Jitterbug Perfume Page 6

  “Hey!” a voice called out. “Why doth thy crawl about on thy belly? Art thou a man or a worm?”

  Compelled by the voice, which was both dreadful and jolly, threatening and seductive, Alobar forgot his recent failures and scrambled to his feet. “Where are you?” he asked in a shaky falsetto. “Why are you laughing?”

  “I am everywhere,” the voice boomed. “And why shouldn't a god laugh at the puny endeavors of man?”

  It was then that Alobar's battle-trained vision focused on the leer in the leaves. At first, the leer was all that he could see, but then he caught sight of a shaggy tail and realized that it was connected to the leer. (The tail bone frequently is connected to the leer bone, although today that connection is illegal in seventeen states and the District of Columbia.) In a moment, the bushes parted and into the pasture pranced an unbelievable creature, all woolly and goatlike from its waist down to its hooves; human and masculine above. Or, to be precise, human above save for a pair of stubby horns thrusting like bronze-tipped beet-diggers in the bright mountain air.

  “You—you are the—the Horned One,” stammered Alobar.

  The creature gamboled closer, dispelling any doubts about the origin of the stench. “In some places they know me as that. Herebouts, they call me Pan.” He paused. “Those who still honor me, that is.” He paused again. “And who might thou be? And what is thy mission?”

  “Alobar, once king, once serf, now individual—have you heard of individuals?—free and hungry, at your service. My mission? Well, frankly, I am running away from death.”

  Pan's hooves, which had been pawing the turf in an almost drunken little fandango, became gradually immobile, and the leer slowly slid off his face as if some weak but persistent hand had shoved it. His thick lips dipped downward in a solemn arc, and in his goatish eyes woe replaced mischief. “I, too,” he said.

  “What's that?” asked Alobar.

  “Art thou so famished that thou cannot hear? I said that I, too, am running from death.”

  “But that couldn't be! You are a god. Are not the gods immortal?”

  “Not quite. True, we art immune to the chills and accidents that swallow up humanity, but gods can die. We live only so long as people believe in us.”

  “Hmmm. I never thought of that,” said Alobar. “But certainly for the likes of you there is no shortage of believers.” Despite Pan's bedraggled curls and matted wool, despite the drool in the goatee and the manure on his hooves, he was by far the most impressive being Alobar had ever met.

  “Ha! Where hath thou spent thy life, Alobar? In a pumpkin? Did thou just fall off a turnip cart?”

  “I am an eater of beets,” proclaimed Alobar proudly.

  “How could such an ignoramus ever hath been a king? Doth thy people reside so far back in the sticks that they never heard the famous voice crying out over the wine-dark sea, 'Great Pan is dead, Great Pan is dead'? Of course, that was nearly a millennium ago and as even a lout such as thou can see, I am still kicking. Nevertheless, with the birth of Christ, belief in me dwindled, and I have been scrambling for my life ever since.”

  “Yes, now that you mention it, the priest in our church did often refer to you as one of the false deities. In fact, the way he described the devil—the silly man believes there is but one god and one demon—he could be your twin.”

  “Thou art Christian?” Pan pronounced the word with such contempt that the flock stopped dancing and glared at Alobar, the bees buzzed angrily at him, and a passing butterfly shat upon him with remarkable accuracy.

  “Oh, no, no,” said Alobar hurriedly, wiping the green butterfly poop from the corner of his eye. “Not really. I merely played along with my neighbors to assuage their suspicions. This fellow Christ is a bit namby-pamby for my taste. And now that I hear what he's done to you, why, I like him the less, even if he did favor individualism.”

  “Thou ninny.”

  “Sir, I will not have you calling me a nanny!”

  “Ninny, not nanny! Doth thou think I would call thee after one of the things I love best?” Pan's heavy lids drooped momentarily as his thoughts strayed to other pastures on other days, days when the petal-pink genitals of the she-goats drew him down from the crags.

  “Just the same . . .” Alobar's fist was about his knife.

  “If thou wouldst outdistance death, don't blow thy slender lead by challenging a god, neither Christ, who is not here to defend himself, nor I, who art much closer than I need be to smite a prideful gnat such as thee.” With a disagreeable thump, Alobar landed on his chin again. Pan had not moved a muscle. “Namby-pamby, huh? Christ said that illumination is found only by putting everything one has in jeopardy. Thou, of all humans, should understand the courage that is required to reject the secure blessings of society in order to woo the unpredictable ecstasies of the solitary soul. It is true that Christ had little enthusiasm for dance or copulation, that he took 'right' and 'wrong' too seriously and set himself apart from the natural world, but for all his shortcomings, he was much superior to thou mortals who hath embraced him to further thine own ends.”

  Although Alobar was no more fond of criticism than of being flung to the ground like a peach pit, he had learned from the shaman that the path to the marvelous is sometimes cleared by a sharp tongue, and when Pan began to move away, intimating that their conversation was done, Alobar hastened to draw him back. “Tell me, Horned One,” he called, “why do you defend Christ if he is threatening your hide?”

  The god paused, assuming a haunchy stance, like a woman in high heels. Instead of replying, however, he produced reed pipes and blew through them in a manner that caused the sheep to skip again and the little clouds to wiggle in the sky. The music was high-pitched and playful, a frail, tremulous, silvery sound that unfurled in lazy spirals without a care in the world. So immense was the contrast between this lighthearted piping and Pan's demeanor, his crude, simian features, and great sad eyes, that Alobar was moved in spite of himself, and when at last the music ceased, he knocked away a tear with his knuckles and said, “For you, sir, may the jaws of death have cotton teeth.”

  “For thee, as well,” answered Pan. “But how can we toast without strong wine to lift? And thou did announce thy hunger so emphatically that even the deaf roots took note. I'll wager thou be horny, into the bargain. Come with me, Alobar, for while we must go forever in despair, let us also go forever in the enjoyment of the world.”

  In a flash, Pan was across the pasture, Alobar at his heels, scaling the rugged rocks, oblivious to the thickets of violent thistles. Alobar was physically fit, hardened by his peasant labor and recent travels, but he could not keep pace with the god, and soon Pan was out of sight. That was no real problem, however, for Alobar simply followed the scent, that effluvium of goat glands that hung in the air like a salty mist and drew him ever higher up the craggy vertebrae. The higher Alobar climbed, the more piercing his unease, until he was in a literal state of panic. Just when this thrilling anxiety was at its zenith, tempting him with irrational impulses to throw himself from the cliffs, he heard girlish voices and the sound of splashing water. The panic completely vaporized as the Pan odor led him into a grotto, a ferny recess in the middle of which was a pellucid pool.

  Enjoying the liquid pleasures of the pool were seven or eight unusual human females: short in stature, though full in contour, their bones packed into loaves of ivory and petunia; their tangled hair hanging like ropes of seaweed, nearly to their heels; their perfect nipples as red as guinea pig eyes, their squeals the kind that leave a glow in the dark; and not one of them older than the teenage Frol he'd left in Aelfric. Sweet genital sparks flew when they looked at Alobar, and he sensed himself in company most benevolent.

  Directly across the pool, in the mouth of a shallow cave, hunkered Pan, a wineskin in one fist, an erection in the other. In a rough clay bowl at his feet, dangerously close to the sizzling bulb of his member, were olives, figs, and feta cheese. With a jerk of his head, the god beckoned. Alobar was fa
mished, but in order to reach the food and drink, he had to wade through nymph-infested waters. Summoning his nerve, he plunged in. Brunch time in Arkadia.

  The remainder of the day was spent in a luxurious, pastel stupor against which Alobar's northern temperament rebelled in vain. He had expected the nymphs to be quite wild in their demonstrations, imagined them biters, scratchers, and screamers, yet neither as king nor serf had he known such delicacy, and the softness in which the pleasures of the afternoon were couched made the hero in him a bit embarrassed. When he glanced about him in the pale twilight, however, he saw everywhere evidence of his participation: dried semen frosted the thighs of napping nymphs, clots of it floated in the shadowy waters like weaving wrenched loose from the looms of the trout, and upon the tips of bracken there glistened drops too milky to be dew. It couldn't have been Pan's output alone because Alobar's testicles were as flat and juiceless as trampled grapes. Besides, after an hour's eventful splash in the pool, Pan had crawled into the cave and fallen into a lengthy snooze from which the purring ecstasies of the nymphs were much too low to wake him.

  “Pan is not well,” the nymphs confided.

  “I watched him scale the rocks, I watched him set four of you to coming in a row,” said Alobar. “He seems fit enough to me.”

  The nymphs released a chorus of dreamy sighs. “You should have seen him when he was in his prime. He's like a sick dove, nowadays, compared to the goat he used to be.”

  “Is it Christ who is making him weak?”

  “Not Christ but Christians. With every advance of Christianity, his powers recede,” said one nymph.

  “It started long before Christ,” said a second.

  “Yes, it did,” agreed the first. “It began with the rise of the cities. There simply was no place in the refined temples of Attica and Sparta for a mountain goat like Pan.”

  A third nymph, who, with a wad of leaves, was scrubbing herself clean of caked secretions, joined in. “It was man's jealousy of woman that started it,” she said. “They wanted to drive the goddesses out of Olympus and replace them with male gods.”

  “Is not Pan a male god?” asked Alobar.

  “True, he is, but he is associated with female values. To diminish the worth of women, men had to diminish the worth of the moon. They had to drive a wedge between human beings and the trees and the beasts and the waters, because trees and beasts and waters are as loyal to the moon as to the sun. They had to drive a wedge between thought and feeling, between the lamplight by which they count the day's earnings and the dark to which our Pan is ever connected. At first they used Apollo as the wedge, and the abstract logic of Apollo made a mighty wedge, indeed, but Apollo the artist maintained a love for women, not the open, unrestrained lust that Pan has, but a controlled longing that undermined the patriarchal ambition. When Christ came along, Christ, who slept with no female, neither two-legged nor four, Christ, who played no musical instrument, recited no poetry, and never kicked up his heels by moonlight, this Christ was the perfect wedge. Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and goddesses into muses.”

  “And who can guess into what it will turn us nymphs?”

  Alobar felt a surge of beet-red temper. Violently, he shook his head. “The world is changing,” he said, “but there will always be a place in it for you. And for Pan.”

  “Perhaps. Certainly, we wish the moderns no harm, though Pan plays roughly with them at times. And thou? Will thou escape the fate thy feareth?”

  “You misunderstand me. I do not fear death. I resent it. Everything must die, apparently, and I am no exception. But I want to be consulted. You know what I mean? Death is impatient and thoughtless. It barges into your room when you are right in the middle of something, and it doesn't bother to wipe its boots. I have a new passion, my darlings, a passion for being myself, and for being more than previously has been manifested for a single lifetime. I am determined to die at my own convenience. Therefore, I journey to the east, where, I have been told, there are men who have taught death some manners.”

  “We suspect thou art as foolish as brave, Alobar. In fact, bravery may be naught but foolishness. Fear, like love, is a call into the wild—into the deep, shadowy grotto. Fear is a finer thing than resentment. Resentment, an affliction of the mind, will leave thee complaining in Christ's well-lighted halls, but fear, a wisdom of the body, will lead thee back to Pan.”

  While Alobar was thinking that over, Pan awoke, stretched, and scampered into the thistles. When with the sun's setting he did not return, Alobar gave the nymphs a last squeeze and began his long, laborious descent, during which he several times heard thunderous laughter ring round about him and once thought he saw a moonbeam strike, high up in the crags, a fleeting horn.

  Alone, with not so much as a sperm left to accompany him, Alobar again directed his steps toward the east. His was the gait of expectation, a pace set more by intuition than by reason, a clip fueled more by vague hints of wonderment than by steady assessments of purpose.

  He was to continue in that fashion for an inappropriately long stretch of literary time, passing through more landscapes than there are keys on a typewriter, having more adventures than there are nibs for pens. Not once during or following a perilous escapade did it occur to him that the unpredictability of the moment of one's death might provide life with its necessary tension. But ever mindful of the kin of Pan, whose memory no encounter, however dramatic, could obscure, he allowed himself to resent death less and fear it more. And as he passed through one exotic environment after another, learning languages, wearing out boots, he sang his little song:

  "I love the ground-o, ground-o

  A ball beneath my feet

  The world is round-o, round-o

  Just like a frigging beet."

  No, he would not be remembered as bard—nor, for that matter, as warrior or king. Life is fair, however, and in the fragrance industry, his name would one day become an accepted part of the nomenclature. According to Priscilla, the genius waitress, an alobar is a unit of measurement that describes the rate at which Old Spice after-shave lotion is absorbed by the lace on crotchless underpants, although at other times she has defined it as the time it takes Chanel No. 5 to evaporate from the wing tips of a wild duck flying backward.

  SEATTLE

  IT SEEMED LIKE THE WHOLE TOWN WAS at odds over the solar eclipse. A lot of people were of the opinion that since in Seattle one seldom saw the sun anyhow, there was nothing very special about not seeing it again. Monday morning would be only a shade darker than usual, they reasoned. The difference, according to others, perhaps the majority, was that Monday was forecast to be clear. With the absence of the cloud cover that normally caused the sky over Seattle to resemble cottage cheese that had been dragged nine miles behind a cement truck, the city, for the first time in memory, would have an unobstructed view of one of nature's most mystical spectacles.

  “Did you walk up to Volunteer Park to watch the eclipse?” was the first thing Ricki said to Priscilla when she came by her apartment Monday noon.

  “Nope. Didn't make it outdoors,” said Priscilla, yawning.

  “You watched it on TV then?”

  “No, I didn't.”

  “You didn't see it at all?”

  “I listened to it,” said Priscilla. “I listened to it on the radio. It sounded like bacon frying.”

  “Shit, woman. Sometimes I don't believe you're for real.” Ricki looked about the room for a place to sit. The couch and the chair, the most logical contenders, were piled high with dirty clothes, clean clothes, clothes in transition, books, unopened mail, and laboratory equipment. There were also a couple of beets. Ricki elected to stand. “You'd better shift into your hurry-up offense,” she said. “The meeting starts in thirty minutes.”

  “I can shower on first down, make up on second, and dress on third. If I haven't put it over by then, I can always kick a field goal.”

  “Unless you fumble.�
��

  Priscilla slammed the bathroom door. Ricki had to steady a beaker of liquid to prevent a major spill.

  The football repartee was the result of Ricki having talked Priscilla into spending the previous afternoon at the Kingdome, an outing that revealed to Priscilla what Ricki really liked about the Seahawks. It was the Seagals. “Fashions come and go, come and go,” said Ricki, “but the length of the cheerleader skirt remains constant, and it is upon that abbreviated standard that I base my currency of joy.”

  Today (they each had Sundays and Mondays off), Ricki was taking Priscilla to a meeting of the Daughters of the Daily Special, an organization of waitresses with university degrees. At least in the beginning all the members had had university degrees. The group had some time ago lowered its standards to accept waitresses with only two years of college. That was when Ricki was admitted, back when it was still called Sisters of the Daily Special. “Sisters” had come to sound too political. It suggested a feminine solidarity that the waitresses, in their honesty, considered not just inaccurate but inappropriate. “We're out to grab us some gusto, not cut anybody's nuts off,” was the way Ricki put it.

  In Seattle, as in most other large cities, there were a fair number of women who had studied art, literature, philosophy, history, etc., only to find that their education and a dollar would buy them a glass of Perrier. True, they hadn't entered their respective fields with the idea of getting rich, but neither had they expected that a summa cum laude would take them about as far from campus as the nearest dry water hole. Unable to support themselves in the work of their choice, they turned to waitressing, for there they could earn the most money for the least investment. If it wasn't possible for them to do something meaningful and fulfilling, at least they could be well compensated for a minimum of moral compromise and an even barer minimum of vocational commitment.