“You think it will live?”
“Who’s going to loll it to revive it?”
“Who’ll want to kill it to survive?”
“The Parisacs and Priests–find them something they have to contend with face to face with the possibility of horror and bloodshed and they’ll be satisfied with wooden crosses and go home.”
“But old Wizard wants to live.”
“In that last form he took I wouldn’t bother—”
“Who is Doctor Sax?”
“They told me in Budapest he’s just a crazy old fool. No harm will come from him.”
“Is he here?”
“Is–presumably.”
‘Well–and did you have a good journey?” (moderate) “Of course for now I have a box of good American earth for you to sleep in–Espiritu dug it up for you–at a fee– it’ll be charged upstairs–and the B equivalent (because he’ll never see the money so the only thing he wants is blood) you can leave with me when you get some, and I’ll pay him–he’s been bitching and bitching—”
“I have some B right now.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“A young girl in Boston when I got off the ship at dusk, around 7, snow swirls on Milk Street, but then the rain started, all Boston was slushy, I pushed her in an alley and got her just below the ear lobe and sucked up a good pint half of which I saved in my gold jar for nightcap at dawn.”
“Lucky boy–I found myself a sweet sixteen-year-old boy in his mother’s window, counting birds at aftersupper blue dusk (the sun just sank in westerly) and I caught him right by the Adam’s apple and ate up half his blood he was so sweet–last week it was a—”
“Enough, Contessa, you’ve convinced me I did excruciatingly the right thing coming here– The Convention won’t last long–the Castle will undoubtedly rattle-but (yawn) I want to move on–unless of course the Snake does pop up in which case I’ll certainly stay to see the horrible spectacle with my own eyes–from a good distance in the air-”
“It’ll have to happen at night then, dear Count.”
“If you see Mater tell her I’ll come in to see her in the morning.”
“She’s busy at cards with Old Hatchet Craw in the Blue Belfry–entertaining Flamboy the Ambassador so large … he just got in from Cravistaw where he stole a polo pony and had it flown to the Maharajah of Larkspur, who sent congratulations– They found a new Dove in the Bengali mountains you know. Supposed to be the Spirit of Gandhi.”
This ‘dove’ business has gone out of hand,” frowned the Count. “Dovists … serious? … are they? I like my religion practical–blood is good, blood is life, they can act up with their ashes and urns and oily incense … bloodless theosophists of the moonlight–excalibur dull bottards in a frantic hinch, cock-waddlers on pones and pothosts, rattle-bead bonehead splentiginous bollyongs, cast-offs, bah, flap-slaves and blackbearded bungy doodle frummers of lug and lard. Fat. Dry. Dull. Dead. Spew!—” he spat— “But I’ll do anything the High Command wants, of course.—Have we anything striking for my box design?”
“Oh,” gushed the night eyed Contessa dripping an eave from her shoulder s dust, “a fabulous green jade monstrosity of a buckle or belch or insignia of some kind held firmly, well welded, but the main box a gorgeous 12th-century masterpiece, I believe one of Della Quercia’s last—”
“Della Quercia!—Ah!”—the Count danced, kiss-a-finger, “let it not be said”—he danced with himself around the decaying foyer all dripping with dust and here and there a bat watching, with hanging African vines of cobwebs in the great center of the hall—”that the Count Condu goes to his well-deserved rest in the fresh and dewy morn (after night times of not ill-considered debauch), goes to his—”
“—quiet spew—”
“—without ostentation, without charm and dignity.”
“It’s all a matter of taste.”
“And money, my dear, money in the blood bank.”
15
THE DOOR OF THE GREAT CASTLE is closed on the night. Only supernatural eyes now can see the figure in the rainy capes paddling across the river (reconnoitering those blown shrouds of fogs,—so sincere). The leaves of the shrubs and trees in the yard of the Castle glint in the rain. The leaves of Pawtucketville glint in the rain at night–the iron picket fences of Textile, the posts of Moody, all glint–the thickets of Merrimac, pebbly shores, trees and bushes in my wet and fragrant sandbanks glint in the rainy night–a maniacal laugh rises from the marshes, Doctor Sax comes striding with his stick, blowing snot out of his nose, casting gleeful crazy glances at frogs in mud puddles … old Doctor Sax here he comes. Rain glints on his nose as well as on the black slouch hat.
He’s made his investigations for tonight–somewhere in the woods of Dracut he lifts his door out of the earth and goes in to sleep … for a moment we see red fires of forges glowing to the pine tops–a rank, rich, mud-raw wind blows across the moon– Clouds follow rain and race the fevered Dame in her moony rush, she comes meditating hysterical thoughts in the thin air–then the trapdoor is closed on the secrets of Doctor Sax, he rumbles below.
He remotes below in his own huge fantasies about the end of the world. “The end of the world,” he says, “is Coming …” He writes it on the walls of his underground house. “Ah me Marva,” he sighs… They put Marva in a madhouse, Doctor Sax is a widower … a bachelor … a crazy Lord of all the mud he surveys. He tramped the reeds of March midnight in the fields of Dracut, leering at the Moon as she raced the angry marl clouds (that blow from the mouth of the Merrimac River, Marblehead, Nor’West) —he was a big fool forever looking for the golden perfect solution, he went around having himself a ball searching mysterious humps of earth around the world for a reason so fantastic–for the boiling point of evil (which, in his—, was a volcanic thing … like a boil)—in South America, in North America, Doctor Sax had labored to find the enigma of the New World–the snake of evil whose home is in the deeps of Ecuador and the Amazonian jungle— where he lived a considerable time searching for the perfect dove … a white jungle variety as delicate as a little white bat, an Albino bat really, but a dove with a snaky beak, and habitating close to Snake Head… Doctor Sax deduced from this perfect Dove, which flew to Tibet for him at will (returning with a brace of herbs strapped to its leg by the Hero Monks of the World North) (H.M.W.N., a Post-Fellaheen organization later acknowledged by the Pope as barbaric) (and by his scholars as primitive) … deduced that the Snake had part of its body in the jungle … Came grooking from the Snow North mountains Doctor Sax, educated in a panel of ice and a panel of snow, taught by Fires, in the strangest Monastery in the World, where Sax Saw the Snake
and the Snake saw Sax-
He came hobbling down from the mountain with a broken leg, a cane, a pack, wounds, a beard, red eyes, yellow teeth, but just like an old Montana hobo in the long blue sky streets of Waco–passing thru. And in fact when Doctor Sax did get back to Butte, where he’s really from, he settled back to longnight poker games with Old Bull Balloon the wildest gambler in town … (some say, W.C. Fields’ ghost returned he’s so much like him, twin to him, unbelievably except for the—) Sax & Bull got into (of course Sax had a Butte name) —into a tremendous game of pool watched by one hundred Butteans in the dark beyond the table lamps and its bright, central green. SAX (won the break, breaks) (Crash) (the balls spin all over)
SMILEY BULL BALLOON (out of the mouth like a cigar and a yellow tooth): Say Raymond-O, don’t you think this romance has gone far enough?
SAX: Why do you say that Pops?