Ishmael Reed - The Free-Lance Pallbearers

No sooner had he said that when a giant tentacle attacked the ship, tilting it to an angle. An ever-ready gun, one of four massive ones on the ship, swung into action and blasted the tentacle to bits. Chunks of quivering blob rained down on some of the passengers. The two men plucked some of the trembling membrane-like substance from their clothes where it had fastened itself, and calmly walked back into the stateroom.

Heavy kats, I thought. The battleship docked at a wharf that stood at the bottom of the great stone wall which surrounded the entire island. The bottom of the wall seemed to disappear into the very depths of the insidious Black Bay. Holding a flashlight, the two men, Waldo and Matthew, led the guests down the ramp.

Suddenly Matthew trained his light on a tentacle lying across the wharf like a lazy boa constrictor with suction holes for scales. Matthew removed a bottle from his pocket and poured its contents on the tentacle. A great groan was heard from the bottom and the passengers held each other to avoid falling from the rocking wharf. The tentacle slunk back into the dreadful waters.

Some steps led from the wharf to the top of the wall where a path began and wound to the summit of the mountain where the motel stood. At the top of the steps a woman waited. She seemed to be dressed in the traditional habit of a nun. I was the last passenger to walk down the ramp and onto the wharf. To the right of me the pounding and crashing of the ugly effervescence of a sickly yellow color could be heard pouring into the bay from the stony mouth of the nineteenth President of the United States.

At the top of the steps the woman greeted us, that is, greeted all of us save Waldo and Matthew, who strode past her with their noses upturned.

“Glad to make your acquaintanceship, I’m sure,” she said to the rest of us in authentic Flatbush. “My name is Lenore and I’m the official hostess and cook up here at SAM’s. If you’ll just walk up this path …,” she said, pointing to a cobblestoned path that disappeared around the bend where a gnarled tree stood, its limbs lit up with yellow eyes.

She stood to the side as the guests filed past her on the path. I was the last to walk by the place where she stood. “Did you say your name was Lenore?” I asked.

“That’s right,” she said. “The same.”

“Do you know an old man named Alfred who spends his time at the Seventeen Nation Disarmament Conference Bar cutting out articles from the old Harper’s Brothers Weekly? ”

“Yes, Alfred is my ex-old man,” she said. “You see those creeps walking ahead of everybody else, looking so proper and all? They ruined it.”

“Ruined what?” I asked.

“They ruined my romance with Alfred. Prying and sticking their noses into our business. They were all on the rowing team together, Harvard, eighty-nine, and used to carouse about ‘wenching,’ as they called it, in some of the bars in the dilapidated section of BAWSTON.

“You should have seen Alfred with his features of classical cut, his brow so trim-and his mouth so precise. See I was working behind the BAWR and he’d flirt with me; calling me stuff like the second Helen of Troy and names of dames that guys use to fight those dragons over. Well, Matthew and Waldo, those unalterable bores, had to put their two cents in. Those flat moralistic cough drops. They didn’t approve of me and they kicked him off the rowing team and stopped inviting him to the cockfights. When we got hitched the Anglican Church refused to perform the wedding. It was very lonely playing whist every night and when he bumped into his friends on the street — those that would talk to him — spoke in French. Well, Alfred and I became bored with each other after a while but I didn’t want to leave him because he was so helpless. Sometimes he would go out into the streets with nothing but a boiled vest and tall hat and carrying a pocket watch that stopped on August 6, 1945. I didn’t mind the perms he used to read me but I was young and wanted to do a little boo-ga-loo so I asked him to buy me some harpsichord lessons. On the pretense of taking the harpsichord lessons, I went down into the Village and met the black man named Jr. Bug and we did the boo-ga-loo for days. Finally Waldo and Matthew who were in a café on Greenwich Avenue doing strange recipes spotted me even though I was wearing shades.

“They told Alfred and he took me to court. We appeared before Judge Whimplewopper, a little fellow so high who combs his hair in public with a two-foot-long comb.”

“Yes, I’ve had dealings with him,” I said, interrupting her.

“Well, anyway, the Civil Liberties Committee warned him that the decision would make American justice a laughingstock around the world but he went ahead and did it.”

“Did what?” I asked impatiently.

“He admitted all the precedents from the Salem witch trials where these teeny boppers were burned at the stake for going out into the woods to meet black men. I was due to be burned at the stake too.

“The villagers were led by J. Lapp Swine, jazz critic from the Deformed Demokrat, who romped about rousing the mob with a small torchlight between his toes. Being a double-jointed freak, he was capable of all kinds of odd contortions.

“Suddenly a man in a black limousine, with the symbol of the Great Commode on its license plates, pulled up. It was Judge Whimplewopper. He intervened and said, ‘Instead of burning this tomato at the stake, we’re going to send her up to SAM’s place in exile, where she will be condemned to deliver up cruel and strange recipes for the Chief.’”

“What recipes?” I asked.

“That’s classified,” she replied. “The funny thing is,” she said as we rounded the last bend before the top of the mountain, “one night I found those Catholic rejects Matthew and Waldo up here doing the same thing I’m doing, with all their might.”

“Cooking strange recipes?” I asked.

“You might put it that way,” she smiled.

What stood before us at the summit of the mountain was one magnificent sight. The Harry Sam Motel rose so high that it pushed the clouds aside. The helicopters whirred above, dipping in and out. They were marked with the symbol of the Great Commode. It was a giant Victorian house with gables and bay windows. It stood there harsh and forbidding in the moonlight.

Inside the ballroom the guests continued their stomp. On the walls were giant black hoopla hoops. Some women had engaged me in a conversation about BECOMINGS. Standing there with a cocktail in my hand, I had just gotten to the part “trees lifting their leafy arms to pray” when someone tapped me on the shoulder.

It was the tiny man in the white smock. “Are you Bukka Doopeyduk?” he asked in a strident voice.

“The same,” I said, glancing at the women who were giving me streaks of white teeth.

“Follow me,” the little man said, “the boss wants to see you.” The women began to gabble anxiously as the man glided from the room as if on wheels.

“Just a minute, sir. I have to pick up my attaché case chock full of notes.”

The man twirled about and flicking some ashes from the big cigar said, “Okay, but quit stallin’. I ain’t got all day. Whaddaya think this is, Fredrichsbach or some joint?”

We were joined in the hall by two Screws in those long black capes. They escorted me into a splendid library where the two Screws sat on a sofa and the little man beckoned me to sit at a great garish maple table in the center of the room.

“Would you like some likker?”

“Don’t mind if I have a little taste of brandy,” I said, relaxing in a black leather club chair with my fingers inside my suspenders.