the Tailor-craft. Grijpstra remembered a yachtsman in Holland who washed up on the beach after his craft got torn up by a gale. The yachtsman told a TV interviewer he'd been floating on top of big waves and there were tankers everywhere and when the yachtsman looked into the tankers' portholes he kept seeing sailors enjoying their dinners, or watching TV, or un-centerfolding Playboys, and nobody saw him outside, begging and sobbing.
'Second door on the right,' Ishmael repeated, 'and we're in the airport restroom, so that door would lead into one of the shifters. But that's where he said I had to go and he was Saint Peter-he had a label on his chest that said so.'
Grijpstra groaned.
'Bad,' Ishmael said, 'but I'm from Maine so I don't believe nothing unless my parents tell me to and my parents are dead. So I just stand about for a bit and there's other people having their shoes shined and they never did the Pentecost and you know where Saint Peter sent them?'
'No,' Grijpstra said. He thought he shouldn't worry because this Tailorcraft had been around since 1949, with good people like Ishmael at the controls. Nothing to fear but fear itself. And say, just for argument's sake, that the plane did go down. This was not a good planet anyway. This might even be hell. To leave could only be pleasant. Nellie was okay perhaps but no more memory of the significant person in one's life means no more regret at being without that significant person. What else would death wipe out? Amsterdam traffic? Old age? Traveling in old unreliable mini-airplanes? More and more red tide in the sea and a lot of people being kept alive with terminal painful diseases? He should be grateful. Here he was having the last bad time ofhis bad life.
'Second door on the right,' Ishmael said. 'All ofthem. All of them got sent through the second door on the right. One total asshole I knew, he'd lived in a commune-Zen, you know Zen?'
'My friend does,' Grijpstra said, looking straight ahead. 'My friend Rinus, on Squid Island. Back in Amsterdam he'd go sometimes, Sunday mornings. Said he would sit on thin cushions, his legs all twisted, quietly, never mind if it hurt.'
'On Squid Island?'
'No, in a loft, in Amsterdam. Lange Leidse Dwarsstraat honderd drie en veertig drie hoog.'
'You're okay?' Ishmael asked.
'I'm sorry,' Grijpstra said. 'I thought you wanted to know where Rinus did Zen. That was the address.'
'In tongues?'
'In Dutch.'
'What happens to Rinus when he does Zen?'
'When he stops sitting his legs stop hurting. So where did your Zen man get sent by Saint Peter?
'Second door on the right,' Ishmael said. 'Like everybody else. Never mind what he'd done. Maybe played golf and fished for trout all his life. Maybe nine to fived for IBM or Ford. Watched daytime TV. Same difference-all us suckers. But there were all the other doors too-those are big restrooms at Logan, fifty doors maybe-so I wondered where they led to. And there were all these folks getting their shoes shined by Peter, keeping the old boy busy so that he couldn't see what was going on behind him. So I sneaked around, tried all the other doors, and you know what?'
'Duds,' Grijpstra said. 'Dud doors. Part of the wall between Now and Hereafter. Only the second door worked.'
'You had the same dream?'
'Makes sense,' Grijpstra said. 'Doesn't it? You tried the second door?'
'Sure,' Ishmael said. 'Led to Bliss. More of the same with the pain blocked out. Whatever you wanted to do you could do. All the shoe-shined people were there, looking for something to do. But I wanted to make music and there were these black guys who said they would let me play with them so I was going to do that for a while but they said it wouldn't satisfy me forever.'
'Yes,' Grijpstra said.
'You had the same dream?'
'What's your instrument?' Grijpstra asked.
'Keyboards.' Ishmael had been rolling more cigarettes out of the trumpeting-soldier can and he had to crack a window to let air into the cockpit. There was too much wind whistling in to talk through but Ishmael pointed things out below, with the coast roughening up. No more townhouses on sand beaches raked by tractors but bays, coves, peninsulas, and ragged islands, each with its own moving luminous froth surrounding bare rocks leading up to carpets of shrubs and firs or pine trees. There were a few fishing boats thumping through turbulent seas, white wooden vessels, and a three-masted schooner with billowing brown sails.
'Tourist charter boat,' Ishmael shouted.
There was a modern yacht, sleek, whizzing along under a cloud of white nylon. Grijpstra thought that the yacht was the ideal situation.
Ishmael made the plane lose altitude. The Tailorcraft, its tiny wheels a few feet above the waves, circled the yacht. The crew waved. The crew looked young and beautiful, both sexes from late teens to thirties. Grijpstra thought that these had to be the Magazine Cover People, temporarily released from their second dimension. He noticed a white-maned, ruddy-faced, sharp-featured, tall rnilitary-looking authority at the wheel. The authority smoked a pipe. Grijpstra thought the authority could be General MacArthur, or the United States god. Grijpstra waved. General MacArthur or the United States god lifted an imperial hand in response. There was immense power in the figure.
The little plane headed north again. Grijpstra thought of de Gier, subject to American authority now. 'Do you know Sheriff Hairy Harry?'
Ishmael discussed Hairy Harry while the Tailor-craft wiggled through the last hundred miles to Jameson, in between showing his passenger such curiosities as a finback whale coming up to spout between dives, over seventy feet of smoothly shaped gray-blue creature calmly pursuing a majestic existence framed by whitecaps on green waves.
'Thirty elephants,' Ishmael said, 'thirty elephants wouldn't outweigh that mother.'
'Big mother,' Grijpstra said, as the whale dwarfed the airplane.
'Bigger than Tyrannosaurus rex,' Ishmael said, 'and that mother stood five stories. What did you hear about our sheriff?'
'To stay away?' Grijpstra asked.
Ishmael thought that might be a good idea. Grijpstra might think this whale was big but Sheriff Hairy Harry was bigger. Why, did Grijpstra know that Hairy Harry, ruler of Woodcock County, Maine, had bought a two-hundred- thousand-dollar house from Farnsworth for one hundred thousand, twenty-five down, and an easy mortgage?
'From Flash Farnsworth?' Grijpstra asked.
'So you know everybody?' Ishmael's dentures clicked in amazement, moved sideways a little, overadjusted, came back in place. 'No. Bildah Farnsworth. He'd be kin to Flash. All Flash has is an osprey nest for hair and a half share in a leaky tub.'
Grijpstra said there had to be a slump on for houses to sell at half their value, and Ishmael said that would be so, but then there was always a recession in Maine. But Hairy Harry's house was custom-built, complete-turn the key and step into Hairy Harry Land, the sheriffs individually adjusted theme park. Country music on compact disc in an electronic jukebox loudspeaker-extended to all rooms, full-size snooker tables in the basement, inside golf carpet wall to wall in the loft, bar with foreign beers on tap, a gun room, a video room.
Ishmael looked sly. Now he wasn't sure but just for the sake of argument, of pure cussedness, there might even be a supply of skinflicks there, no kidding around for Hairy Harry, the old in-and-out perhaps. Imported, most likely. Probably quite a collection. Ishmael liked to collect things himself and there was something to be said for naked women, okay? Grijpstra didn't mind his bringing up the subject? But they, the women, might make the viewer, Ishmael in this case, kind of nervous, especially if they moved and talked, and had company and so forth. 'You happen to care for that sort of thing yourself, eh…'
'Grijpstra.'
'Kripstra,' Ishmael said.
'In Holland we get too much of that now,' Grijpstra said. 'Like masturbation classes on prime-time TV. Holland used to be Calvinistic all over but it's the other way around now. The Dutch are compulsive in any direction. Prescribed group sex and all that.' Grijpstra didn't care for the activity himself.
'What if they're good?'
