PLEASE HELP US FIND OUR PET PIG!
LIS is our MASCOT!
LIZ IS 34 YRS. OLD!
She is a BAD-TEMPERED SOW but WE LOVE HER!
Will do what you want if you say ‘I PROMISE’
(OR)
‘THERE’S MONEY IN IT’! CALL HOusitonic 5-8337
(OR)
BRING to THE WILLIAM PENN GRILLE!
Ask for THE LOW MEN IN THE YELLOW COATS!
Motto: ‘WE EAT IT RARE!’
His mom saw the poster, too, and this time when her ankles banged together she did fall.
Get up, Mom! Bobby screamed, but she didn’t — perhaps couldn’t. She crawled along the brown carpet instead, looking over her shoulder as she went, her hair hanging across her cheeks and forehead in sweaty clumps. The back of her dress had been torn away, and Bobby could see her bare burn — her underpants were gone. Worse, the backs of her thighs were splashed with blood. What had they done to her? Dear God, what had they done to his mother?
Don Biderman came around the corner ahead of her — he had found a shortcut and cut her off. The others were right behind him. Now Mr Biderman’s prick was standing straight up the way Bobby’s sometimes did in the morning before he got out of bed and went to the bathroom. Only Mr Biderman’s prick was huge, it looked like a kraken, a triffid, a monstah, and Bobby thought he understood the blood on his mother’s legs. He didn’t want to but he thought he did.
Leave her alone! he tried to scream at Mr Biderman. Leave her alone, haven’t you done enough?
The scarlet eye on Mr Biderman’s yellow doublet suddenly opened wider . . . and slithered to one side. Bobby was invisible, his body one world farther down the spinning top from this one . . . but the red eye saw him. The red eye saw everything.
‘Kill the pig, drink her blood,’ Mr Biderman said in a thick, almost unrecognizable voice, and started forward.
‘Kill the pig, drink her blood,’ Bill Cushman and Curtis Dean chimed in.
‘Kill the pig, strew her guts, eat her flesh,’ chanted Willie and Richie, falling in behind the nimrods. Like those of the men, their pricks had turned into spears.
‘Eat her, drink her, strew her, screw her,’ Harry chimed in.
Get up, Mom! Run! Don’t let them!
She tried. But even as she struggled from her knees to her feet, Biderman leaped at her.
The others followed, closing in, and as their hands began to tear the tatters of her clothes from her body Bobby thought: I want to get out of here, I want to go back down the top to my own world, make it stop and spin it the other way so I can go back down to my own room in my own world . . .
Except it wasn’t a top, and even as the images of the dream began to break up and go dark, Bobby knew it. It wasn’t a top but a tower, a still spindle upon which all of existence moved and spun. Then it was gone and for a little while there was a merciful nothingness. When he opened his eyes, his bedroom was full of sunshine — summer sunshine on a Thursday morning in the last June of the Eisenhower Presidency.
9
Ugly Thursday.
One thing you could say about Ted Brautigan: he knew how to cook. The breakfast he slid in front of Bobby— lightly scrambled eggs, toast, crisp bacon — was a lot better than anything his mother ever made for breakfast (her specialty was huge, tasteless pancakes which the two of them drowned in Aunt Jemima’s syrup), and as good as anything you could get at the Colony Diner or the Harwich. The only problem was that Bobby didn’t feel like eating. He couldn’t remember the details of his dream, but he knew it had been a nightmare, and that he must have cried at some point while it was going on — when he woke up, his pillow had been damp. Yet the dream wasn’t the only reason he felt flat and depressed this morning; dreams, after all, weren’t real. Ted’s going away would be real. And would be forever.