You. You got this out of my files somehow. This was locked up in my study. [Looking up, amazed] You won’t stop, will you? It’s never going to end, is it? You want to keep me in there forever, don’t you? You don’t really believe in rehabilitation. It’s just a way to keep us out of print. [Soft, unbelievable horror. Pause. Bitter resignation. Determination] All right, I’ll read it. I’ll read every damn word of it. It may be the only time I’ll get to. [Bracing himself, adjusting tie, one hand on knee, beginning …] And it was with a timorous expression of the wide upturned Afro-American nostrils that, arched and slightly hissing, Otis McQuay paused and turned toward his eating, sitting, brother, the twin, the Aquarius, the one with whom he had shared the dark bloody nacreous unlighted cavern of his mother’s womb, and sniffed, hesitantly, not blatantly or in open astonishment or anything so challenging as that, at the malodorous gases drifting cloudlike and thick as turtle soup down the rough unplaned splintered wobbly table to where he sat eating his butter beans and cornbread, his stance like that of a bluetick on a mess of birds. For it was not in his nature to be challenging. Then he heard it, the slight thin whistle like steam escaping, and his eyes shifted quickly in their sockets, huge and white and rolling. Trapped, with him now, his own supper but half eaten, frozen in that indecision or flight or willingness to endure, to stand, the muscles of his legs coiled tight as screen-door springs, his hands on either side of his plate like dead or wounded or dying blackbirds, while all around him the fumes grew stronger and more malodorous, more pungent. The air grew rank, grew right funky. There came a long ragged sound like paper tearing and it was chopped off short, immeasurably loud in the close silence. Then like two toots on a bugle came the next two toots: toot, toot. But it was not the brass mouth of a trumpet, not an instrument of music that played that sorry scale. It was something deeper, more sinister—

I think that will do.

a sound born not of clean air and lungs but a fecund, a ripe smell, like burning shoes …

Your Honor, I think we’ve proved our point. … Bailiff,·would you show this man to his seat?

… like dead rattlesnakes, like soured slops, like contaminated sheepdip—

Could we get the bailiffs to perform their duties, please?

[Bailiffs surging forward, babble of voices rising from courtroom, judge rapping gavel]

Like moldy mattress stuffings! Like bad cheese!

Your Honor! Could we have order restored! Please!

[Judge rapping gavel louder, bailiffs grappling with defendant on witness stand, now wild-eyed, smiling! Defiant! Eyes ablaze!] Like putrid prairie dog meat! Wait! There’s more! Do you hear me! Just listen!

Big Bad Love

Part III

92 Days
for buk

1