Читать книгу WASH ME ON HOME, MAMA - Pete Najarian - Страница 12

BUSTER

Three duck eggs scrambled gently with a little dill, a baguette of sour dough and a heavy cup of strong French Roast as he looked over the garden and enjoyed himself. Indian summer a dominion of weeds, the tall broccoli sprouting yellow flowers. The first cigarette of the day rumbled his belly toward the pleasure of the john. He shat a big rich brown heap of yesterday’s life, yawned a great bone-cracking cosmic sigh, and stared in the luminous mirror:

— Hello, Meatball!

Flesh the Great Beatie would one day roll into a ball of dung. And now what should he do with his life? Be could enjoy himself, or he could get a job. The Venerable Bum, a big mound of hair on top of bulk. You want to hug him as if he were a friendly bear, gentle strength swaying softly barefoot across the garden to his garage next to the duck yard and the chicken house. He poured himself a second cup of coffee from the old gray porcelain percolator on the pot-belly stove and then settled into the raw clean-smelling ply wood desk and the pleasure of freshly sharpened pencils. And once again mesmeric doodles flowed from his nimble fingers, the enormous talent and prodigious indolence like twenty pounds of dictionary flowing patiently with the soft refrain: it will all work out, it will all work out, it will all work out. And all the tears behind the twinkling eyes were held inside by little pleasures that locked his heart.

Later on he decided to do a little work. Tacked to the old gray wood of the tool shed smiled a print of a Chinese scroll, two Sung monkeys playing in the branches of a juniper tree. Buster grabbed the shovel, the pick, and the machete, and went to the duck yard. Clearing the blackberry bush for the ducks he loved he thought of settlers in wildnerness. With his arms bleeding in the sun he thought of Berkeley as a wilderness, the heart of the Beast. And thinking of Guevara he transformed his work into an adventure. Sucking delicious blood and sweat from where the thorns had cut his arms, he whacked at the bramble and with each whack of the machete he imagined a jungle: whack for Guevara, whack for satchidananda, whack for everybody, and whack for the ducks.

Enough bush in the back for plenty of berries, and clearing this one in the center would leave space for a pond, the big pool of duck happiness. But the bramble was tight, woven with generations, and no end or beginning to untie the knot, no way to clear it except by slicing, slicing vine by vine like a pioneer in a forest. The butter flies applauded with a ballet over the fence. Finally he had it all down and rolled it tumble by tumble to the truck. Now with the pick he ripped into the white pulpy roots that gripped tight to the soil, generations fat from their undisturbed sucking. He smashed and killed them, his hands burning, biceps swelling. He sighed:

— Ah, it feels good.

The two mallards, the muscovy, and the six white Pekings stared at him not with curiosity but fear, their steady unblinking eyes wide like lunatics tortured with paranoia.

—It’s for you guys, you quack-quacks. A big pool. Cool water. Happiness.

They kept staring at him standing there with the pick in his hand, all their wings clipped, each one held captive in his prison.

And now to complete my gestalt is Daphne, the youngest member and the only one who works “out there,” commuting between here and the world outside the driftwood fences of the garden. She moved in after telling her old boyfriend to go fuck himself, and then she got the job at the Post Office she’d been waiting for. She’ll be here for a while, but not for long.