The Roach Powder in the Maple Walnut

Things were looking up for Simon. He had finished ghosting another book for Pandro Harlow the sexologist around the Pandro Harlow thesis that an outlet is an outlet is an outlet. It was the peppiest broadside yet against the bigots who favor one orifice over another, and Pandro was pleased.

Pandro had paid Simon the last $5000 and thrown in $1000 as bonus. So Simon had money. Also, with the job done, he had time to play.

Plus a girl to play with. He thought he had a girl, was about to have a girl.

Two weeks before completing the job, he'd been lazing through Sheridan Square trying to think out Pandro's last and in many ways Sunday-punch chapter. It was to lay out the Games Theory approach to sex. The idea was that sex, like all human projects, is a variety of game playing. The professional player does not put taboos on any part of the playing field. He defines no portion of the arena as out of bounds. He tries to cover the whole field and run up the best score possible. The champion golfer never says these orifices are good and those bad, he shoots all 18 orifices as expertly as he can. Sexual athletes will work for the same thoroughness once sex is recognized as a branch of athletics. So-called deviates, because they play so fully and exuberantly, have been prominent among mankind's front-runners. So-called deviates have led in cultural flowerings.

As he poked along, Simon asked himself questions about the orifice tourists. Is culture one more orifice? Some maybe can't tell their culture from a hole in the ground?

This wasn't thinking it out. This was thinking it down and out. His mind lagged, and with it his feet, as he tried to think creatively across Sheridan Square.

On the West Third side a crowd had formed around a young Negro poet. The Negro poet was explicating in a lashing basso that this nation would be turned into an ocean-to-ocean Watts: the Age of the Molotov Cocktail was being ushered in.

Simon stopped to consider the Negro poet's ferocious jollity and tight pants. Hell's Angels boots and gold ring in pierced left ear did not look right on a soapbox: meager programmatically.

A girl circled the crowd passing out leaflets. Her hair was black and her eyes were gray and she spilled from her shiny leather pants splendidly. The pants, by all signs, had alarmingly less square footage than did the skin coextensive with them. She was handing out her leaflets with the largess of a dean handing out diplomas.

Simon took one: invitation to a street-corner rally for get-out-of-Vietnam. She saw he was looking at her in an apolitical way and was not sure she welcomed it.

"That's what's happening," she said, tilting her head toward the emphatic poet. "Watts and more Watts."

"Doesn't it bother you when a speaker predicting blood baths wears one gold earring?"

"Maybe he can't afford two."

"If his budget's as tight as his Levis, he could afford none."

Her eyes did some melting. She tolerated a laugh. Some welcome edged into her air.

"Hey, you say funny things. What's your name?"

"Simon Dwire, what's yours?"

"Lee Abends."

"Lee Evenings? You're German?"

"Pennsylvania Dutch. They live by the clock, so some name themselves by the clock. There was a girl on my block in Allentown named Jenny Morgend, Jenny Morning."

"We had a Horace Mittag in my class in college. Horace High Noon."

"I went to Swarthmore with a Lucilla Nachmittag, Lucilla Afternoon. Maybe she should have been after Horace."

"What'd you study at Swarthmore, getting out of Vietnam?"

"No, I studied how to get out of Allentown and Swarthmore. I took top honors in those subjects and now I'm doing my fieldwork."

She urged a leaflet into the hand of a collegiate-looking young passer-by in a mustard-on-mustard chesterfield. He carefully blew his nose in it, wadded it into a ball, punted it west.

"He likes it in Vietnam," Simon said.

"Be a nonreader," Lee Abends said to the diminishing chesterfield. "When Watts gets to Madison Avenue you'll read. Your obituary. Listen, Simon Dwire, why'd you come down here, to heckle?"

"No, I was getting some air and trying to formulate some thoughts on the Games Theory approach to sex."

"What's that?"

"It's what I make my living at, I mean, I write about it. It's essentially a theory that sex can and should be made gamy."

"That what you're for, gamy sex?"

"Well, sex is something I think people should be game for. I'd like to talk to you about that, make my position clear."

He had inventoried her. Not only was her face a satisfactory face in a gathered, pre-pounce way. Her body was close to cornucopiate and by many signs a better orifice than culture. Huskiness alleviated cunningly by curviness, so even where most solid it came out in an abundance shapely rather than meaty. It didn't seem likely that with her free-lunch lines she'd have the triangle of air between her inner thighs that always disconcerted Simon. You could never be sure. But her tastily sculpted massiness argued against it.

"What do you do, Evenings?" he went on. "I'll rephrase that, what do you do evenings—or nights? Some night if you'd like I'll buy you a steak and we can talk about outlets and sports."

She thought he was some variety of flip but not unfunny. She gave him her number. The day Simon collected his $6000 from Pandro Harlow he felt like catching up with his less consequential side, his playful side; he called the overflow leaflet girl. She said fine, sounded great, she'd be at his place 7:30, order her one cow medium rare.

• • •

They had Scotch on the rocks at his West Tenth apartment, daiquiris at Peor's and then a Bodegas Bilbenas white with the filetes de puerco adobado, Tuaca brandies at Cool Sounds while the midget m.c. in his Barbie-size swallowtails sopranoed his androgyne hipness, stingers back at his place. They got boozed up fine, but Lee's mood was no perkier. She had been down when she rang his bell and down she remained even as she wabbled once more into his basement-floor-front under guidance from his wabbly hand.

She had just this afternoon received one more goddamn letter from her goddamn father, she said. Letters from her goddamn father always ricocheted her into the moper's sidest pocket. What was in the letter? She wouldn't try to summarize such bastardly bilge. Simon could smut up his own eyes on said bilge. She fished around in her saddlebag and handed him the letter. It had a harmless enough text:

"Puss Girl, Now don't tear this up without reading. I'm saying no more about your uncombed friends and their mimeograph machines. Why you'd want to sit down and lie down on uncomfortable stones and pavements beats me when they're making such dandy innerspring mattresses these days, but that's your business. I've heard there are Hindu Indians who get their 40 winks on beds of nails, so why should you treat your bones better than the Hindu Indians? I'm not making more pitches for your going back to college either. I didn't raise my daughter to be a dropout, but if you want to pretend you're a Mexican-American grapefruit picker or a Mississippi Negro shoeshine boy deprived of educational opportunities, I guess it's good training for an actress in case you ever want a career in acting. I'm not even going to ask you again not to be ashamed of me because I manufacture high-quality kitchen ranges with the best patented rotisseries on the market and make enough money from this to winter in Nassau and send my daughter to Swarthmore to be Miss Dropout of 1966. The only thing I'm writing to inquire about is how much future there is in stretching out on railroad tracks in front of troop trains. I'll grant you it can be rewarding on a moment-to-moment basis, especially if you get enough state troopers to carry you to the paddy wagon, it's a queenly feeling to be transported in this luxury maharani way, but all the same, you've got to think of tomorrow, styles change, tomorrow they could move their troops by air, I know you're an unusually gifted girl, but I don't think it's running down your many talents to suggest even you can't figure out a way to lie down in front of a plane 30,000 feet up. What I want to propose, Doll Girl, is that you take a year's sabbatical leave from your corridor campouts and mimeograph machines and see a little of the world, all expenses paid. Travel can be broadening even to a corridor connoisseur and mimeograph fancier. See how the other half of the corridor-camping and mimeograph-turning world lives. I'm ready to put up every cent for the expedition, any style you want. Of course, if in your travels your eye gets diverted by a couple of nice paintings or churches to the extent that you forget about fussing cops, or if you meet a nice young Peace Corps civil engineer somewhere in Afghanistan that you'd like to do something besides charge riot squads with, I won't put up any fight. You know what kind of permissive parent I am. All I want is for you to spend a year not getting arrested so your horizons can expand somewhat beyond municipal and county jails. If at the end of the year's moratorium on your one-dropout war against the human race you want to end the cease-fire, I won't stand in your way. I'd just like to see you get some more education before you qualify for some Federal Penitentiary. Lifers should have a lot to think about or time will hang heavy on their hands. Education can help in that respect. What do you say, Kitten? You can even take a slow boat to China and see Mr. Mao if you think you'd like his brand of fortune cookies. Though I suspect you'll find just one fortune in all his cookies: Better blight than white. I'm not commenting on his politics, just his color schemes. You don't have to remind me that we've got some color scheming in this country, too. I just sent another contribution to Martin Luther King. Incidentally, if you decide to poke around in Mao country, it might be interesting to check on how many sit-ins they have compared with the per-capita frequency of mimeograph machines. If you find any Martin Luther King around Peking who's conducting sit-downs in front of Chinese troop trains to protest Mr. Mao's plans to wipe out the white race, let me know, I'll send him a check, too. Your loving father with the great big abominable checkbook, Harrison."

"He's permissive and he's funny," Simon said. "You taking him up on the offer?"

"I'd like to take him up in a Mariner IV and leave him there," she cronked. "Call that an offer? It's a bald-faced bribe."

"Bribe to do what, grow up?"

"That's the one thing he's terrified I'll do. Registering Negro voters and fighting militarism is my way of growing up and believe me it's growing me up fast. His establishmentarian idea is that only by dropping these adult concerns and playing footsie with museums and civil engineers can his Puss Girl grow up."

"Aren't you reading too much into this letter? Maybe your father's just saying some growing up can be done indoors as well as out, without squad cars screaming up."

Her gray eyes were storm centers.

"Listen, how old are you, anyway?"

"Thirty-one."

"There you go. There you are. We've got a saying, Don't trust anybody past thirty, and I guess it's with basis. The barricades are up everywhere between go and stall and they cut right across the population at age thirty. You've got Yale locks on your mind same as my father. Course you'd take his side, the establishment side, against me."

"I'm not taking any side, I'm not saying a word about your politics, and I don't think your father is particularly."

"Shit he isn't. There's a war going on and he's offering me a bribe to be a deserter and that's plenty political, they wouldn't shoot deserters in wartime if deserting wasn't political, remember the Private Slovik case."

"Lee, you're not Private Slovik. The way I read it, your father's only suggesting you can be such a wholesale joiner that you desert yourself. He's asking you to look things over for a year and try to apply for a membership card in yourself."

"I'm not going to argue this with you. I don't argue with reactionaries. All I want to know is why a reactionary would want to buy dinner for, and ply with drinks, a damn-fool joiner. You boring from within, that what you're doing?"

"More accurately, I'm being bored from without. Look, Lee, I didn't call you up to discuss politics, I called because I thought it'd be nice to have some drinks in a relaxed mood and talk about games and outlets. Well. You've been grousing and griping and wearing a long face all evening, because of this damned letter, it now emerges, and I'm just trying to show you the letter isn't such an insult and mortal blow after all, and certainly no reason to put aside all games and not discuss so much as one outlet."

The thing was, when she sprawled back on the couch this way, with one solid leg folded under her, her solid hip sworled up in an acutely invitational way, a spill of the best commodity, suggesting the sort of nerve-laving culture one would give the eyeteeth and, if necessary, the eyes, to hole up in: He wanted those slaty pupils molten enough to be lobbing more than slogans at him, from less than the sloganeer's remove.

"Bugger the world up and down," she said with no pleasure. "An establishment-propper like you, I swear, I don't know what I'm doing here."

"My point is that you're not doing it," he said. He moved less than steady to the couch and put his hands on as much of her as possible. "There. Now you're closer to doing it." He moved through barricades, a goer rather than a staller, man who wouldn't take no for an answer or even waste time questioning. "There. Now you're on the verge of doing it. Now you're making the barest beginning at doing it."

She was still fuming, but offered no obstacle to his undressing her. She lay back as at an obscure sit-in in the twisty corridors of appetite. "Buy me off," she said dizzily. A little later she said through fixed teeth, "Don't want to go round the world." Later still: "Yale locks." There were no words from her for a time. She was not resistant but definitely passive, sluggish but dogging it. Then she was flurrying, masses in motion, unpatterned stir, strain on all frontiers, and saying, "All right now, all right then, you get me over the hump, you."

He didn't. Nobody did. Massy she was and not to be moved, though doggingly, ditchingly motile. Much want in furied leakage everywhere, the random ravening.

They were lying side by side soundlessly, he lighting a cigarette, she twitching from one position to another, fluttered, gray eyes sloganed again, when the phone rang. He was just able to reach it from the couch.

"Hello, who's this."

"Simon, son, I'm on the edge of dying, your mother is poisoning me."

His father with his utmost conspirator voice. Even talking low, he might be heard by the ubiquitous telephone buggers he imagined were everywhere, but chances must be taken.

"Couldn't this wait till morning, Pop?"

"If it could wait till morning, would I be calling you in the middle of the night, son. Listen to me, Simon, believe your father, for two days and nights now she tries to sneak it down my throat, I know what it is, cyanide, cyanide from the roach powder, she says chopped liver and ice cream and lettuce and tomato sandwiches, but it's cyanide in different forms, she's my fine cook, oh, yes, this time she'll cook me into the grave. I have taken no food for two days and nights, Simon, dear son, I'm weak, I haven't got the strength of a kitten in my bones, I am in principle opposed to bothering you with my troubles, but I can't go on like this, this woman must be stopped or there'll be murder in the family and a whole scandal——"

"You're hungry, Pop, but if you go to sleep you won't be hungry and she can't poison you in your sleep. you get some sleep and in the morning I'll come down and take you to the corner drugstore and buy you a big breakfast, ham and eggs, French fries, she won't be able to poison that."

His mother's sniping voice came through from the background. She was no doubt standing in the doorway to the old man's room, withered in her totality of scorn, miniaturized by the abrading of years and wraths, tented by oversize cotton nightgown, cosmic disgust on face and eyes flashing the semaphore of a specially coded fury to which only the old man held the full cipher book.

"You're such an animal? You don't make life miserable enough for your one and only son during the day you've got to disturb his precious sleep, too, you animal? Suck and suck and suck that poor boy's blood?"

"Now you stay away from this room and from me, Elsa, I give you warning," his father said with the rage of the totally declawed, his tone offering dire upshots which would never precipitate down from fantasy. "I have the right and the obligation to tell my son I have had no human bite of food in my mouth for two days and nights because of your plots, he's got to know, who else should I turn to?"

"You rob your son of his sleep, too, the one and only possession you have not robbed yet?" his mother said. "Give me the phone, you animal."

"Keep your distance, Elsa, and you don't get harmed."

"I said give me that phone. liar and selfish animal."

Sounds of struggle. Percussion of a heavy object against the floor, probably the phone. More indications of scuffling, scrapings on wood, heavy breathing, grunts and groans of combat, a splintering.

Simon nibbled at his thumbnail, waiting. He was aware of Lee Abends' sullen eyes memorializing humps not overcome, pinning blames.

Finally his mother's voice: "Simon, this is a terrible thing he does but forget it, son, go back to your broken sleep if you can."

"He thinks you're poisoning him, boss."

"Could he think he poisons himself, son? A man with such a wholesale supply of poisons in his veins, he has to yell he didn't manufacture them himself, some enemy put them there. Who should put them there. Me. Elsa, the enemy. Elsa, the poisoner. You know how I poison this beast? With maple walnut, Simon, his favorite, I throw your hard-(continued on page 216) earned money away on ice creams for his sweet tooth so naturally I don't feed him like a lazy baby, I poison. Go back to sleep, son."

"I heard glass breaking, boss, what was that?"

"The dish with the maple walnut he has the gratitude to say is roach poison, Simon. He threw the dish at me, this critic of New York's best ice creams."

"I'd better come down and see if I can't straighten this out, boss."

"This I do not accept, son, I forbid you to worry your head with this mental institution we run with your hard-earned money. Wipe us nothings out of your mind and get a night's sleep, Simon, darling."

"Save me, Simon," his father moaned from some far corner of dread. "The she-wolf kills me, without your help I won't last till morning."

"Shut your lying scheming mouth," his mother said. "Simon, you don't disturb your earned rest more, this I do not allow."

"I'll catch a cab, boss, I'll be there in forty minutes."

He hung up. He lay propped against his pillow surveying his hands. They were cupped again, yes, but not for fondling Lee's or anybody's breasts, for taking hold and twisting to a corkscrew some neck or other, the old man's, the boss', the poisoned world's, he couldn't be sure, cared less.

"Trouble?" Lee said.

"Breathing going on. My father thinks my mother is putting roach powder in his maple walnut and my mother is calling him an animal for this hypothesis. It's their way of breathing. They call me every so often to assure me they're still breathing so I won't worry."

"Why would he think she's poisoning him?"

"Who should he trace the poisons to, himself? Do you get enough focus naming yourself the poisoner? Don't you like focus, too? Don't you join movements?"

"Jesus, are you going to quit these political attacks?"

"Nothing political about it, Lee. This is chemistry."

"I'll ignore these pokes because you've got a lot of unfunctional shit on your back, Simon, that's a load nobody needs."

"I don't need it, but it keeps me in condition."

"Parents. Ballast to sink us all. And you defend them."

"Was I defending? I just wasn't attacking. Parents tend to sink, yes, they're like everybody else. But it's not their major program to suck you in after them."

"Isn't it, though. It's what makes it fun for them."

"I'll grant you sinking objects create an inviting suction. But you've got the option to sink or swim."

Except that he was mighty tired of swimming against all this suction.

"In theory. In practice they give you better education in sinking than swimming so the option's mostly academic."

"Your father's offering you the best education you can find. There's more evidence yet that his sole aim in life is not to sink you, he wants to send you around the world in a leakproof boat."

"To get me away from the real things."

"The world's real. So's this hump you can't find to picket and hand out leaflets against. I'd better get dressed."

"You really have to go? At this hour?"

"When they're like this, breathing deep, it takes a visit from me to shame them quiet. It's a therapy we've worked out, I crawl down there, they beat their breasts over what they're doing to their burdened son, and for a time he stops thinking he's being poisoned and she stops calling him animal. Well, shit, where are the untainted maple walnuts these days? You find taints in the world's maple walnuts, too. You join movements to remove the taints. Maybe not to remove. Maybe more to dwell on. That's not to run down the movements."

"Simon, listen, I'm trying hard not to get sore, but don't push me. Listen, will you make love to me again before you go, could you? I could use it, I'm sure jumpy."

She was good for holding, a fine, full bundle. All space worth filling she could fill the best. With her you knew you had superior pulsed substance against you. But again for a time she was all but inert, though infinitely needy. Primed for begging but wouldn't or couldn't reach. Whatever runaway itch was in her was not to be located, much less salved. What need she had could in no way be made contiguous with any need of his. There was in her some throb of total demand, but it remained mute, smothered, and without its implementation of effort. She wanted, all right. What, was the question. Where. How. Now or in the next century. Implicit in her refusal to localize or try was the accusation that if supplicated he would refuse. So she skipped the supplication and went limp from the first in protest of his extrapolated refusal. It was Games Theory, all right, the extrapolated loser's.

Then she was windmilling again, dumped from her pressure-cooking coma into a manic randoming with all parts, a quaking, a thrashing, going all ways against the refuser world; and grinding with a spit of challenge into his ear, "Get me over, damn you, get me over."

He immediately came away. With an upward yank he got himself sitting on the edge of the couch. There she went assigning impossibles again. To prove her want was beyond his reach and the one deficiency was in his reach.

"What, what, what is the matter with you?" she said.

"You're against militarism? And bark your orders?"

"What're you saying, I'm not to be considered in this, only you?"

"I've considered you, Lee. I've considered how your big refuser is you. How your program is to fight the refusing world. How it takes one to know one. That's all the consideration I can spare. Balls, I've got to get out of here."

He began to dress. Her hanging-judge eyes followed him as he pulled on his clothes.

"You son of a bitch, you're going to leave me like this."

"Right, exactly the way I found you."

"You son of a bitch, I'm just to stew."

"Try to see that it's in your own juices."

"You want me to wait for you?"

"If you want."

"Will you try again if I wait?"

"All right, Lee, we'll try again. If you'll try not to bark more orders. Chains of command get too tight around the windpipe."

Sure they'd try again. Her gray eyes pushing into his sockets and grayly asking, tasting the gray, miserly turndowns in advance. She mobilizing herself not at all and then too much. The full flinging muster, to engage an enemy forever out of sight though given the name Simon for the evening, for focus. A guerrilla Vietnam she didn't know how to get out of because it was encamped in all her synapses.

"Miss Dropout who can't drop out of herself," he said as he leaned over her. "Why're you so hard on the easiest orifice? Have you located your own Yale locks?" He leaned closer, kissed her on the hot, sweated forehead. "Sure, Lee, all right, we'll try again. I'll try to be a nice young civil engineer."

When he got outside he noticed his hands were cupped again. Not for her, not for his parents' necks either. Maybe for all the lousy roach powders that contaminate all the otherwise lovely maple walnuts, once we sneak them there so we can gag on them.

• • •

Chatham Town was a low-cost private housing development on the perimeter of Chinatown, not far from Chatham Square and the Bowery flops, overlooking the East River, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge; two city blocks of 15-story packing crates that were the city's experimental models for tomorrow's tenements: instant slum. He'd moved his parents down here from Fall River so he could more easily referee their carnage. He'd found it expensive and time-consuming to referee from New York when the bloodletting went on out of town.

He took the elevator up to the eighth floor and let himself in with his own key.

The boss was sitting as he expected she'd be sitting, prisoner in a homemade dock, repelling comfort as an undesirable alien trying to get across the border illegally: Her martyrdom was not to be diluted by foam rubber. The three-room apartment was furnished in the grab-bag style, no rugs, no frills, no throw pillows, just the bare-bone structures to sit and lie on. In this living room, which doubled as her bedroom because she and her mate could no more sleep in the same room than live on the same planet, were a fold-out couch, a couple of Goodwill Industries easy chairs with patches of ease left in them, a television set, a Naugahyde-covered contour chair which Simon had bought her for television viewing. Typically, though this chair could be slanted back to elevate a footrest, the boss sat on it fiercely upright, on the very edge, accepting minimal support, bare feet barely touching the floor; the little girl taking punishment by sitting in the corner, unrelenting in her disdain for punishers. No doles of ease for her.

Her thinning cotton nightgown was big as her fury, she was lost in it as in her fury. Her pure-white hair went here and there like frizzing milkweed. Mosaic sternness was on her worn, lined, dried, mauled features, the little girl infinitely old, infinitely tired, tike on the decline, hoyden going slack-skinned and arteriosclerotic. Mosaic, yes. Somebody had to be the Moses in this house. If not the man, who abdicated all roles that had to be played standing up, then the woman, who was always too ready to play second-string Moses.

"So," she said, with that special brand of pity meticulously steel-spined, "you give up your sleep. You play his games."

"You play his games, boss," he said, not unkindly.

He'd long ago stopped wasting emotions with these two in the indulgence of being unkind. The first rule of the game is that the referee never tries to carry the ball.

"Me, he makes for me a hell on earth, Simon. I don't play, I only defend so he doesn't smother and choke me entirely. You, you don't have to jump when he calls."

"You both play. I jump when I hear you both call. You're very good at calling together, it's hard to tell your voices apart."

This was said neutrally, too. It was just that they played so hard, they forgot the rules. It was the referee's job to remind the players of the rules at all times, so that the game stayed orthodox.

"Is that you, son? You've come to save me from the she-devil? I thank you, my good son, my kind boy."

His father's voice from the bedroom, close to tears, but underpainted with excitement, too: At least something was happening. He had a high taste for drama, and hated stalemates.

"I'll be there in a minute, Pop."

"Now I'll live through the night, at least one more night I'm safe," his father called with a distinct baritone tremble.

"One more night you wreck your son's already wrecked life," the boss ground out.

"Nothing's wrecked except the two of you and your semblance of being human beings," Simon said, scrupulously non-accusing. "Let's quit the talk about wrecking and see what can be done to restore some sleep to this house, all right?"

"Go restore sleep to a madhouse." the boss said. "A house where the wife poisons with ice cream. You said it yourself, Simon, you said I poison, I play his games."

"I said you play his games, but I didn't say you poison. Your game is not to poison as he says you poison, your game is to yell liar when he yells his lies. It's a subtler game than just poisoning him, I'll agree to that."

"Get it in your head once and for all I don't lie, son," his father called from the bedroom. "She put all the roach poison in the maple walnut, enough to massacre a Coxey's Army."

"I'll Coxey's Army you," the boss called back, eyes on fire. "You hear how he talks, Simon? Can a human person sit and listen to such madman talk twenty-four hours a day and keep a face of smiles? He makes my life a hell, not that I'm complaining, these are the facts. You are not to bother your head with us, son. Go away and forget our names. Our names are Dreck Everywhere and Eat Dreck All the Time."

"Your name is my name, boss," Simon said with practiced patience.

"Dreck's not the worst of it," his father's voice communicated. "Dreck would be bad enough with each and every meal three times a day. Cyanide, pure cyanide, that's a more serious material than dreck, that's a matter for the police."

"You see what atmosphere of happy times he makes in this house," the boss said through starched lips, through more teeth than anybody could have. "You see how he brightens up my days and hours. But don't listen to me, take his side, I play crazy-man games."

"You'll never understand this, boss, but it's an established fact that nobody can play games without a partner to answer him back and complete the games. If you didn't need him around here playing his part so you could play your part, why don't you agree to send him back to the nut house, huh? No, you won't have any part of it, if you lose your expert partner, who'll you find to play games with, who'll you call liar and animal? Listen, boss, I know you've had a hard life, very hard, but this I don't understand, that you would want your life to go on being hard. If he went away there'd be a vacuum in your life. If nobody calls you poisoner you've got nobody to call liar. I love you, boss, but I think you play games. Wait right here. I'll go and talk to him."

He went into the bedroom. His father was built small, too. The bedroom was dark, but enough moonlight came in to outline his delicate hunched figure in the chair by the window, dressed in worn slippers and Simon's GI drabs. This frail man had the face of a violinist whose violin has been run over by a beer truck. He was looking out over the river panorama from Brooklyn Bridge to Brooklyn Navy Yard, studying the many areas of the city in which poisons are secreted.

"You're good to me, you're a beautiful and good son, Simon," the old man said in his mellowed musical voice. "You come when I am in need. Believe me, my need is great tonight, son. It made me bawl like a baby that I had to break into your rest, son, but such are our conditions in this house. You see how I am weak like a kitten, that I can hardly lift my hands or even my head, when a man doesn't swallow a bite of human nourishment——"

"Let's discuss the immediate problem, Pop. What's your proof that she's putting poison in your food?"

"Proof. Psss. Proof is all over this house of murder, son. I sneaked in the kitchen when she was taking a nap and I looked for the roach powder everywhere, in the closets, under the sink, gone, absolutely. This was when I understood the going-on in her devil head. Have we seen one roach on the premises for better than a year, son? So why all of a sudden no roach poison? I will not dirty my lips to speak the answer, Simon. Merely look at the facts, dear son. One, the roach poison is all of a sudden nowhere, two, that witch is all of a sudden trying to push maple walnut down my mouth. I'm no fool, Simon. You can say a lot of things about me, I have my weaknesses and drawbacks, yes, but one thing you cannot say, that I am a fool, that I do not have brains to put the two and two together."

"No, Pop, nobody can say you don't put two and two together. What you always come out with is my telephone number."

"Can I turn to another living soul in this whole jungle world, Simon? Is there another sympathizer I could call for help against a cold-blood murderer?"

"If there's a murderer in the house you call the police, Pop, some people do that."

"I will give my life to protect you, son, to keep the shame and scandal from your already too burdened head. Also I will not give her the satisfaction to call the authorities and make headlines of her plots against me, this is what she wants. Don't blame me, Simon darling, if I try whatever the sacrifices to keep some rags of the family's honor and good name, what else have we got left?"

"All right, Pop, how do we handle this? You say she's poisoning you, she says you're a liar, where do we go from here? I'm willing as I've been all along to pay for this apartment, for your medical bills, everything, and not complain, but one thing I can't do, I can't control the cutthroat games that go on in this house after I pay for it, I can't teach you how to play without cutting each other to ribbons. How do you propose we deal with this new crisis, Pop?"

The old man leaned forward. His voice became very confidential, almost a lover's.

"You know your Bible, son? You know how Solomon, that wise man, that man with a real head on his shoulders, handled it when the two ladies came before him and each lady claimed the baby was her baby? This king knew a few things about the human heart, Simon. He said to the ladies, well, ladies, you both have good claims so I conclude you both gave birth to this baby, so under the unusual circumstances the only fair thing to do, the only equity, is to give each of you half of this nice baby. You will remember he then summoned some attendants with a big knife, whilst the false lady, the liar lady, she only stood there, prepared for the sawing, but the true lady, the honest mother, she couldn't allow the sawing, she jumped up and relinquished any and all claim to this baby, she would rather see the baby in one piece and stolen from her than sawed in half and divvied up. So when Solomon saw which lady accepted the sawing and which one cried out with horror, he knew———"

"Who're you suggesting we saw in half here, the boss? You might like that, but it wouldn't prove there's poison in the maple walnut."

"I am directing your attention to a principle, Simon, I'm surprised you don't see it. That woman is sitting up nights scheming how to exterminate me. The woman calls me liar when I expose her rotten schemes with the maple walnut ice cream. There is a simple Solomon test in such a situation, Simon. She says the maple walnut is clean as a whistle? Fine and dandy, let her eat the maple walnut. You think she would accept this test? Hah. Try her. Don't waste your breath. She will yell and scream and spit more insults, but eat the maple walnut, oh, no, not that smart one."

"How do you know she won't eat it, Pop, have you asked her?"

"Time after time, son. I knew it was a waste of breath, but I laid out the plan for this witch, a simple procedure, and you know what she answered? She threw the dish of maple walnut in my face. She was pretending it was an insult, sure, but I know better, I know she was destroying the evidence before I could trap her and send her to the electric chair where she belongs."

"What do you want me to do, Pop, take the maple walnut down to a laboratory for a chemical analysis? I could do that, of course. But it would take time, hours, days maybe, and you can't go any longer without eating, which you won't do without proof there's no roach poison in her food. Besides, if the lab results were negative, you'd accuse her of bribing the lab people."

"You've got a good and logical mind, son, you defined the problem in this house exactly. This is my analysis of the situation, too, that she won't give me proof there's no poison in the food because she can't, and until such proofs are forthcome I cannot risk one single, solitary bite in this insane house. I suppose it is my duty and the upshot of my whole marriage to end my hard days from plain malnutrition."

His tone, it was astonishing. He was explaining why he was constrained to starve to death, but it was not in complaint, it was actually with an air of triumph, vindication, total rightness.

"Suppose I got her to eat half of the maple walnut, Pop, for me, as a special favor for me, would you agree to eat the other half?"

"Son, don't treat these facts like playtoys, I am explaining to you she can't take a bite of those poisoned materials. What she says, she says it's beneath her ladyship to do this, she will not foul herself, but you and I know the real reasons, but in any case the results are the same, she will not do this thing, and until she gives me these proofs my lips are sealed to her tainted murderer's foods."

"There's another way to get your proofs, Pop, you could eat all the maple walnut."

"Son, are your ears deaf entirely, didn't I make it clear to you this would kill me?"

"You'd die happy. For once you'd have made your case against her. Would it be too big a price to pay for such a victory?"

"You are not facing the problem with a practical mind, son, you're making jokes."

"All right, Pop. You need proofs. She won't give you the proofs, and there's no time to get laboratory proofs, which you wouldn't believe anyway. There's one other way. I'll give you the proofs, I'll eat one plate, and if I survive then you'll eat another plate, OK?"

"My son! Simon! Dear heart! This you will not do! How can I drive it into your head, this stuff is loaded with cyanide! You want to commit suicide in this house to make some kind of a point, what point!"

"I don't want to make any point, Pop. I only want to get on with the game and the two of you are tied now and I've got to do something to break this tie."

"I will not sit here and see your body fall to the floor out of love for your mother, Simon! I know how you love your mother, you're a good boy, a good son should love his mother and I don't object to this, in this I don't interfere, but when out of a son's love for his mommy you take cyanide, enough to kill a horse, I will not stand by, you hear me, Simon!"

"I hear you, Pop. Stay where you are, I'll be right back."

He returned to the living room.

"How much ice cream's left, boss?"

"Practically a quart, son. I buy the maple walnut by the gallon, he eats a whole quart just for breakfast, this is where your money you sweat for goes, to make a big belly for Mr. Garbage Pail."

"Go and get two dishes of the maple walnut, boss, big ones."

"You'll humor him, Simon, make him demonstrations? Don't give him the satisfaction, let him rot."

"Go get two dishes, boss."

She raised her tiny, overworked, bony frame, shuffled to the kitchen with a hopeless shrug.

"Drive these suicide thoughts from your head, Simon!" the old man called from the bedroom. "There's already enough death in this house, she provides for me a living death!"

"Shut up, Pop."

In a minute his mother wavered back with the two heaping dishes and two spoons. Simon took them and went back to the bedroom. He snapped on the overhead light. He placed one dish on the window sill.

"All right, Pop, here goes. If I don't come out of this alive I make you my sole heir. Keep my IBM typewriter well oiled. Write your memoirs of marriage to the lady poisoner and a life of daily abuse on it. It'll be a best seller. The best propaganda against the regular orifices that ever came out of it, probably."

"Don't do this terrible thing, Simon my dear," the old man begged.

"I want you to give my body to Columbia Presbyterian Medical School for research. Let them find out just what roach powder does to the human system when it's hidden in a lot of maple walnut. If medical science can once and for all find out just how much roach powder is being dispensed in the American home, it may do a lot to improve the orifice-shopping situation in this country."

He took a big mouthful. His father raised skeletal hands shaky with horror.

"Son, I'm reasoning with you, your life is at stake," the old man begged.

Simon took a very big mouthful.

"Son, if you have any feeling for your mother you'll put that terrible stuff away, you won't let your own mother have her own son's death on her hands," the old man quavered.

Simon took another mouthful, smacked his lips.

"I must say the cyanide doesn't spoil the flavor, this is delicious maple walnut."

"Simon, Simon, your mother has a twisted mind, all right, I'm not blaming her, she's played out from a life of hard work, she's been a worker, that one, I'll give her that, a devoted mother, she did everything for you when I was unfortunately incapacitated and couldn't provide, she scrubbed floors and ate dirt, it's not her fault all the work and worry mixed up her brains, but don't make her now a criminal, don't lay a worst and final crime at her feet, she's suffered enough, it will kill her, Simon, Simon, if you have any regard for your poor mother stop eating that maple walnut."

The old man groaned and groaned.

"Can't help it, Pop, I'm hooked on maple walnut, I start to eat maple walnut and I can't stop." He took a great spoonful, crammed his mouth with it. "I don't mind giving my life for maple walnut that tastes this good. On second thought, I don't want you to donate my body for medical research. I want you to cremate me and scatter the ashes over Fort Knox. No, make that the Menninger Clinic. Will you do that for me, Pop? I wouldn't ask a thing like that if it wasn't important."

"Son, son, there is a curse on this family, we are damned and cursed from on high," the old man wept.

Simon finished the ice cream in several more enormous mouthfuls. He sat back and sighed, patting his stomach with the air of a king having feasted sumptuously.

"Well, well, well, now," he half hummed, making smacking sounds again, "let the foul winds blow, let the four horsemen come, it was worth it, that's a very good brand of maple walnut. Let's be very quiet now. The solemn occasion calls for two minutes of serious thoughts. Say a couple prayers if you want, Pop, just keep them to yourself, you'll break the mood if you pray out loud. I really don't mind dying, Pop. It's not as bad as it's cracked up to be. It doesn't hurt, just feels like a full stomach. I think there's been a lot of deceitful propaganda about dying to scare the people off from a good thing, we should maybe let them know dying's a cinch, it's just a whole lot of maple walnut in the stomach. It's even easier than falling off a log, falling off a log you can at least bump your head. Don't grieve for me, Pop, I'm ready to go, I've had a full life, I've written books for Pandro Harlow."

He went on patting his stomach. The old man sat opposite him, head buried in hands, keening, keening: soft sounds of whimper from his rhythmic head.

Several minutes went by. At last the old man bared his eyes. He looked at Simon, looked and looked through his tears.

He looked.

Simon looked back with as pleasant and casual an expression as he could muster, with the manner of one who has in all his life encountered none but innocent and unsullied maple walnuts. He smiled in his practiced friendly way at his father.

He reached out for the remaining dish of ice cream. He held it out to his father. He nodded at his father, smiling.

His father shuddered from head to foot. He shrank away, hands pressed to wet, horrified cheeks.

Simon increased his friendly hospitable expression and nodded again, holding the dish farther out. His smile did not get diluted, but the message in his smiling eyes was spelled out in ornamental iron: You eat this. He knew it was the end of awfulness for the old man, but his eyes continued to bellow around their sunny smile: Eat, eat this right now, you infernal plot-sniffing bastard who remembers my phone number too bastardly well. The world's a poison. Eat, eat.

The old man pulled away. Simon leaned far forward, shoved the dish under his nose.

The old man looked deep into Simon's eyes. Simon looked deeper back, his offering an ultimatum.

Slowly the old man's hand came up. Slowly it took hold of the dish, shaking. Slowly the other hand shakily found the spoon. Slowly, shaking all through, he began to eat the ice cream, his eyes steadily on Simon's eyes and condemned.

Simon watched, a student of each shaky bite, leaning close, monitoring each lethal dose. His smile was impervious to diluents.

The old man was helpless, maple walnut was his favorite, condemned or not he began to eat heartily. His hand went faster and faster, though no steadier. He was gulping, he was shoveling. There comes a time in hunger when taint be damned. Who can be forever a chemist?

The dish was soon empty. Simon took it from the old man's nerveless fingers and put it down.

"I am hungry something awful," the old man said, not looking anywhere. He was so small, so refuted. "I could eat some more of it, my son."

"That's the last of it, Pop, but don't worry, tomorrow's another day. Tomorrow the boss'll stock up on maple walnut again. And enough roach powder to pep it up."

The old man raised both hands and let them fall, to say: What comes, comes. The plots are too big and tricky. You can't stand guard from all sides of the head at once.

"Now will you eat a lettuce and tomato sandwich, Pop, maybe with bacon, if she fixes it for you?" Simon's smile was friendlier than ever.

The old man sat balled tight, head low, violin flattened by the world's fleet of beer trucks. He nodded: Can you have eyes in the back of your head? Who stays on 24-hour guard duty?

"Fine. That's excellent. And if she makes some chicken soup with dumplings tomorrow, and some stuffed cabbage the day after, you'll eat those things, too?"

The old, refuted head did not immediately respond.

"Pop, I can come down every day and eat the soup and stuffed cabbage first, I can do it, certainly, but it'll complicate my schedule a whole lot, interrupt my work and make things harder for me. I can come every day and be your taster, each and every day for the rest of your life, three times a day, I can do it but I'd prefer not to, it would be tough. I ask you again, will you eat what she makes for you from now on, without a taster?"

The old man withered some more. He slumped still lower. Crack, scrunch, went all the violins. His head began to nod, at the slowest rate possible.

"Atta boy. Good. Fine. Thanks a lot, Pop. You'll be doing me a big favor if you'll eat without making more trouble, I'll really appreciate it, you're a considerate father."

To this the old man could find no more pertinent answer than: "I could take another bite of maple walnut, son, I am mostly empty."

"Tomorrow, Pop, all the maple walnut you want."

To the floor the old man commented: "There is no question, she's a good woman, one in a million, a giver, a lavisher."

So do roach chokers, those whimsical powders, come and go.

Back in the living room the boss was still unreclining in the reclining chair, alert against welfare.

"He ate it, boss. He'll eat anything you make, he promised. I think it's under control again, old boss, think we've seen another one through."

"Son," the boss said to a spot close by the spot where her absurdly small and withered toes were, absurdly, just touching the inlay, "forget about us and this house, there's only old garbage in this house."

"It's OK, boss, I'll be garbage collector a while longer, it's good exercise."

"I say to him, all right, you can't lift a finger to do something useful in the world. It's beneath you to do an honest day's work or five minutes' work. You don't work in eleven years, all right, be a bloodsucker. Live off your hard-working son. But at least don't sit in the corner all your life supervising the bridge and the Navy Yards. They built a ship before you made your appearance. Take a walk, get a haircut, see a little sun, talk to people. At least pretend you're alive, this assignment you could handle. No. Not Mr. Too Good. Sits in the corner a lump of dreck. This is called a man. It's disgusting, disgusting, Phuh."

She always talked of the old man as though ready to spit.

"Boss, I don't like to hear you call him a dreck. This is the man you married, it says something about your taste. It also says something about me, if he's a dreck I've got dreck blood in my veins. I'll give you this, though, the way he looks right now, he looks like a dreck. We can only hope it's temporary."

He was talking loud enough for the old man to hear. He was very tired, he was thinking of top-quality rotisserie kitchen ranges, also, his stomach was acting up, making squishy sounds, phuh.

"It's temporary for eleven years, Simon, how long can such a temporary go on?"

"All right, boss. I'll accept your view. Every time I come to this house what I see is dreck and nothing but dreck. I walk in here and the human race looks like pure dreck. This house of dreck is costing me good money. It may not be a lot of money to the Rockefellers, but it's a lot of money to me. With the money I spend on this house I could be traveling or fixing up a place for myself." He raised his voice some more, for the benefit of all present. "What're you both trying to prove every time I come, that I'm spending all this money to keep so much dreck alive? That all my money's going down the drain and the drain won't even carry the dreck away?"

"Keep your hard-earned money, son. You're not keeping anything alive, you're keeping the dead from getting buried long after they started to stink. Forget about us. Go far away and live a decent life for once without us around your neck. I think about what we do to you, all day and all night, too, it drives me crazy. Forget you ever heard of us, bury us for good. It's the only way we'll ever be at home, in the ground with the worms, if we don't give them indigestion. This is the danger, the worms could dispossess us, how much poison can even worms take?"

A shuffling sound behind Simon. His father, doll-dwindled in the doorway.

"She's right, Simon, she gives good advice as a good mother should. I'm the stone around your necks, without me you both could have some kind of a life, throw me out and take care of your mother who's worked her fingers to the bones for both of us, take care of this good woman."

He was weeping, toy shoulders going like butterfly wings, there in the doorway.

"All right, Pop. I'm not blaming you, Pop. I'll put it this way. We know the diagnosis."

"Manical depressive," the old man wept. "Manical in the morning and depressive in the afternoon, how can you depend on such a changer?"

"You're a manic-depressive, yes, but you didn't make it your big work in life to be a manic-depressive. We simply have to assess this in terms of what's possible and what's reasonable and what can be lived with and what can't."

"Who could live with me, who could live with dreck?" the old man wept.

"You've been depressed for some time now. If you stay depressed you're no good to anybody. If you've got some of the manic left in you, that can make trouble, too, we know that from experience, you can get out of control, but at least you'd have some energy, maybe you could still do something in the world and feel like more than dreck, not a total lump. I don't know, be a janitor, sweep streets, something. Let's leave it this way. If you're up and out of here at daybreak to look for work, that'll prove there's an ounce of force left in you and you can go on living here. If you're not up and out, that'll mean you're one hundred percent down and will stay that way, no good to anybody, so you can't live here. If that's the case, I'll take you to Bellevue and commit you again. Whether the boss agrees or not, she doesn't have any more vote. You'll go back to the psycho ward, this time for good. I still won't blame you. I'm just trying to save the boss if you're past saving. The boss at least worked like a dog all her life, I owe her something for that. I don't owe you anything, though I have pity for you. Choose, if you have choice left in you. Meantime, maybe you can both get a little sleep, huh?"

The old man stood in the doorway, weeping. Simon went over and put his arm around those insubstantial shoulders.

"Pop, I hope you've got some choice left in you."

He went to his mother, proud, fierce, agonized mite. He stooped before her and took her worked-out hands.

"Boss, what happened to the roach powder?"

"I threw it down the incinerator."

"Why?"

"I was afraid if it was around I would put it in his maple walnut."

He leaned forward, kissed her, held her for a moment.

"Thanks for the maple walnut, boss, it was delicious. I hope if I have to take him away I won't be taking too much."

• • •

In the elevator his stomach was worse. He leaned against the wall feeling dizzy, hearing the churn from inside, breathing hard.

Outside he stood for a time on the corner looking up and down the river. South was the arthropod iron of the bridge crawling with delivery trucks: There would be ice-cream trucks as well as beer trucks among them, for the mouths not overwary. North was the Navy Yard, from which came a glow and a clanking: they were working round the clock outfitting demothballed vessels to carry roach-powder cargoes to Vietnam, where the maple walnuts were in short supply.

On the corner was an outdoor phone booth. He went into it, dropped his dime in, dialed his own number. In a moment Lee Abends' sleepy, combative voice came on.

"Lee, it's me, Simon, listen, I'm not feeling well, I'm quite sick, in fact, I just ate a big dish of maple walnut ice cream and my stomach's kicking up, it's all the ice cream on top of all the Scotch, daiquiris, Bodegas Bilbenas, Tuacas and, my God, stingers. Look, I don't think you should wait for me. No, I think it's much better if you go home. The fact is, I've got to get up early, family business, I've got to buy my father a big breakfast of ham and eggs with French fries and then take him up to Bellevue, I'm committing him again. That's one thing. Also, there's no sense to our trying again, that's my feeling after thinking it over. You want to ban the bomb, but you don't ban it from the beds you visit and that means where the biggest pacificism is needed you're the biggest warmonger. Bombs are one thing and orifices another and the bombs shouldn't be brought as close to the orifices as you bring them. I mean, an orifice should be a bomb shelter or it's nothing. I don't want to write any more confirming footnotes for Pandro Harlow, never mind what that means. My parents wrote enough. Go home, Lee, please. Go home and take that trip around the world. You can't fight the real roach powders in the world till you learn to tell them from the ones you invented inside you and smuggled out. There're still some uncontaminated maple walnuts here and there, maybe you'll see them in your travels. I know I'm not making sense, for Christ sake, but I'm just not feeling good, Lee, I'm really quite sick to my stomach, all that goddamn maple walnut tainted through and through——"

There was a devious poison in his guts, the subtlest cyanide, he was trying to spew it at her through the phone company's conduits, it wouldn't come, not the worst of it.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the klieg brightness over the Navy Yard, out of the corner of his ear he heard the clank from there, around the corner of his mind he thought: All the way to Tonkin Gulf for something to shoot at?

From the receiver, all the way from Tonkin Gulf, the gripe-tinned voice shooting at him: "You promised. I stayed because you promised."

"You listen now! I'm taking no more leaflets from you!" He was shook to hear these cyanide words bulleting from the Tonkin Gulf down his own distressed gullet. "I just came from a house of champion self-extrapolated losers and I've had it with that game, see! You all put the locks on your minds, locks all over, then yell about the shortage of locksmiths! Goddamn it, can't you get it through your heads you're the biggest establishment-proppers around! Establishment people lock up all their parts and throw away the key and you lock yourselves up and scream false arrest and call for nonexistent wardens to spring you! You don't fight the establishment! You're the establishment's biggest copycat! You're stalled! Sure you're stalled! You put up the roadblocks yourselves, nobody but you! No! Nothing doing! No more you-did-it-to-me games, understand! Get out of my bed, goddamnit, I will not have my parents fouling up my bed, get out of my house——"