Ishmael Reed: The Free-Lance Pallbearers

The two men on the side of the truck were not amused. “You gone have to do better than that, my man,” said one.

I left Elijah in the cab of the truck biting his nails and surrounded by the men who were rolling up their sleeves — as Elijah tried to come up with something better than that.

“UP TO SAM’S,” I shouted to the crowd, who now believed my discovery of sheer evil. We ran through the vapidness of SAM and to the Emperor Franz Joseph Park, climbing through the ol men’s possessions — the colostomy bags, snuff boxes, fake frills and moles. “FOLLOW ME!” I yelled to the crowd that lined the bank. “INTO THE DRINK.”

“But those Latin roots,” someone said, “those terrible bloodletting plants.”

I whispered into the ear of the man standing next to me and told him about the bottle’s secret. Pouring the remainder of the bottle into the bay I dove in and started plowing toward the island. Hundreds of splashes registered behind me.

After the seven-mile swim we arrived at the wharf on the island. People were assisted from the water until everyone stood along the platform.

“Now we’ll have to be very quiet,” I advised. “The place is heavily guarded.”

We walked up the steps and reached the top of the wall. I expected stiff resistance, but to my surprise the pathway leading to the motel was deserted. We moved through the bush until we reached the top of the mountain. A handful of Swiss guards poured out to challenge us. They had been driven from Italy at the height of the Bingo crisis and were given freedom-fighter status in HARRY SAM. After their unemployment checks ran out they were hired as the household guard, the Chief Nazarene Bishop, the theoretician of the party, and the Chief of Screws, having been sent all over the world to put down the Yam insurgencies.

We tore the Swiss guards to pieces, whipping out some of those trapezoidic switchblades (blades dat upon opening spring every which way), and put them on the kats.

No one remained to guard the place but the washroom attendants in the bottoms. We reached the door of the grand John and slowly opened it. HARRY SAM sat in a wheelchair with his back turned to us. He was watching television.

On the screen: the vicar of the Screws, Mr. Nancy Spellman (called on the sly “tail-gunner Nancy” by some Screw pilots) was having his swanky ermine robe and golden girdle rudely removed by some mean-looking Puerto Rican nationalists. Their children were eating Chuchifritos and rolling Nancy’s little fat butterball of a severed head around the room. In some unidentified port thousands of plumbers were drowning in oil fires while their battleships capsized in the background. In a Peruvian market place natives shoved yams and copper wire down the throat of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until his jaws split open (incendiary yams).

Someplace else five hundred big black Gurkhas were gang banging Lenore who rolled her thighs, popped her fingers and enjoyed every minute of it. She smacked her lips and squirmed like an eel, punctuating these ecstatic cries with the comment, “WOW-EE. This sure doesn’t taste like tomato juice.”

Da Chief of da Screws was giving his farewell lecture on a scaffold in Leopoldville. He was trying to explain that if they’d release him, he’d have his men learn Puerto Rican and Yoruba — but before he could start loll-gaggin’ and handing out white papers the trap door opened, two seconds before his scheduled death, and the kat kinda dropped and with a crraaacccckkkk, his neck snapped.

On another channel Mile. Matzabald had been caught trying to make it down the Amazon River with a rowboat full of profits reaped from her Anti-Freeze Creplach Shows. The real headhunters caught up with her and waving a copy of the Wall Street Journal shouted, “Come back here wit dat anti-freeze. Dat ain’t yo anti-freeze. Dat’s our anti-freeze. We sick and tired of you ‘mericans comin’ down here carrying off our anti-freeze.” They then gave her their version of the now famous Nuremberg War Trials which they called an “Anaconda Flop” (they were still savages, you see) — which simply means that the kat was allowed to row through the Amazon and flop about with them anacondas and after flopping if she still felt like bopping she could join their fires and listen to all the Prestige and Bluenote albums that the headhunters had snatched from all of the deadhead missionaries from NOW-HERE. They wanted to see if she was really that hip.

So you see, things were very very shaky everywhere the eye could scan.

SAM’s assistants were running around with hot-water bottles, ice packs and thermometers as they aided the ailing leader. I crept up behind him and put my hands in front of his eyes. He in turn put his fat hand on my wrist. “Is that you Miss Matzabald, come to take my mind off this crisis by giving me some of them good mechanical drawers?”

He started, jerked forward, and sprung to his feet. “Hey! whad’s da big idear? You …” He continued to pant. “How did you get out of that Black Bay?”

But before I could explain, the gnomes having got wind of their leader’s difficulty, rushed out and attacked the crowds. But they were no match for my greasy stompers who mashed them as if they were so many pesky little bugs. Rapunzel was in the corner holding off some wild-eyed bruisers.

“Spare that man,” I yelled. “We owe him a lot.”

“Look, buster,” Rapunzel said. “You don’t owe me no favors.”

“Come down off your perch, Rapunzel,” I insisted. “I know what you did for us and we’re eternally grateful.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, giving one man a quick-as-a-flash karate chop.

But another man moved in quickly and subdued the gnome. The little creature fought back furiously, even digging his nails into the man’s back.

“Hey, wait a minute! Where is SAM?”

While we were fat-mouthing about Rapunzel’s fate, SAM had slipped inside his John. I opened the door of carved griffins and gargoyles. There was the Great Commode! But I had no time to admire it. On the floor encircling the bowl were SAM’s discarded shirt, pants and shoes. Footprints tracked the tile near the bowl. Well, at least one print. The other was the mark of a hoof covered with blotches of fresh dung. Had he disappeared into thin air?

I walked over to the bowl. There were heavy stains on its sides as if some object had squeezed through with much effort.

“I know where he is,” I announced to the crowd, some of whom had dispersed throughout the motel and were helping themselves to SAM’s legacy.

I ran up the stairs and out onto the path. Down toward the statues of the Presidents I charged, trampling twigs and cutting through the thicket. Some fingers were creeping over the rim of one of the mouths as an uneven flow of puslike substance roared into the Black Bay.

Then a gas mask peered out as SAM, coming out of RBH’s trap on his back, chinned himself headfirst on the lips. I crawled out onto RBH’s nose. It was a long drop to the bay so I moved with caution. When I reached the edge where the fingers gripped the lips holding on for dear life — while I clung to the cracked nostrils of the President — I kind of lost my cool and stomped up a storm on my man’s fingers.

“NO! NO! LET’S GOAT-SHE-ATE THIS THING.”

But lightning struck his mask as the smashed fingers slowly slipped from the rim of the lips. The gas mask tore away as SAM fell back into the waters sending a geyser of spray many miles high while ripples fanned out across the waters sending tides to the banks of the Emperor Franz Joseph Park. For one brief second as the gas mask fell away from his face I caught a glimpse of it.

NOW I WAS DA ONE. NOW NOT ONLY WOULD I BE THE NAZARENE BISHOP WHICH WAS AFTER ALL PEANUTS, BUT I WAS GOING TO RUN THE WHOLE KIT AND KABOODLE. ME DICTATOR OF BUKKA DOOPEYDUK. NOW DEY WOULD HAVE TO PUT DEM JOOLED ANTLERS ON MY HEAD AND NOW I WOULD BE DA ONE SURROUNDED WITH DEM TENDENTS WHO WOULD WAIT ON ME HAND AND FOOT AND EVERYONE DIDN’T LIKE IT WOULD BE SLUGGED. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA, DA GOLDEN BEDPAN WAS MINE NOW AND I WOULD BE DA ONE GIVE OUT DA BINGO SCORES, HAR HAR HAR.