Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

He moves along a ledge of the extinct, peers at the camel-like jaw of the Macrauchenia Patachonica : “a member,” says the card, “of the peculiar South American ungulate orders. This genus was camel-like but others were horse-like. Thus the litopterns show parallelism with the more familiar true camels and horses.” The keyboard of teeth float in the petrified gum like tulip bulbs. And the lower jaw of a ground sloth, relative of the Megatherium, the teeth driven like stakes deep into the bone, all shapes, one a figure eight worn down to the ground, another like a tree stump, a third like a pipe, a fourth with a crown the texture of target cork. The teeth are in terrible disrepair. (They died this way, Alexander thinks, biting their pain.) A root thicker than the wire in a coat hanger rises a full inch above the awful terraces of decay which surround it. There are teeth long and thick and curved as tusks — these were inside a mouth, Main thinks — huge as jai alai bats.

As always, Alexander ignores the skeletons, the carefully wrought xylophonic carcasses, immense scaffoldings of spine, he supposes, from a hundred animals, so that what he sees is some ancient committee of beast he finds it difficult to believe in (though he is fascinated by the individual parts: the shield-like pelvis, the separate vertebrae, long as the hilts of swords, a hinged jaw like the underedge of a key). Comically a megathere squats upright pawing a prop tree, its odd squat like some plantigrade, prehistoric crap. No. It is the teeth. The tiny spines in the skull of a young jaguar, curiously white, sharp as toenail. Skin still adheres to the palate, the concentric tracery distinct and fine as what he touches with his tongue at the roof of his own mouth. It is teeth that he comes back again and again to see, as if these were the distillate of the animal’s soul, the cutting, biting edge of its passion and life.

He is thinking in geological time now, in thousands of millions of years — thinking Pre-Cambrian, Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, saddened at the sixty-million-year-old threshold of his own immediate past, Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Quaternary. From seaweeds, younger only than the earth’s crust, through invertebrate animals, fishes, land plants, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, birds and men. He is weeping.

The guard approaches him. “Are you all right, sir?”

“What? Oh. Yeah,” the Phoenician says, “I’m a sentimental old fool.” He starts past the guard, his friend.

“I was wondering something,” the guard says.

“What’s that?”

“Well, it’s just that you spend so much time here.”

“Yeah, well,” he tells the keeper, “I’ll tell you why that is. I’m a dentist.”

He was late for lunch. (As so often on museum days, his sense of time — he is an early riser, beats others to appointments, brisk as a candidate when it is time for the next, goes late to bed, paper work in the toilet, on the bus home, carrying no brief case but all pockets stuffed with correspondence, pens, notepaper, stamps ready in his wallet — turned tragic, pulling long faces, the past slowing his blood, thickening it, stopping his watch.) He did not even have time to go back to the office.

The bus stop he’d chosen, looking back over his shoulder as he walked from one the two blocks to the next, was outside a drugstore. A woman waited with a shopping bag.

“Missus,” Alexander said, “have you been waiting long?”

“About ten minutes.”

“Just miss a bus?”

“It was pulling away when I came out of Kroger’s.”

If he hurried he would have just enough time to call Crainpool.

“Crainpool?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s up?”

“It’s been very quiet.”

“No messages?”

“The man who was in earlier stopped by.”

“What? The mobster?”

“He said Mr. Morgan gave him the slip. He holds you responsible.”

“Does he, now? Has there been an afternoon mail?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well?”

“There was nothing from Chile, nothing from Iran.” Crainpool chuckled.

“East Germany?”

“No word from East Germany.”

The Phoenician cracks down the receiver so hard that the drugstore clerk looks up at him. Loose, he thinks, fugitives at large — the phrase, as always, chilling, raising goosebumps. He thinks of swamps, caves, passes in mountains. Loose. At large. He thinks of settlements so inland in terrains so forbidding that the inhabitants have no language. The chatter of apes, perhaps, the signals of birds. As always, the idea of such remoteness abstracts his face, neutralizes his features, a sort of paralysis of the attention. People watching him wish to help.

“Is there something you wanted, sir?” the clerk asks. At large, loose.

“Hmn?”

“Is there anything I can get you?” Loose.

“What have you got that’s binding?” He sees his bus outside and rushes to board it.

They are in Hilgemann’s Restaurant at the girl’s request. At his they have chosen to remain indoors rather than to dine outside in the beer garden. Though it’s warm enough, the long bare vines snaking among the trellis make him nervous. He could never have been a farmer; he is a bailbondsman because he can exercise some control over his crops of criminals, his staggered harvests so nearly continuous that he feels he does not deal in time at all. (His calendars are only a sort of map, like the precinct maps in police stations.) So they are inside, in an Ohio approximation of Bavaria, leashed to reality by the sealed blue hemispheres of Diners Club, American Express’s bland centurion and Master Charge’s interlocking gold and orange circles decaled on the window like bright postage. He sees airy clubs, spades and hearts between the spindles of the heavy, low-backed captain’s chairs, notices the sweet intrusion of a stuffed deer’s head — no teeth there — and the elaborate plaster-of-Paris mugs that hang from their handles above the bar and that gravity arranges in identical angles, a fringe of falling men, with here and there a lidded pewter beer mug like a tiny hookah or an early, complicated steam engine. Once Herr Hilgemann offered to present the Phoenician with his own, and to have his name inscribed on it. “I’m not a joiner,” he told him. He sees without appetite the heavy portions of thick, stringy meats — flank and chuck and pot roasts, and sanded schnitzels, worms of anchovy curled on them like springs. Thick gravies wound the table linen. There are constructs of pastry, geometric lattices of chocolate, baked bridges of caramel, fretworks of crust, flake, cherries in cross section like the intimate slivers of biopsy. Among these moist ruins Main chews the sandwich he cannot taste; he does not want the fearful cutlery in his mouth, those heavy tines.

He is amazed at the girl’s appetite. The lunch, as Miss Krementz might have guessed, is unnecessary; this could have been handled in the office, or on the phone. He might have asked her, as he had asked others, to write a composition for him: “Why I Think——Will Not Jump Bail.”

He doesn’t even feel like explaining it to her. He feels like taking a nap, like dreaming of fugitives, for though they are his nightmares, at least in his dreams he is with them, learning their plans, seeing them in their new settings and fresh disguises.

“All right,” he says, and puts down his sandwich. By the time he is ready to speak he has already decided against her boyfriend. “Arson’s one of the highest bonds there is. It’s a very high bond. You set fire to a building—”

“But he didn’t. ”

Alexander shrugs. “You set fire to a building you bring the insurance companies into it. They’re the ones who determine the prices; not me. I admit it isn’t fair. Every sort of minority pressure group exists in this country, but who gives a second thought to the arsonist? Fire Power! I’m just thinking out loud.”