“Ah, that iss how yii re-member it now,” said sorrowful Galardo.
“Well, it’s the way it [but wasn’t something green? I think of spired Toledo and three angled crosses toppling] happened. I don’t want anything silly, like a million dollars in small unmarked bills, and I don’t want to be bullied, to be bullied, no, I mean not by you, not by anybody. Just, just tell me who you are, what all this is about. This is nonsense, you see, and we can’t have nonsense. I’m afraid I’m not expressing myself very well—”
And a confident smile and turn away from him, which shows that you aren’t afraid, you can turn your back and dare him to make something of it. In public, in the bar? It is laughable; you have him in the palm of your hand. “Shot of Red Top and a beer, please, Sam.” At 9:48.
The bartender draws the beer and pours the whiskey. He pauses before he picks up the dollar bill fished from the pants pocket, pauses almost timidly and works his face into a friend’s grimace. But you can read him; he is making amends for his suspicion that you were going to start a drunken brawl when Galardo merely surprised you a bit. You can read him because your mind is tensed to concert pitch tonight, ready for Galardo, ready for the Serpentists, ready to crack this thing wide open; strange!
But you weren’t ready for the words he spoke from his fake apologetic friend’s grimace as you delicately raised the heavy amber-filled glass to your lips: “Where’d your friend go?”
You slopped the whiskey as you turned and looked.
Galardo gone.
You smiled and shrugged; he comes and goes as he pleases, you know. Irresponsible, no manners at all—but loyal. A prince among men when you get to know him, a prince, I tell you. All this in your smile and shrug—why, you could have been an actor! The worry, the faint neurotic worry, didn’t show at all, and indeed there is no reason why it should. You have the whip hand; you have the Seal; Galardo will come crawling back and explain everything. As for example:
“You may wonder why I’ve asked all of you to assemble in the libr’reh.”
or
“For goodness’ sake, Gracie, I wasn’t going to go to Cuba! When you heard me on the extension phone I was just ordering a dozen Havana cigars!”
or
“In your notation, we are from 19,276 A.D. Our basic mathematic is a quite comprehensible subsumption of your contemporary statistical analysis and topology which I shall now proceed to explain to you.”
And that was all.
With sorrow, Gentle Reader, you will have noticed that the marble did not remark: “I am chiseled,” the lumber “I am sawn,” the paint “I am applied to canvas,” the tea leaf “I am whisked about in an exquisite Korean bowl to brew while the celebrants of cha no yu squeeze this nourishment out of their poverty.” Vain victim, relax and play your hunches; subconscious integration does it. Stick with your lit-tle old subconscious integration and all will go swimmingly, if only it weren’t so damned noisy in here. But it was dark on the street and conceivably things could happen there; stick with crowds and stick with witnesses, but if only it weren’t so …
To his left they were settling down; it was the hour of confidences, and man to man they told the secret of their success: “In the needle trade, I’m in the needle trade, I don’t sell anybody a crooked needle, my father told me that. Albert, he said to me, don’t never sell nobody nothing but a straight needle. And today I-have four shops.”
To his right they were settling down; freed of the cares of the day they invited their souls, explored the spiritual realm, theologized with exquisite distinctions: “Now wait a minute, I didn’t say I was a good Mormon, I said I was a Mormon and that’s what I am, a Mormon. I never said I was a good Mormon, I just said I was a Mormon, my
mother was a Mormon and my father was a Mormon, and that makes me a Mormon but I never said I was a good Mormon—”