches, who is ageless and misses not a figure etched or engraved in an eternal and continuous ground which is a field of force, this A with a slight smile of pity observed this self who knew too little and envied her also. Also only slightly: for narrative is a passion that allows little scope for other feelings. Should she leap out of bed and go look see if G had dropped dead of the fear of death? Or should she go back to sleep?

She took the leap. But she didn't go outside. She began to tidy the room. If only you could tidy up people the way you could tidy up a room! But people were too narrow or too big. And some wore giant warts shaped like mesas with stampeding mustangs... hmm, where had that figure come from? Rooms stayed discrete, this side earthquake, hurricane or war, whereas people overlapped, identity shadowing identity, thoughts streaming through the universe looking for a warm receiver, a plugged-in bunch of tubes and valves and copper wire... For herself, she liked to keep her gear in order. But she could know beyond that habit, however laudable. This great white flash which G and his friends had witnessed...this flash without sound or wave...told a truth of some kind, whatever its empirical existence. Had she paid sufficient attention when G had told her of it? Was this G's only pair of shorts? Suddenly tender towards the big lug, she moved towards the door, and the sunlit garden beyond. She wanted to find her man, and hold him close... She gazed up and down the blank street. Premonitions of trouble, grave trouble, stirred in her soul.

It was not until he was almost upon her that she noticed the short slight man with a countenance of Oriental cast. He smiled and bowed and handed her a slip of paper about the size and shape of a fortune cookie fortune.

A read it aloud. "Remember, the Chinese sign for trouble is the same as the sign for opportunity." The last word was misspelled.

Right. Since G was out of sight, and there was nothing to be done about it, she would not become depressed or anxious; she would practice Negative Capability. She would use this opportunity to phone her old friend Rhonda Toogood. She hadn't yet told Rhonda about George Oliver Delsing (GOD to his friends). G-Absent would become G-Present as she discussed him with her old helpmeet Rhonda. She returned to the basement suite and reached for the phone.

Arthur Maguey and Dorcus Davenport: ah, let us envy them their lot.
Once they had stopped writhing on his cot, Art said with a grin, as he wiped off his chin, "Let's do it again!"

"I've been shot!"

This cry was cried in five different accents, timbres, pitches.

Beef-o clutched at his gut. Another thug grabbed at his own shoulder. A third clapped a hand to his head, as if to snuff a pesky skeeter. Al-Steve had to settle for a wrist, since he was using one hand to wrestle the car out of the skid brought about by the blowout.

D was thoroughly convinced that the bullet had entered his ribcage. He could sense its presence, just above his liver. Then he remembered the gallon of Regal Sherry he had downed at the Roundtowner last night.

They piled out once the driver had steered the vehicle into a pullout zone, and watched him jack it up.

"'I sit by the side of the road, watching the driver change the wheel,'" D said. "'There is nowhere I need to be. Why do I watch him with such impatience?'"

"He knows Brecht," chortled Beef-o. "Well enough to misquote him. Say, kid," he went on, "You could be a double agent. Talk Brecht to the commie rats and sell the goods back to us. Whaddya say? We'll pay your tuition and board and room...Berkeley: all those chicks! All that dope! And the Summer of Love is coming!!"

"Summer of Love?" D said. "What might that be?"

"Just a little something we're cookin' up by way of a distraction. It's gonna involve an awful lot of humping."

D thought hard, if not long. Sometimes a chep had to do the decent thing.

"OK," said D, "Where do I sign?"

" - But I have a big dog,' Al-Steve was saying, sitting on the ground and apparently talking to a spare tire. "'Great! Lend me a big dog then!" 'Oh, I'm sorry, I couldn't, I couldn't send a knight out on a dog like this,' said the Baron, indicating a stupid looking mutt that had wandered into the banquetting hall."

"So seems to me the life of a man," Beef-o opined into the dull silence (save for Nature's sweeter sounds) that now ensued: "He trots in at one door covered in muck, dries off as he shuffles past the fire, sneaks a bone fallen from the great table, then vanishes into the night out the far door, pursued by execrations."

He turned to D. "Therefore it seems to me to be right and fitting that we should believe in something - something that will deliver three square a day and a roof overhead and kindling in the hearth. But you don't actually sign anything. We don't need you to. And as for us, well, you'll just have to trust us, won't you? "