Classics Mutilated Part 44

I hang up and throttle Dr. Hiss II with my trunk. "Who was that?"

"I don't know! He isss no one."

"Where's the screen test?"

"Ssstage 4! Have merssssy, Master!"

When Pan, the old satyr, died last month of cirrhosis, I became the last of the Master's original children, out of the forty-nine who left the island with Will Dixon. In the sixteen years since, our new Master has created almost three hundred of us. n.o.body knows how many he made for the war.

Virgil was the original Moxie Monkey. Dixon was as good as his word, and grafted a new tail onto his stump as soon as he'd perfected Moreau's transplant formula. But Virgil was crushed in an accident on the set of the sequel to Monkey See, Monkey Do. The second was electrocuted while swinging from power lines for the climax of Monkey in the Middle, but Dixon had a clone bred and ready to finish the stunt before the smell of burned fur was out of the air.

The third Moxie had to be ga.s.sed after he got drunk and threw feces at Vice President Truman at a White House dinner. (The joke around the studio was that Dixon was p.i.s.sed he missed Roosevelt.) The fourth escaped his cage while on a USO tour in Italy, and was never found.

The fifth and current Moxie is not a spider monkey at all, but a five-year-old Mexican orphan named Rico. Discovered at one of the Will's House orphanages, Rico was reborn in the Barnyard with a tail and a shiny fur coat. He takes direction far better than the other Moxies, and Dixon still owns him outright.

The soundstage is manned by two more guards. They don't want to let me in, but I'm Will Dixon's eyes and ears.

Screen tests for the next big feature. This one is a th.o.r.n.y challenge, because the script calls for naturalistic woodland fauna, but with big expressive eyes and oversized craniums to hold human-sized brains.

The soundstage is framed in towering California Redwood trees, the floor a riot of wildflowers. All are hand-carved and painted. Real flowers wilt under the lights. More real than any real forest, it puts the humanimal actor into character.

A skeleton crew mans the cameras and lights from behind a s.h.a.ggy blind of fake undergrowth, so the actor thinks he's alone with his mother, a lovely unmodified doe who has nursed him since birth. The little spotted fawn with eyes the size of headlamps wobbles up to his mother, great love and wonder in his adorable face.

"I'm gonna have nightmares about this for years," the director grumbles. "Cue the hunters!"

With that, two men in checkered coats jump out of the wings and shoot the doe. The bullets blow her breast wide open and send her teetering around the set before crashing to the floor in front of the baby deer.

This is the moment we've been waiting for. All the careful breeding, rearing, and brain surgery will be a waste if our talent cannot act.

"MAMA!" he shrieks, eyes grown wide as dinner plates. The fragile, birdlike body jolts backward as if cattle-prodded, and I swear I can see his heart visibly break inside the prison of his ribs. "MAMA! NOOOO!"

"Cut!" The director wipes a tear from his eyes. "Now that was perfection."

I douse his flame before he can even light a cigarette. "No, sorry. Uncle Will was quite specific. He wants his pathos laced with helpless defiance, and I'm afraid we just don't see it." The crew looks stricken. The fawn continues to scream. From the cover of the lighting cage overhead, a gaffer mutters, "Cold-hearted b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"Gentlemen, if it were up to me, we'd be tickling them with feather dusters. But unless you'd rather tender your resignations, get a mop and another doe on set. And let's try the fawn with the 6% bull terrier and wolverine mix next, shall we? If that's not too much trouble."

We're a happy family. Dixon rewards loyalty. Most of these men worked on Banjo. We know each other too well.

The fawn is led off, still howling his grief. I have to admit, it's a powerful performance. We'll have to wipe his memory if we want to get it fresh, but definitely a top contender. Worth sedating and trying again. Dixon needs to see the footage.

"Shake a leg, humans!" I trumpet, as the last hint of motherly blood is erased. "Oscar season is right around the corner!"

I don't know how much more of this I can stand.

cd cd (Burbank, 8/20/44) Mr. Dixon dips his plain cake donut in a mug of scotch. He's watching an impounded Republic newsreel in his private screening room with J. Edgar Hoover.

"You know America is eternally grateful for your services, Wilbur, as are the countless fighting soldiers and sailors whose lives were spared by your heroic contributions to the war effort. But perhaps it was a mistake to attempt to send your most celebrated stars into the theater."

Dixon doesn't want to see or hear this. He asked for the Director's discreet help with another matter entirely.

It seems that Algy Gator escaped from his paddock in Orlando and went on a mating spree in the Everglades. None of our natural offspring has ever shown any signs of our hard-won intelligence, but Hoover's got forty teams of G-Men combing the swamp for Algy's b.a.s.t.a.r.d eggs.

The swamp people say the gators are building a city and stockpiling guns. But Hoover brushes the Algy issue aside.

On the screen, Moxie Monkey and Darn Old Duck and some star-struck GIs play football in the ruins of Berlin. The ball is. .h.i.tler's severed head.

Dixon fumes, even though he's seen this footage before. It's having to explain himself to Hoover-a "snake-eyed sodomite" who knows and controls everyone and everything that really matters in America-that galls him.

"I frankly don't see the problem, Edgar. Even if the footage were to get out, this country has had to fight a hard war, with much bloodshed and sacrifice, and we all deserve to see that little troublemaker pay for what he's done ... though I'd be even happier to see them playing with that little Commie sc.u.mbag Chaplin's head. It's subversives like that you should be rooting out...."

Hoover looks sidewise at me. I sit doodling on a memo pad, but he knows about my eidetic memory. No doubt he also knows about my numerous drug addictions, my questionable a.s.sociates, and perhaps even my silent disloyalty to my Master.

But we know a thing or two about Mr. Hoover. One of the earliest projects at the Dixon Studios in Burbank in 1932 was a top-secret private commission. Outwardly human, but with the germlines of a Great Dane and an albino boa constrictor, Clyde had made his companion very happy for over a decade, and had risen to the position of a.s.sociate Director of the FBI.

"Our princ.i.p.al concern is that the returning subhuman hordes will bring their laudable savagery-which so swiftly and decisively ended the war in Europe-back home."

What he can't bring himself to express, even in our most privileged company, is the fear that the returning veterans will demand rights, even citizenship. The Barnyard Bonus Marchers have become the new bete noir of the radical right, even after the guerilla leader and onetime Barnyard Ballads lead Sgt. Lummox was gunned down by a Dixon-bred Rat Patrol.

Dixon nervously taps a monogrammed sterling silver pill case against the arm of his chair. "Idle hands are the Devil's workshop, I know. The loyal ones who return will be kept busy on our new projects. So long as there are no further interruptions." A venomous glare as he gobbles a donut disintegrating in scotch. He sets the mug down and lights a cigarette.

"You won't have any more union trouble in Florida. If you embodied the courage of your convictions, you'd abandon California altogether. Let the Communist vermin wallow in their syphilitic cesspool."

"The film industry is my life's blood, Edgar, you know that. Lord knows I haven't gotten the recognition for the innovations I brought, but I can't walk away from it. My boys-my family-would never forgive me."

He looks fondly at the screen. Darn Old Duck catches the severed head and his feathery fingers get caught in Hitler's toothless mouth. Mugging and cursing, he dances into the end zone and spikes der Fuhrer's face into the cracked concrete.

Hoover stands up and brushes donut crumbs off his pinstripe suit. I like Mr. Hoover more than I should, because when he's not wearing his lifts, he's the only human I know who's shorter than me. A product of constant mental surgery, with a House of Pain inside his head, Mr. Hoover is an inspiration. A triumph of humanity over its own nature.

This tiny upright pug projects the crushing weight of his superhuman virility onto Dixon's quaking shoulders as he rises from his chair. "We stand ready to a.s.sist you, Wilbur, if you cannot maintain order in your own backyard."

After the meeting, Dixon wants to go home and relax with his model trains, but there is business to discuss.

Filming on Alice in Wonderland has been delayed yet again, after the scenarist, a dangerous British intellectual I could've warned Dixon about, dosed the Tea Party scene with mescaline. "Mr. Huxley has been deported and all the humanimals have been treated with thorazine, but ... the March Hare has escaped again, and we think he's been ... that is, he's gone over to the Animal Liberation League."

"Orwell! Tell me again, why can't we deport that black-lunged agitator! No, I'm sick of hearing about the films. Tell me about the park."

With opening day still a week away, Dixonland is a shambles. Half the rides don't work. There was a broken slide on the Li'l Black Sambo flume ride. Two log boats were trapped underground, and a woman was mauled by a tiger. "Thank goodness it was an employee," he grumbles. "Next."

He busies himself with his new toy, a clockwork scarlet macaw. "It can learn and repeat up to two hundred phrases," he preens, "and it never p.o.o.ps."

"Please, sir. This is serious." A lawsuit was filed last week by a Mr. Lee Nussbaum of Anaheim. His son was bit by several squirrel litter-pickers when he attempted to climb the fence to get a peek at the park.

"Haven't even opened yet, and the parasites and the vermin are already sucking my blood." He lights another cigarette and sucks half of it to ash. The doctors want to take out his left lung, but still he sucks in that smoke, like the atmosphere of his lost home planet. "My squirrels don't have rabies. Perish the thought." Dixon dips another donut and then coughs. "Nussbaum. Squirrels. Ha!"

The complaint gets a bit vague, but the boy has grown a tail and outsized incisors, and lost his thumbs.

"We should counter-sue him," Dixon muses. "He's stolen our proprietary, patented process. Shame about the little boy, but we can't allow our property to slip into the public domain."

We split the difference. Offer little Nussbaum a chance to audition for the Moxie Monkey Club, a new project being developed for ABC's embryonic television network. He dictates a letter in his windy, emphysemic tenor, then has me sign it. His world-renowned signature, with its trademarked whimsically swooping initials, is the effect of my fluid trunk penmanship. His own signature, even when sober, looks like a spider smashed into the paper.

His facial tic starts up again. "Spare the rod and spoil the child ... I should've listened to Moreau. All these problems you filthy, ungrateful creatures brought to my door. It's enough to make me think about going back to animation. When a drawing goes wrong, you just erase it."

He wants to show me his new tabletop model. Dixon's World breaks ground in another month, and he's got so many plans. Flying ahead of schedule on the backs of bull and baboon slaves, it will take only months to build the 2,000-acre park and miles of hotels and walled suburbs. There have been daily discipline problems and a few uprisings, but beast men are not unionized contractors. Gunning them down in a ditch or burning them in ovens isn't genocide. It's inventory reduction.

"The new park will be bigger and cleaner than this one, Gene. And it'll have a little portion for every corner of the globe, so you can go around the world in a day, without all the unrest and germs. And all the inhabitants will be humanimals from each region. I've got Hiss working on Komodo dragons and panda-men, and...."

"What about the Cowboys and the Lummoxes, sir?"

"Well, what about them? Who'd pay to see them? They're trained killers, they've tasted human blood. And-" He catches himself rationalizing to me, and lights a cigarette to go with the pair in his ashtray. "And as it happens, they'll be staying in Europe. Soviet Union's licking its chops over the mess. .h.i.tler left. Someone has to hold the line."

"Where will they stay? Some of them will ... want to come home."

He bites a nail and looks away. "In the old German facilities. As it happens, Hitler had a lot of accommodations that will work perfectly for our extended family."

I've wanted to ask him about this for some time, but Uncle Will has been on edge, firing loyal workers for using profanity, sending half the staff to spy on the other half. Enemies are everywhere. Trying to steal us from him, even now. Even my position is not invulnerable. "You love us ... but you sent us to war. To die...."

He downs his scotch, oblivious to the cigarette b.u.t.t floating in it. "Not to worry, Gene. My old partner, Doc Iwerks, doped it out before he tried to stab me in the back. Dr. Hiss perfected it. You know how much it pained me to see my children suffer, so we cored out the anterior cingulated cortex."

He takes out another of his precious models, of the human brain, and pulls off the frontal lobe to point at an innocuous organelle like a wad of chewing gum underneath. "It's uniquely overdeveloped in humans, and it's the part that regulates pain and fatigue. All of my humanimals were modified so they wouldn't feel pain or exhaustion as humans do, but there was something else about it that made me a little blue at first.

"Our best medical minds believe it's the seat of the soul. This little joy buzzer lights up when our barnyard exhibits are treated with the serum, but we nip it in the bud with a few cc's of sterile mineral oil. Voila! No souls."

"No souls," says the robot macaw.

"We did yours up when we grafted those ears on you for Banjo." He looks up from his brain model and sees the wetness streaming from my eyes.

"But ... Master. I do have a soul ... don't I?"

"Oh, of course you do, Gene! Good heavens! You and all my other stars have the very best kind of souls. The movies we made are your souls. The world fell in love with you through them, and they'll go on forever, long after you're all dead and gone. I tell you, Gene, you poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds don't know how lucky you really are. It's no picnic, having a G.o.d-given soul."

He's drifting, but I suddenly see what must be done. "Sir, the short list of new feature projects needs reviewing."

"None of them. They're all tarted-up modern trash. We need something grand, that'll remind the world of what we do best and put those naysayers and vulgar cartoonists in their place."

Despite our best efforts, animated cartoons are becoming popular again. Dixon's old animated character, Babbitt the Rabbit, has been revived by Universal, and now dominates the one-reeler territory we once owned, since Dixon moved into grandiose features.

I humbly offer a suggestion. "What about ... The Island ... of Dr. Moreau?"

I can hear his stomach roll over, hear the tumors bubbling in his lungs. He gathers his thoughts and breath. It takes a while. "What the devil are you trying to pull, Gene?"

"I believe it's time the world learned the truth about us. About how you rescued us from the jungle, and the House of Pain."

He continues to look stricken.

"Think of it, sir: the true story of how Moxie, Snafu, the Three Little Pigs, and I came to Hollywood. All of us in our prime, with you in the starring role. I was thinking that Clark Gable-"

"Nothing doing. The man's a philandering drunk. I'll handle the casting and the scenario. You ... you...."

"I would be most useful, I think, scouting locations."

15 South, 115 East (11/4/44) It should be grander than it is. A pilgrimage to meet one's creator should be something exalted, and not another chapter in a sordid Hollywood tell-all.

To see the real world after being submerged for so long in a hand-crafted improvement upon it is more depressing than liberating. From Easter Island to Mount Rushmore, men have written their madness upon the remotest edges of the earth. Only the ocean resists them, and I find myself praying to it, in my endless seasick nod. Rise up and devour all their works, drive them from the land, and free your wayward children! Perhaps the fault was not in men, but in all of us, who crept out of the womb of the sea.

The island has not changed. From the bay, it seems to have erased all traces of Moreau. The compound is engulfed in jungle.

Our chartered schooner drops anchor and we row ash.o.r.e. Three merchant marines with tommy guns and my bodyguard, a mongrel with too much Australian shepherd in him. I hope and dread that something will come out of the trees to meet us.

He could not have survived. He was a very old man, when Dixon ruined him. The few of the Master's mistakes that stayed behind must have died out, long ago. But the island is very much alive. And everything bears the marks of his hand.

The fins of sharks circle us and shepherd us into the waves, then follow us onto the land. Great sleek, tawny bodies heave out of the surf on powerful, clawed fins. Sea-lions and tiger-sharks. Ma.s.sive green-black igloos dot the sh.o.r.e like a fishing village, but the doorways open to disgorge scaly heads with curving beaked maws that hiss wisdom in centuried syllables.

Shy octopi slither up into the palm trees and brachiate off into the jungle as we chop the overgrown trail to the old compound. A puff of wind, and all three marines drop dead with tiny darts in their necks. My bodyguard whines and lifts his leg to mark a tree. All around us, the jungle whispers.

They pelt us with rocks and sticks, driving us across the creek, where flying frogs and queer, orchid-faced fish on lobed, prehensile fins bask in the green shade. Tiny pink homunculi peer at us from under every leaf, but now their shapes are not crude imitations of human features. Every one is unique, as if self-sculpted. They whisper, timid and fearful, but they do not try to stop us.

Across the sulfur flats and through the canebreak, we march until, at the mouth of the ravine, a s.h.a.ggy, eyeless thing with a twisted crown of antlers and naked, yellow bone for a face blocks the way. "Have you come to apologize?"

I should hate Montgomery. I have a whip. I could give him a taste of his own medicine, but he has already drunk it, and tasted ours, besides.

"You've been spying on us through Dr. Hiss."

"Not spying, old son." The new Sayer of the Law turns and hobbles on all fours back up the ravine, now a cathedral grotto roofed in palm fronds and littered with abalone sh.e.l.ls and fruit husks. Strange eyes study us as we pa.s.s, stranger than the ones before, but with one common difference. None of them looks anything like a man.

Montgomery stops before a steeply sloping cave and draws back the curtain of moss to usher us inside. "He forgives you, you know. To forgive our enemies, that is the law. We are not men."

I step into the cave. A meager shaft of green light slips past my pygmy bulk to illuminate the Master.

"So good to see you, Diogenes.... Someone must bear witness to my repentance."

"You have not stopped tampering with nature."

"Oh, but I could never stop, for I am as G.o.d made me. But I have learned from my sins of pride. I thought that the greatest service to nature was to lift it up to humanity, but nature had other ideas. When you strip away all of the animal from man, the result is not so different from a disease, if a very persuasive one. I finally learned to listen to nature, and cure myself."

His elephantine bulk spills off the bed. His feet and hands are swollen into featureless stalks. His hairless head is the size of an icebox, too heavy to lift off its pillow. His trunk trembles with arthritic eagerness as it reaches out to me.

"Once, I gave you a human form and mind from my own blood, but I never considered that this made me your father. I was dying, and using the serum on myself seemed the only way to stay alive long enough to undo the evil that I did, and close the circle."

We are now each other's father, I did not say. "We never knew what evil was until we left the island, Master."

"I won't say I tried to warn you. No, I am only a creature, old and tired. It's good to see you."

"I am the last one left. But there are thousands of us now. Dixon ... he's unstable, insane ... cruel."

"He's become all the things you thought I was, when you rebelled against me."

Trunk drooping, my father reaches for a mango. There is no self-pity in him, no rebuke. But when he picks up a satchel and sets it at my feet, his eyes flash with the old zeal, the stolen G.o.d-fire, though his eyes blaze green, not red.