The Dot and Dash Bird

The Myna, in black pomposity of feathers, with chief justice's leveling eyes, worked at its chuffy song, gurrah, gurree, gruh-greeg. Walter Jack Commice ticked out the beat on the surface of his free-shape pale-lemon Formica desk, bop, bop, bop-bop.

When he became aware of what his fingers were doing, he looked up quickly from the puce-colored IBM typewriter to study the dark presiding figure in it curlicued brass cage.

"I spit on your trivialized smut guts, too, scum eyes."

He was not pleased with himself for hating a small incarcerated animal. But facts were facts. Small black magisterial clump of nothing with a sheen of no sympathy in the eye and answering to the name of Jonnikins.

"Jonnikins, your Jerkiness. You and your witch friend Daisy-Dear. Long-term mononucleosis to you both."

Neither did he enjoy malicious thoughts about his mother-in-law. He never laughed at mother-in-law jokes, because he sensed in them a displeasure with women which he believed more suited to fairies, whom he truly hated. Yet how deny he had a mother-in-law who doted on the name Daisy-Dear and insisted on keeping a filthy rotten myna bird she insisted on calling Jonnikins? Keeping the miserable squawker in his study, at his elbow? Not bad enough she had to live here. She had to buddy up to rotten filthy birds that eyed you and made nasty Huntley-Brinkley commentaries you couldn't understand about you and yours. Birds that sat on a stack of statute books handing down sentences and making mucoid rock 'n' roll in their throats. In his study. At his elbow.

"Jonnikins, if you want to know what I think, I think you're a fairy, a feather-bearing damn fairy. I would dance in the streets to see you stretched out conclusively dead with your ugly claws sticking straight up. As for your side-kick and bird of a feather, Daisy-Dear ..."

Drawing back from the darkening thought, he shifted his eyes to the picture window to consider the sunny spread of West Hollywood and Beverly Hills below. From his rose-carpeted and rose-draped study here high over Coldwater Canyon he could make out all the landmarks of the sprawled enterprise called Walter Jack Commice, the California Bank Building, where agents sat collecting his moneys, the Sunset Tower, where business managers were busy disbursing his moneys, the Beverly Hilton, in whose penthouse Escoffier Room he met regularly with television producers and story editors to firm up new assignments, the Park La Brea Towers, where his secretary was at this moment typing up his last script for the Yucca Yancy series, the Bekins warehouse, where he was obliged to store his many bound volumes of old television scripts now that Daisy-Dear insisted on using the closet of his study for Jonnikin's feeds and vitamins and assorted goodies. About him this network of institutions operating on the premise that his hands would continue to fly plottingly and dialogingly over the puce IBM, but when he looked down at a wide city dependent on his ten fingers, the fingers went truant and jogged the myna's growling rhythms.

Bop, bop, they went. Bop, bop-bop.

Daisy-Dear came in slapping her too-large fluffy mules and crossed to her darling's cage.

"Don't mind me," she said, as usual. He was again struck by how much she sounded like her feathered friend, a rasper, a growler. He kept expecting her to grow a beak; she already had the beadiness of eye. "Just want to see how Boy-Boy is."

Sometimes it wasn't Jonnikins. When that love welled up it could be Boy-Boy.

"It would be easier to not mind you," he said, not loudly, "if you didn't start yapping the minute you came in." He added with no loudness at all, "Easier still if you took a slow train to Anchorage."

But by this time she was crooking her finger through the brass bars at Jon-Boy-Boy and saying in a coo, "Are you maybe under the weather, little man? You look peak-ed, definitely."

He felt peak-ed, definitely. He imagined his head was peak-ed and pointy and begging for dunce caps. He stared with disenchantment at the page in his typewriter and forced his eyes to follow the words again:

Quarles (lazily): What makes you think I'm your man, sheriff?

Sheriff Slate (readying hands at holsters): Scar over right eye. Third finger of left hand missing down to second knuckle. You're the one gunned down Farrow, all right. I'd know you anywheres.

Quarles (placidly downing drink in shot glass): You can get in a whole mess of trouble going round making big accusations like that.

Sheriff Slate (fingers stiffening near holsters): You're the one's in trouble now, Quarles. Either you come along quiet ...

Quarles (putting shot glass down deliberately): Now, you couldn't rightly expect me to do that, sheriff. I don't do things quiet. I'm a loud man. I do everything real loud ...

Daisy-Dear reading today's immortal prose over his shoulder. Projecting the editorial lower lip, beaklike. Inanely reporting, "He was saying he's a loud man this morning at eleven. It's three in the afternoon now."

"I've asked you roughly a hundred times not to come in here when I'm working, Daisy. I've asked you maybe two hundred times not to read over my shoulder when you do come in, Daisy."

Eyes slotting now. Two Daisies bereft of their honeying and kissy Dears. She knew when she'd been slapped in the face twice in two sentences.

"Walter. Really. You know I can't go all day without peeking in to see how Jonnikins is."

"And how my script isn't?"

"Now, Walter. You know you're just grumpy because it isn't going well. Two pages in five hours ..."

A double accusation behind that. It was her theory that his study was the best place for Jonnikins because the sound of typing gave him something to think about and generally soothed him. When there was this sound: It was her further theory that her son-in-law was a no-good lazy bum who sat all day counting his fingers and thinking about strip-teasers, and that the lack of busy noises was what made Jonnikins feel neglected and got him under the weather and peak-ed, definitely.

"Five hours is right," he said. "Five full hours of Feathers over there concertizing in my ear. He's in fine, phlegmy voice today."

The thing was that the longer Walter sat, trying to get Killer Quarles to put that shot glass all the way down and draw on Sheriff Slate to force the shoot-out, the more the goddamn prosecuting attorney of a black bird kept throwing the book at him. This sheeny black mess of a black hoppy animal was conviction-happy D. A., rigged jury, hanging judge, and firing and blackballing story editor in one dirty, black ball.

Walter was terrified of getting fired from Yucca Yancy and blackballed from the industry as a deadline misser. He was already three days overdue on this assignment and Quarles was still so disinclined to draw that Sheriff Slate's fingers were going stiff with neuralgia there by his holsters.

"Write, Walter," Daisy-Dear said. "It'll be good for your nerves and for Boy-Boy's, too. Get them six-shooters a-shootin' like sixty!"

She padded out on her sloshing mules.

Gurree, gruh-greeg, admonished the scummy bum of a blackhearted bird.

Bop, bop-bop, went his fingers.

Bump, bump-bump?

What?

Duh, duh-duh?

That little fairy with the celluloid letter opener for a nose? Mm?

• • •

Soon as he heard the station wagon hit the gravel he headed down to the carport. Immediately he was leading her over to a safe conference spot near the hibachi patio grill, close by the vermiform aquamarine swimming pool, saying too fast, "She's your mother and my nemesis. She was in every hour on the hour today, making time with that undernourished vulture and cracks about my work. Get Daisy-Dour for a mother-in-law and you don't need any Romanians. Chris, I swear, if she's going to keep busting into my room with blue pencils going counterclockwise in her eyes ..."

Chris put her shopping bags on the barbecuing machine and said, "Wally. Honey. She's been giving you a workout, I know." She raised up to kiss him on the cheek. "I'll have one last talk with her. If it doesn't do any good, she doesn't live here anymore, that's it. She carried me for nine months, but that doesn't give her any call to needle you for nine years. You forget about it, hon. If I've got to choose between her and you, it's no contest. I know what side of my bread the jam's on."

She kissed him on the neck, over to the left, near the scar where the carbuncle had been cauterized off. Daisy-Dear had insisted on the carbuncle going, because she saw potentialities for cancer in all unusual blooms except her own bloating tongue.

Chris was his one ally. He knew he could count on her against all the editor-eye vultures. Immediately he felt better.

"You're a girl and a half," he said, and meant it.

"I'd better make tracks and a half. Six-fifteen. Oo, oo. Mix the onion dip and get martoonis in the fridge. How're you doing with the Yancy?"

"Nnnh. Quarles's an old chimney. Not drawing properly."

"Ho, ho. Never you mind, hon. You're the A-one chimney sweep in these parts."

His eyes followed with approval as she gathered up the groceries and went off toward the all-electric kitchen, haunch-high, ample, still a curvy and superior bundle. If at times he felt he was a prisoner in the enemy camp, she at least was there with him, tapping out messages of solidarity on the cell wall.

• • •

He thought of Henny Juris. While Chris and her mums were off doing last-minute things in the kitchen, Walter Jack Commice adjusted his legs on the leather hassock, sipped at his panatela, and thought about Henny Juris, wondering why. He had not seen or considered Henny for 16 years, since the Navy. His fingers were making rhythms on the martini glass. He let his eyes go to the glass patio doors, to the well-lit landscaping beyond. In this town you paid high for your red and blue banana trees. But, he told himself, he did not mind. Nothing comes free of charge. Even when you jump for joy you're using up your legs some. All of which did not tell him why his mind was suddenly going back to Henny Juris. Or his fingers jumping on the martini glass, not for joy. He was now on his third martini, not for joy.

The ladies came out to announce that dinner was ready and in a minute they were seated and the maid was serving.

"Chris," Walter said over the jellied madrilene, "you majored in psych. Stimulus-response, reflexes, things of that order. Tell me, do you think animals, the higher animals below humans, are capable of hate?"

"There's the danger of anthropomorphism," Chris said. "Attributing to them specifically human qualities, like being vain about your figure and liking to see your name in the papers and wanting to be at the head of the class. But, yes, I'd give them hate. When the hippopotamus is dismembering the white hunter I don't think his head's full of rosy Christian thoughts."

"You speak of the hippopotamus. What about, specifically, birds?" He kept his eyes carefully away from Daisy-Dear, but he saw the alerted look Chris gave him across the table. "You suppose birds, domesticated birds, can hate other creatures--people?"

"Well, we don't know too much about birds." Chris tasted her Chablis and grimaced approval. "Birds are descended from the reptiles. We don't know a damned thing about what goes on in a snake's head. They're too cold-blooded. Where do your hostilities and resentments trend when your blood stream's down to seventy degrees Fahrenheit?"

"I don't know about snakes, but I can tell you when birds hate you," Daisy-Dear said. Now Chris was giving her (continued on page 232)Dot and Dash Bird(continued from page 229) warning looks, but she paid no attention. "It's when you hate them. You can't blame them. They're sensitive little fellows and they feel things."

"Listen, Daisy." Walter was not inclined to dapple his talk with falsifying Dearies. He knew he should not have had that third martini, but there was no stopping now. "I'll tell you something about that sensitive little chum-buddy of yours. He hates me and everything about me. He even makes fun of my writing, if anybody took the trouble to decipher his stenchy warbles. Exactly like his feeder and fancier. You don't need deciphering. Come clean, now. Don't you make fun of my writing?"

"I think it would be better not to go into literary matters," Chris said cautioningly. Her words were meant for her mother, but Daisy-Dear was too interested in rising to the occasion, the beam of battle was in her eye.

"Since you ask me, Walter," she said happily, full of anticipation, "since you seem to want my opinion, I'm no critic, but I can tell you this, I think it's a shame and a disgrace for a grown man to be spending his life trying to get strutty little outlaws and sheriffs to shoot bullets into each other. There are other things in life besides guns and gore and men with two-year-olds' itches talking tough and with barks at each other. Besides, you can't even get your itchy men to reach for their guns. You get them talking tougher and tougher and longer and longer and--"

No telling how far she would have gone if the maid had not just then come in with the steaming roast beef on a platter. They sat with petrified eyes until the maid was gone again. Then Chris looked directly at her mother and said, "Mother, let's understand one thing. Walter is my husband. I love him and love and approve of everything he does, and if anybody feels differently about it, there's no room for such a person in this house. Is that clear?"

Before the old lady could open her mouth Walter said, "I'm glad you said what you did, Daisy, very glad. It's good to get these things out in the open. Let me just inform you, for your information, that by writing about people who talk tough and itchily reach for their guns, as you so choicely put it, I make over thirty thousand dollars each year after taxes. Some people may have very highly developed critical minds and see what's less than perfect in everything, but if you look at their tax returns--"

"Thank you very much, Walter," Daisy-Dear said. "Thank you for reminding me that I'm a helpless old woman who can't earn her keep anymore and has to depend on the charity of people who don't want her around. I'm well aware of the fact that I'm a pauper and have to live where I'm not wanted. For your information, your toughies with all their itches aren't reaching so much for their guns lately. You're days late with this Yancy and you still can't get Mr. Quarles to stop talking long enough to take a gun to Mr. Slate."

"All right, Mother," Chris said with the firmness of ultimatum. "I think that does it. I think that's just about it. You've been making life miserable for Walter long enough, and my first loyalty is to my husband. You won't be a pauper, Daisy-Dear. We'll see to it that you never want for anything, but you can't stay here. I suggest you go to your room and start packing. We'll make the necessary arrangements in the morning."

"I'll be happy to leave this house," Daisy-Dear said. She stood up with dignity. "I don't care to be in a place where a soul can't speak her mind." She left the room without a look back.

Walter called exultantly after her, "And Daisy-Dear, take iddums Jonnikins with you! Tell him about Dostoievsky!"

He was feeling taken care of and vindicated. The feeling increased when Chris came over and kissed him on the head, saying, "It'll be all right now, darling. This was coming for a long time. I just had to handle it my own way and in my own time."

He patted her hand with all affection. "Thanks, honey. I really mean it. These are the moments that count, when you're tapping strong on the cell wall."

Chris went back to her seat as he said with all heartiness, "Mothers-in-law should be hurried and not seen. You know." But Chris didn't laugh, and Walter couldn't bring himself to laugh either. He knew damned well he was no fairy, but here he was making one of those misogynistic mother-in-law jokes that had fairy overtones. He said as he bent to carve the rib, holding the tools before him like lances, suddenly gloomy, "Damn it. I swear, by midnight Quarles's going to be letting loose at Slate with both barrels." Then his fingers were throbbing obscure semaphors and he was exclaiming, "Henny Juris! Of course! Hon, what we were saying about animals and hate, listen, I just came in mind of a proof! Rumpy! The scratcher, the chuckler, Rumpy!"

"Translate, please," Chris said.

It was all back in Walter's mind: "My God, yes. The squirrel." Around the edges of the memory he was aware of his fingers going faster against the tabletop. "This was a little beast one of the lieutenant jg.s in Newport News had. Lieutenant Quarles, come to think of it, that was his name. I guess I never told you. This Rumpy was, generally speaking, an affectionate little bugger, he really liked people, all kinds, he was forever nuzzling and making up to everybody. The only one he wouldn't kiss and mush up to was Henny Juris. Oh, how that little so-and-so hated Henny's insides. He made Henny's life miserable, I'm telling you. Henny's got scars from where that animal bit his fingers to the bone. Once they had to tear Rumpy off Henny because he was trying to scratch Henny's eyes out. He saw red whenever Henny was in the neighborhood. Spitting and clawing was his one hello. What Rumpy felt for that man wasn't anything as soft as hate. It was homicide, pure and simple."

His fingers were on the speed-up. He was sitting straight, aware of how his breathing had speeded up, too.

"Right!" he said. "Absolutely! Not a word of exaggeration in that! How that squirrel went out of his mind and screamed like a banshee every time Henny came near! You know what his favorite trick was, Chris? He used to go to the bathroom on Henny's desk, on his bedclothes, his shoes, his head, even. He would scamper about, and go to he bathroom all over poor Hen!" Walter moved his hands from the table to his knees, but the fingers went on working. "Henny had a theory about that squirrel. It had to do with the little bugger's owner, Lieutenant Quarles. Quarles loathed and abominated the sight of Henny. It was Henny's thought that he represented everything that went against Quarles' grain and tastes. Henny outdid this guy in officers' training, talked louder and faster, was bigger and stronger, his parents had the standing Quarles' didn't, there were a whole lot of things. What Quarles felt for Henny was one headful of murder!"

"Do I understand you?" Chris said slowly. "You're saying when a human feels something very strongly it can get communicated to an animal?"

"Can and does!" Walter said excitedly. "And it's for the precise same reason hat Jonnikins has that baleful look when I'm around that he'd like to do me in! That kind of concentrated venom and bad feeling has to come from somewhere! We know its source!"

"Well," Chris said, "be that as it may. I don't think we know enough about animals to get that detailed about what they feel or don't feel. Anyhow, you won't be bothered by Jonnikins anymore. Or Daisy-Dear. Whatever the ESP between them. We're going to have a life of our own around here, a little peace and quiet once more, thank the Lord. I've been meaning to ask you, hon, why do you keep drumming with your fingers that way?" Walter's hands were back on the table.

"Oh, I guess it just comes from working at the typewriter all day," Walter said neutrally. "Writer's tic, or something. Writer's tock. Let me ask you something, Chris. They gave you Morse-code training in the Waves. You make anything of this?" He repeated the beat with his fingers, dup, dup, dup-dup.

"Search me," she said. "I don't remember my dots and dashes. It's been a long time."

"Eighteen years," Walter said, drumming. "A lot goes. Sounds to me like there's a pattern there, but I can't get it. I'll have to look it up."

"Where's it from?" Chris said. "The way Daisy-Dear slaps around in her slippers or clears her throat? In that case, maybe you better not do any looking up. What you don't know can't go to the bathroom on you. You know." She said "Ha, ha" at him hopefully, but he ignored the call to lightness.

"It's from an animal," Walter said. "A cold-blooded reptilian bird of my acquaintance. I think he's trying to say something to me, but I'm not sure."

When Chris went to the bedroom to undress, Walter followed her here and there.

"Tell me the truth, hon," he said after a time. "Do you agree with any of the things Daisy was saying about me, I mean, really? Don't you ever get any secret sour thoughts about me because I've given up my ideas of writing novels and just bat out these Yancys and drivel like mat? I wouldn't blame you if you had some reservations, sweets, but I'd like to know. We've never really talked about it."

"Oh, dear, darling, dotable Walt, of course I don't have any reservations. Whatever you do is what I want you to do. Walt, I'll tell you this one last time. I think you're a marvelous writer, a beautiful writer, and I think everything you write is perfect. And I'm glad we finally had the blowup with Daisy-Dear. You'll see. Once she's gone the atmosphere around this house is going to get very clear and friendly. Very, very friendly."

It was true. She kept tapping on the prison wall, spelling out messages of comfort and chin up. He kissed her lingeringly and with full conviction.

"Going to get another hour of work in, sweets. If Juridical Jonny hasn't gone to the bathroom on my IBM. Sleep tight. Love you fulsomely."

Two hours later Killer Quarles was still proclaiming what a loud man he was and Sheriff Slate's hands were still hovering like trapped mynas over his holsters. As Walter's hands hovered like trapped and irreverently screeching mynas over his typewriter. He had placed the night covering over the cage and Jonnikins was tomb still, but Walter was excruciatingly aware of the bird, heard its roaringly silent comments on the state of letters in the nation and the accumulation of clanking deadlines for the grubs. Below, deep down from these Santa Monica hills, in the valley of collectors and disbursers who had come to a standstill waiting for Walter's new script, the valley which, like an impervious mouth breathed with chesty beggings for more Yancy shoot-downs, all the lights were blinking in a rhythm Walter took to be one, two, one-two. Over the typewriter keys Walter's fingers twitched, one, two, one-two. There was nothing for it. He got up with a growl, crossed the room, whipped the covering from the cage.

Immediately the bright pellet eyes were on him and the festering black throat was going strong, one, two, one-two. Then other throaty pulses. Highs, lows, chirpy middle-range tones.

Walter reached for a pad and pencil and began to make notations, dots for the short and hyphenated sounds, dashes for the sustained ones.

The bird sang, the pencil flew.

When the sheet was half covered with these markings, Walter went to the bookcase and ran his finger along the shelf with the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He took down the "M" volume. He sat at the desk and opened this volume to the entry for "Morse Code." There it was, from A to Z.

He wrote for a bit, put shaking hand to wet forehead, said, "My God, my God," and wrote some more.

The bird sang, gruh-greeg, gurree.

In a husky, strangulated voice, Walter began to read the words on his pad:

"Call yourself a writer? You haven't got one drop of talent. You're an uninspired hack. You couldn't write your way out of a paper bag. Your badmen and sheriffs are all finger-crooking fairies pretending to talk tough. Fairies who can't stop talking garbage and for once reach for their guns ..."

The bird stared bold and sang, gurree, gurrah.

"Oh, my living, forgiving God," Walter whispered. "It is high time that woman left this house. The malice, the malice she bears me."

Then he was filled with a fury. He was remembering what Henny Juris had done to the squirrel that night he came back to quarters and once again found his sheets, his shirts, the letters from his fiancée and his money indiscriminately gone to the bathroom on. Henny had taken Rumpy up by the neck and thrown it from the barracks and far into the night.

At this moment Walter felt that he had been gone to the bathroom on from head to foot.

He went to the cage, opened it and reached in for the sooty concertizer. He got his hand firmly on the black, rotten throat, but he could not squeeze, he couldn't. He took his enormous compact burden to the picture window and cranked open the mobile pane to one side and pushed the outside screen open. He held the struggling, fluttering bird out through the window, toward the blue and red banana trees.

"Back where you came from," Walter whispered. "Even if you have to change trains."

He loosened his fingers. Jonnikins flew off in a whir of foul feathers, singing festeringly, gurrah, gurree.

Walter stared after him, breathing heavy. He felt full of felony but there was relief in it, release. At last he took up his pencil and pad from the desk, along with the volume of the Britannica, and started down the hall to the bedroom, down past Daisy-Dear's room from which came the sounds of histrionic humming and drawers being slammed.

Walter had the strong feeling that here now was something tangible that Christine should know. Her horizons were not wide enough, praise be, to allow for the full working out of truly poisonous processes. She had to know how far Daisy-Dear had overstayed her human welcome, how close to absolute crisis they'd all come.

He stood over her bed and said softly, "Chris? Hon? Hear me? Something you should see."

He listened to her weighty, troubled breathing. She was not snoring, really, but there was this low rasping and catching in her throat. Irregular. Sometimes slow, sometimes hurried. Vague, dissipating smile on her face.

He stiffened.

Listened more carefully to the smothered sounds.

What?

One, two ...?

He listened some more.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and began to make notations, dashes for the long rasps, dots for the short, run-together ones. His hand was shaking so much that at one point the pencil slipped from his fingers.

He flipped open the reference volume and tried to focus his eyes on the chart. Forced his rebellious hand to write, letter by letter, word by word.

When he had enough lines transcribed, Walter Jack Commice held the pad up and began to read with disheveled lips, feeling that he had been gone to the bathroom on by the world's population of squirrels, birds and wives:

"Who ever said you're a writer? There's not a drop of talent in your veins. You're the hack of hacks. You couldn't write home for money. All your tough guys are absurd little fairies and that's why ..."

My God ...

Chris breathed suckingly, snugly, privately, smilingly, one, two, one-two ...