Stanley Elkin - The Living End

Reassured by his wife that he had taken the right course with Ladlehaus, Quiz now regularly ate his lunch near Ladlehaus’s grave, hoping the organic scents of honey and fiber, of phallic vegetable and subtropical fruit, of queer nuts heavily milligramed with potent doses of Recommended Daily Allowance, fetid to his own meat-and- potatoes temperament, might prove actually emetic to the dead man’s. For the caretaker, who was neither drawn to nor repudiated the living, hated Ladlehaus and took an active dislike to this decomposing horror beneath the grassy knoll at the bleachers’ bottom. He acknowledged the unreason of his aversion.

“Maybe,” he told Mrs. Quiz, “it goes deeper than his trying out his ghost tricks on me. I’d treat him the same if he was a genie in a bottle. These dead folks have got to be stopped, Irene.”

“Don’t let him bother you. You must concentrate on cleaning up your lipids, on scraping the last pre-digested enzymes off your plate. Don’t let him get your goat, my lover.”

“Him? Bother me? That ain’t the way of it by half. I been teasing him, drawing him in, having him on. I make out there’s a war right here in St. Paul.”

“Here? In the Twin Cities?”

“Between the Twin Cities.”

“Stand at ease, men. Smoke if you got ’em. That a comedy book you got in your fatigues, Wilson? No, I don’t want to see it. Put it in your pack. Renquist, leave off reading that letter from your sweetheart or you’ll wear it out. All right. Now the captain wanted me to talk to you about the meaning of this war. He wants you to know what you’re fighting for, and do you understand the underlying geopolitical reasons and whatnot. Well, I’ll tell you what you’re fighting for. So’s the bastards don’t sweep down from Minneapolis and do their will on our St. Paul women. So’s they don’t wreak their wicked ways on our children. Let me tell you something, gentlemen. A St. Paul baby ain’t got no business on the point of a Minneapolis bayonet. You seen for yourselves on Eyewitness News at Ten what happened after Duluth signed the surrender papers with them. Looting, rape, the whole shooting match. Them Duluth idiots thought they could appease the enemy’s blood lust. Well, you seen how far that got ’em. So it’s no time to be reading comical books, and if you birds ever hope to see peace with honor again you better be prepared to fight for it.

“Whee-herr-whee-herr-whee-herr!

“There’s the air-raid warning, boys. Capiapo, you and your men take cover. You, Phillips, your squad’s in charge of Hill Twelve.

“Hrr-hrr. Hrn. Hrn-hrn.

“It don’t need no fixed bayonets, Sarge. Dey’s our tanks. Ain’ dat so, Gen’rul?

“It is , Mr. President.”

History had gone out of whack, current events had run amok. Ladlehaus despaired. Hearing what he did not know were Quiz’s master sergeants and the high blood-pressured man’s High Command, his presidents and sirens and generals and tanks, he accepted in death what he had not known in Hell—that the great issues which curdled and dominated one’s times were shorter-lived and more flexible than personality or character. In his own lifetime he had outlived depressions and dictators, wars and the peace that came between them, outlived the race questions and the religious, all the great ideas and great men who thought them, outlasting the trends and celebrated causes. What he wanted to know was what Wilson thought of his comic book, what Renquist’s sweetheart had to say.

“Is there anything bothering you, Mr. Quiz?” the caretaker’s doctor asked him. “Mrs. Quiz tells me that you’ve been sticking to your diet and taking your medications, yet your pressure’s as high as it ever was. Are you under any particular stress at work?”

“Some dead man’s been trying to play me for a sucker.”

“Hsst,” Ladlehaus said. “Hsst, Renquist.”

“He’s trying to get to me through my men,” Quiz told his wife.

“Boys,” Quiz asked the ten- and eleven-year- olds who had the Board of Education’s permission to use the facilities of the high school stadium, “do you know what a dirty old man is?”

They made the jokes Quiz had expected them to make when he asked his question, and Quiz smiled patiently at their labored gags and misinformation. “No, boys,” he said when they were done, “a dirty old man is none of those things. Properly speaking, he’s very sick. For one reason or another his normal sexual needs—do you know what normal sexual needs are, boys?—have not been met and”—he waited for their raucous miniature laughter and hooting to die down—“he has to take his satisfaction in other ways. It’s much the same as hunger. Now I doubt if any of you boys has ever really been hungry, but let’s suppose that your mom never lets you have candy. Let’s suppose you never chew gum or drink soda, that she doesn’t let you eat ice cream or nibble peanuts. That you can’t have fruit. The only sweets she lets you have are vegetables—corn, say, or sweet potato, sugar beets, squash.” He waited for them to mouth the false “yechs” and mime the fake disgust he knew they would mouth and knew they would mime.

“What might happen in such a case, boys, is that you’d grow up with a sick sweet tooth. You wouldn’t know what to do with real candy. A Hershey’s might kill you, you could drown in a Coke.

“It’s the same with dirty old men, boys. Maybe they can’t have a relationship—do you know what a relationship is, boys?—with a person their own age, so they seek out children. Your moms are right, boys, when they tell you not to accept rides from strangers, to take their nickels or share their candy. Children are vulnerable, children. They don’t know the score. You give a dirty old man an inch he’ll take a mile. His dick will be in your hair, boys, he’ll put your wiener in his pocket. They can’t help themselves, boys, but dirty old men do terrible things. They want to smell your tush while it’s still wet, they want to heft your ballies and blow up your nose. They want to ream and suck, touch and diddle. They want to eat your poo-poo, boys.”

He had their attention.

“Do you know why I say these things to you?”

They couldn’t guess.

“Because I’m thirty-seven years old, boys. Raise your hands if your daddies are older than me.” Nine of the twenty children raised their hands. “See?” Quiz said, “almost half of you have pops older than I am. They’re not old. I’m not old.

“The other thing I wanted to say, boys, is that I have a good relationship with Irene. Irene is my wife. We do it three times a week, boys. There’s nothing Irene won’t do for me, boys, and I mean nothing.” He listed the things Irene would do for him. “Do you know why I tell you these things, boys?”

They couldn’t guess.

“To show I can have a relationship with a person my own age. To show I’m not dirty. I’m not old, I’m not dirty.

“So that when I tell you what I’m going to tell you you’ll know it isn’t just to get you to come over to the grandstand with me.”

The attack had started. Ladlehaus could hear the foot soldiers—their steps too indistinct for men on horseback—running about in the deathgrounds. From time to time he heard what could only have been a child cry out and, once, their commander. “Cover me, cover me, Flanoy,” the commander commanded.

“Yes, sir, I’ll cover you,” the child shouted. He heard shots of a muffled crispness, reduced by the earth in which he lay to a noise not unlike a cap pistol. He held his breath in the earth, lay still in the grids of gravity that criss-crossed his casket like wires in an electric blanket.

Horrible, he thought, horrible. Attacking a cemetery. Defending it with children. A desperate situation. He had fought in France in the war. Captured three of the enemy. Who’d turned out to be fifteen-year-old boys. But these kids could not have been even that old. What could they be fighting about? He was disappointed in the living, disappointed in Minneapolis.