Jitterbug Perfume Part 7

Later, by what little moonlight that remained, she cataloged five types of scratch marks on his shoulders and back. To him, they each stung the same.

"I would like to read this Kama Sutra," said Alobar. "Except that I cannot read."

"Nor can I. But I can teach you those of its contents that might benefit you most. Unless you object, I will demonstrate rather than recite." She had had four o.r.g.a.s.ms and was feeling a.s.sured. "For now, however, you must tell me more of the Bandaloop doctors."

"There is nothing left to tell."

"You mean that you never heard of them again?"

"Oh, stories about them abound, but their veracity. . . . Actually, something happened once ..."

"What happened, Alobar?"

"One spring, on the pa.s.s south of here, there was a snow slide. Travelers were buried. Some of us from Samye went to help dig them out. We removed several bodies, frozen stiff, which we laid on the side of the road. After a bit, one of them stirred. It was a female. She stood and stretched, and thanked us and walked away. Just walked away. Fosco must have noticed that I was stunned, for he put a hand on me and whispered, 'She was a Bandaloop woman.' That was all that was ever said about it. The rest of the victims behaved the way corpses ought to."

Kudra, propped on her elbows, shaking her head in amazement, said, "And she was merely one of their women."

"Yes."

"Hmmm." She lowered herself into the straw, her rump in the air. The last moonbeam of the evening was snagged in the tangle of her pubic moraine. Alobar reached in from the rear, as if to free it. Like a careless animal on the lip of a tar pit, his middle finger slipped and sank quickly from view. Kudra writhed automatically, then lay still. Her mind was off somewhere. Her body and Alobar waited patiently for its return. He fell asleep with his hand still in place. When the lamas awoke him, well after sunrise, his finger was waterlogged. But Kudra was gone.

One thing about moving out of a Tibetan .Buddhist lamasery, you don't have to hire a cart. Alobar's worldly possessions-a tea bowl, a change of clothing, and a knife that in twenty years had been used only for shaving-were packed in a flash. He bid farewell solely to Fosco. Fosco put down his brush, folded his inky hands upon his belly, and regarded Alobar affectionately. The little lama did not seem surprised by the departure, but rather hurried him to the gate, where, looking into the only blue eyes the Himalayas had ever known, he said something so incomprehensible that Alobar was ready to delay his leave to get to the bottom of it. Fosco withheld any explanation, however, and soon Alobar was winding down the mountainside, pausing every few hundred yards to glance back at the placid walls of Samye. Stone remains, water goes, he thought. For once, at least, he knew where he was going.

In less than a day, he caught up with Kudra. She was squatting by the path relieving herself when he rounded the bend. She leapt to her feet in midstream and threw her arms about him.

"I knew you would follow me," she said, with the kind of confidence some women exude when they sense that they have made a clean capture with the v.a.g.i.n.al net.

"You left without a word," he said. Her kiss, so wet and exotic upon his unpracticed Western lips, vented much of the steam from his accusation.

"I feared that you would talk me out of it. You have talked me out of several things already, including my widow's virtue and my obligation on the funeral pyre."

"Praise Shiva," he said mockingly.

"Praise Shiva," she repeated, after a long pause, and with more than a hint of the poignant.

She still had not pulled up her boy's trousers, and Alobar kneaded her bare, p.i.s.s-damp thighs. "You made it impossible for me to remain at Samye," he said.

"Your stories of the Bandaloop made it impossible for me to remain there."

"So, your destination was the caves."

"My destination is the caves. And you are going with me."

Any protest he might have uttered was drowned out by the fluttering of the pages of the Kama Sutra, dog-eared pages with notes in their margins, which she taught Alobar to read with his one oozing eye, the Kama Sutra being a book that usually opens in the middle and begins at the end.

When the volume had been wiped and placed back on the shelf, they again took to the path. Irrigated by snow-melt, the recently awakened gra.s.s on the slopes glittered like spinach between the teeth of the hard earth. Far below them, in deep, narrow gorges, streams worked themselves into a lather, roaring like all the seash.e.l.ls in the world turned inside out; and above, great cold peaks in mineral armor were trying to smash the sky. Step by step, the path led them down and away from this terrible beauty.

"I have been considering," said Kudra, a tad out of breath, "what you said about desire."

"Ah," said Alobar. "And now you agree that the devotee's desire to be without desire is the most insidious desire of all."

"Not exactly, Alobar. Look at it this way. The word desire suggests that, there is something we do not have. If we have everything already, then there can be no desire, for there is nothing left to want. I think that what the Buddha may have been trying to tell us is that we have it all, each of us, all the time; therefore, desire is simply unnecessary." She stopped to catch her breath. "To eliminate the agitation and disappointment of desire, we need but awaken to the feet that we have everything we want and need right now."

Alobar thought, She is a smart one, smarter even than Wrenna, whom she resembles in odd physical ways. And her v.u.l.v.a is as clever as her speech. I was right to pursue her, though I must be careful that her power does not turn against me, and I must come between her and those sickening oils she likes to smear upon her flesh.

Aloud, he asked, "Do we have everything, you and I?"

They were descending into a small valley. The valley had clouds tipping into it, and the clouds were dark, as if bruised by the jagged thrusts of the peaks. One cloud was so black that Ch.o.m.olungma herself might have battered it. The wind was at their heels and beginning to bark.

"I have lost my husband, my children, my people, my faith," said Kudra. "Yet I feel that still I have everything. Everything, at least, that I deserve. Brrr. It is growing cold."

"A storm is building," said Alobar. "There is one thing we have not, and it is that thing we are obliged to desire."

"And that is?" Kudra b.u.t.toned her vest against the first blown drops of gelid rain.

"Some influence over the unknown tribunal that sentences us to die against our wishes. A reform of that law that decrees death a certain consequence of birth."

The wind had grown so strong it practically rolled them down the path. When Kudra said, "I cannot tell if that be the one valid desire or the greatest deception," she had to yell to be heard. "Perhaps we shall have our answer from the Bandaloop. "

"The what?"

"The Bandaloo-oo-p." The word sailed away on the wind, its vowels banging together and scattering, its consonants tearing the lips of the word like the bit of a runaway horse.

There proved to be no shelter in the valley, not even a boulder leaning at a protective angle, so Alobar and Kudra pressed on. Soon, they were regaining alt.i.tude. By nightfall, the rain had turned to snow, the last blizzard of the Himalayan spring. Should they continue to walk, they might topple into a gorge; should they stop, they might freeze. They walked, keeping to a pace just fast enough to promote circulation.

When dawn finally came, it was only a stain in the sky. Kudra prayed to Shiva and Kali, separately and together, and while looking for a signal from the G.o.ds that light was still on their payroll, she crashed into the trunk of a Yunnan pine that a gale had muscled into the presumed path. She had to sit in a drift until the pain subsided, Alobar draped over her like a human tent. The kneecap swelled up until it was as round as one of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and as tight as a devil drum. She leaned against Alobar and, she hobbling and he shuffling, their bellies agonizing and their energy all but gone, they reentered the mainstream of the storm.

Within two hours, he was not so much supporting as dragging her. She was babbling about sandalwood groves, and marketplaces where crumbs of jasmine flower blew about the streets like music. Although his fingers were numb, he sensed them losing their grip on her.

"Please hold on. Kudra, please hold on. Please, Kudra, please, Kudra, please."

The trail was descending again, but if his calculations were correct, they were yet two days from the foothills. Three days, if the weather didn't break. An eternity, if she couldn't get back on her feet.

"Please, Kudra. It won't be long. ..." He bit his blue lip against the falsehood. "It won't be long until we reach the caves."

She wailed. The cry was so similar to the wails of the widow on the cremation fire that a huge horror seized him, a horror shot through with adrenaline, and he picked her up in his arms and began to run with her.

The horror changed into a kind of giddiness. This must look ridiculous, he thought, though to whom it looked ridiculous he failed to name. He must have meant Death, for in a minute he conceded, "Death has trapped us, that's for sure, but he shall not take us sitting still." And, as the pageant of his life, no less ridiculous than this mad dash in the snow, flashed before him, he laughed and laughed.

Almost immediately the wind fell quiet, like a drunk who has pa.s.sed out in the middle of a rage. The sun burned through and set about boiling clouds into dumplings, then into gravy.

With Kudra somewhat revived, they made the foothills in little more than a day. It was practically on their hands and knees that they covered the final mile. But n.o.body greeted them. The caves of the Bandaloop were empty and bare.

Alobar gathered wood and built a fire. In the process of drying their damp clothing, they slipped into unconsciousness and did not awake for hours. When his eyes did open, Alobar arose and remade the fire. He recognized some herbs not far from the caves, picked them and steeped a strong, green beverage in his bowl. After taking tea, they went to sleep again. This sequence was repeated numerous times, until upon a sunny morning, perhaps four days hence, they found themselves sitting .in a cave mouth, wide awake and reasonably nourished.

Concluding his account of how he had swept her up and run with her, Alobar ventured the opinion that they had survived because he reached a point where he did not take his desire to live seriously. "My desire was no less than before, you understand, but I no longer identified with the desire. Perhaps that is why desire causes men calamity. By identifying with our desires and taking them too seriously, we not only increase our susceptibility to disappointment, we actually create a climate inhospitable to the free and easy fulfillment of those desires."

"Maybe," mumbled Kudra, stretching her sun-warmed muscles until the elastic shuddered pleasurably and a mindless animal happiness collected in a pool at the base of her skull. Alobar is a glorious man, she thought lazily, but this constant prattle about the meaning of things can make a person tired.

Mistaking her reticence for incredulity, Alobar said, "I suppose you think I made it all up. About the Bandaloop, I mean."

In tandem, they turned their heads to stare into the cave, where rock was as raw as a lump in the throat and bats...o...b..ted the dead star of a dank ether.

"I believe you."

"You do?"

"Much incense has been burned in these caves. The traces are faint, but I can smell it."

"I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to hear you say that. But where-"

"It no longer matters," Kudra said firmly. She retrieved a pine bough and, favoring her sore knee, began to sweep the entrance way. "The immortals are gone. Now we are the immortals."

That night they made love on a bed of bhabar gra.s.s, the twisting of her hips nearly weaving it into rope. She progressed from o.r.g.a.s.m into dream without skipping a beat, but Alobar did not so quickly sleep. His arms pillowing his head, he lay beneath the echo circles of the bats and wondered about the former occupants of the caves. In certain ways, he was relieved that they were missing, yet in the velvet shadows of his heart, he sensed that he must someday deal with them, or others equally disturbing: infinity, apparently, did not travel safe highways or join in polite company. But those strange, strange words of Fosco s, what could they possibly have meant?

Fosco, the plump little poem painter, had looked into Alobar's uncomprehending eyes and said: "The next time you encounter Bandaloop, it will be a dance craze sweeping Argentina in 1986."

SEATTLE.

HERE IT COMES, across the stars, eating worlds, sucking the energy out of atoms and suns; here it comes, bullets can't kill it, dogs can't bite it, it refuses to listen to reason; here it comes, it just ate a hydrogen bomb. Oh, my Lord, here it comes, heading our way! nightmare asteroid, maniac vacuum, transcosmic pig-out; can't stop it, drunk on photons, burping pizzas of poisoned plutonium. It wants our oil, it wants our beautiful lumps of coal, it wants Air Force One, Graceland, and the wash on the line; it will slurp every erg, gnaw every volt, unless. . . . It trashed our magnetic laser net, barbed wire is useless, napalm a treat, can't evade it, can't divert it, only this little boy can stop it; big blue eyes, mustard on his T-shirt, this adorable towhead with the discount dirt bike and the h.o.r.n.y mom; only Jeffrey Joshua and his fuzzy teddy bear, Mr. Bundy, stands between us and galactic oblivion; can he . . . ?

Priscilla was watching a TV movie in the bar at El Papa Muerta. She and several other waitresses had completed the setups in the dining room and were awaiting the 5:00 P.M. opening (Seattleites dined early). Ricki was behind the bar, having been promoted recently to a.s.sistant bartender.

Priscilla was watching the movie and not watching the movie. Ricki noticed the part that was not watching and came over. "Have a hard night in the lab?"

"Matter of fact. There's gonna be nothin' but hard nights until I can afford the stuff I need." The "stuff" Priscilla needed was high-quality jasmine oil. It came from France and cost six hundred dollars an ounce. Priscilla figured she needed a minimum of three ounces, to begin with. That would take care of the middle. The^ thete -vnyM sttii t>e ke matter of matching the base note. What was that G.o.dd.a.m.ned base? Sometimes she wished she had left that bottle where she found it.

"Go ahead, tell me your troubles," said Ricki. "As a novice bartender, I need the practice."

Priscilla sighed. She watched a swoosh of rocket exhaust. The TV color needed adjusting, and the rocket blast was as pink as a nursery. She could have used a jet a.s.sist herself, even a soft pastel one. "Ricki," she said, wearily, "do you ever pray?"

"Pray?"

"Yeah, pray."

"Sure I do, honey. I pray all the time."

"Well, when you talk to G.o.d, does he answer?"

"Absolutely."

"What does G.o.d say?"

Ricki glanced around her. The bar was starting to fill up with customers waiting for the dining room to open. "Have you noticed," she said, "that you and I are the only Mexicans in this place?"

"I'm Irish and you're Italian. Ricki, be serious. What does G.o.d say?"

"G.o.d says the check is in the mail," answered Ricki, moving to the waitress station where the c.o.c.ktail girl stood gargling a mouthful of orders.

In a busy restaurant bar, a waitress must order from a bartender in a particular sequence: neats, rocks, waters, sodas, Sevens, tonics, collins, c.o.kes, miscellaneous mixes, juices, sour blended, creamy blended, beer, and wine. This was partly to aid memory, partly to facilitate arrangement of gla.s.sware, mainly to prevent the mix from one drink from tasting in the next (should a bit of 7-Up spill, in the rapid firing of the bar gun, into a collins, it wouldn't be detected, whereas c.o.ke would definitely intrude).

"Jack/soda, tall; four 'ritas, a sunrise, a Dos Equis, and a Bud."

A bartender's beauty is in his moves. Like a lover's, like a matador's. The finished product means little: a spent o.r.g.a.s.m, a dead bull. Satiation and stringy beef. To be sure, there are drinks of fine workmanship and drinks of poor; there are coherent ramos fizzes and incoherent; there are martinis in which the gin is autonomous and martinis where integration and harmony of ingredients prevail; b.l.o.o.d.y marys can suffer high blood pressure or low. Yet Priscilla had never heard a customer complain of a drink, unless it was to impress a companion, unless there wasn't enough booze therein, and at El Papa Muerta, at least, there was always enough booze.

A bartender's beauty is in his moves, in the way he struts his stuff, in the field of rhythms that is set up in the orchestrated hatching of a large order of drinks. A skillful barkeep no more looks at his accoutrements than a practiced typist or pianist peers at the keys, but works with both hands simultaneously, full blast, undimmed by the usual dull requirements of routine. (Even in a lull, with only one drink to mix, he will not slacken his pace nor take a glyptic approach.) When he s.n.a.t.c.hes a bottle from the well, he knows, without looking, that it is grenadine and not triple sec, and if it should prove to be triple sec, too bad, dad, the drink is already mixed. Stirring and sloshing, rinsing and wiping, pouring and garnishing, with a fry cook's retention and an acrobat's timing, he virtually dances through his shift, skating, as it were, on the chunky ice he scoops with furious delicacy into each gla.s.s. The regular at El Papa Muerta was a master of bar dance, he consumed the s.p.a.ce around his station, he had speed, presence, and finesse; his output was huge. Ricki had a lot to learn'. Her style was kinky. Ugly and odd. But Priscilla sensed that Ricki would be a good one in time. To her advantage, she was impatient with small stuff and detail, and with the fussing and adjusting that the dilettante in any field tries to subst.i.tute for inspiration and thus rescue his art. She had a capacity for the grand, and it was with some faint concept of eventual grandeur that she set about to mix the first order of drinks on that autumn evening, her arms-and her mood-arched to parallel the natural curve of flowing liquid.

"Jack/rocks, C.C./water, vodka martini, five 'ritas, one grande, one strawberry; and a draft. That martini takes a twist."

It has entered our solar system. It's becoming our solar system! If that kid doesn't make contact , . . What's that? His teddybear is missing?!?!

Priscilla closed her eyes and slipped into a crack between the bar noise and the movie noise, where, under her coffee-scented breath, she prayed; asking G.o.d, in whom she only marginally believed, what to do about the formula, what to do about Ricki's l.u.s.t and love. She closed, out of habit, with an "amen," not knowing for sure what "amen" really meant, but suspecting that when G.o.d finally ended the world his big boom-boom voice would not bellow "amen" but "Tha-tha-tha-tha-that's all, folks," a la Porky Pig.

Into the dining room she went, virtually limping with fatigue, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up her face with distaste at the diners being shown to their tables. What kind of gourmet would trust a Mexican restaurant where the entrees smelled like ketchup and the waitresses wore sailor dresses? It was a long way from the perfect taco. Five minutes later she was back in the bar, placing her first drink order.

"Two sloe gin fizzes, two fast gin fizzes; three martinis, dry, no starch; twenty-eight shots of tequila, three beers (a Bud, a Tree Frog, and a Coors lite), seven rum separators, five coffee nudges, two Scotch and waters, five vodka and b.u.t.termilks, a zombie, a zoombie, four tequila mockingbirds, thirteen gla.s.ses of cheap white wine, a mug of mulled Burgundy, nine shots of Wild Turkey (hold the stuffing on three), one Manhattan (with eight cherries), two yellow jackets, fifteen straitjackets, thirty-seven flying dragons, nine brides of Frankenstein, and a green beret made with 7-Up instead of sweet vermouth and in place of grenadine, banana liqueur. Amen."

The fraud backfired. Before Priscilla had reached the end, Ricki was in full panic, and even after Pris said, "Make that two margaritas, grande; and a Carta Blanca," Ricki just stood there, up to her elbows in gla.s.sware, looking as if she'd had the brain electricity sucked out of her by the black hole, which on the TV, had stopped eating Grand Coulee Dam and was sharing a granola bar with Jeffrey Joshua. There was at least one tear in her eye. "That was a rotten thing to do to you on your first shift alone," Priscilla apologized. Then she whispered, "Take your break at nine-thirty, if you can. I've got a special treat for us."

But, of course, Ricki wanted something more than the pinch of cocaine, and Priscilla found herself, during break, in the ladies' stall with her panty hose down around her knees.

"I'm sorry, I guess I'm pretty dry."

"That's okay," said Ricki. "I'm like a cactus. I can make maximum use of minimal amounts of moisture."

A loud rap on the restroom door caused them both to jump.

"Pris. Pris, are you in there?"

Priscilla pushed Ricki away and hurried to pull up her Danskins.

"Pris, there's a delivery for you from Federal Express."

It was with mixed emotions that Priscilla headed for the reservations desk. On the one hand, she was relieved to get out of Ricki's grasp; on the other, she was afraid of what that delivery might be. She had received mysteriously almost a dozen beets at her apartment. What if they started to show up at work?

The Federal Express envelope contained no raw vegetables, however, but a fancy, engraved invitation, requesting her presence at a dinner party honoring Wolfgang Morgenstern, the n.o.bel prizewinning chemist. The dinner was to be held at the Last Laugh Foundation. This was even more puzzling than the beets. Priscilla, who had completed but one year of her chemistry major, knew Dr. Morgenstern by reputation only, while, aside from the war room at Boeing Aircraft, the Last Laugh Foundation was the most exclusive turf, the most inaccessible sanctum in Seattle.

"Why me?" she asked.

"The Last Laugh Foundation," mused Ricki. "That's that immortality place."

"I know. Ricki, do you believe in immortality?"

"I'll try anything once."

The cocaine was leaning on the doorbell in Pris's tummy. She was buzzing at the same frequency as the orange auras that had begun to pulsate from the pseudo-Guadalajara wrought-iron light fixtures. Physically, at least, she was primed to return to the dinner trays, freighting what she'd sworn to one diner was "the most authentic Mexican cuisine north of Knott's Berry Farm."

"You aren't upset with me, are you?"