factory, forcing from its epiglottis a jerky sound somewhere between a cough, a sneeze, a fairy choking on fairy dust, and a socially prominent dowager trying to stifle a belch. Repeatedly the donkey’s donkey larynx was issuing the first quarter-note of a bray, a hee-haw from which the
“Pathological,” muttered Switters, surveying the scene with a mixture of pity and revulsion. Then, gathering his wits, he sent Bob to the kitchen for sugar. “Tell Maria Une I want . . .” He surveyed the animal. “Tell her I’ll need most of a small sack. You know: at least a kilo.” Next, he dispatched Pippi (who’d come over from her shop to see what was the matter) to fetch a pail of water.
When the sisters returned (Bob was followed by Maria Une, who was demanding to know what was to become of her precious sweetener), Switters spilled the sugar into the water bucket and stirred it with a rake handle. He set the solution under the donkey’s convulsive muzzle, but the beast was too distressed to take more than a few laps of it. They waited. The donkey hicced, then lapped again. It obviously liked the taste but simply couldn’t consume the mixture with enough speed or in sufficient quantity for it to be therapeutically effective. “Okay, Bob, you restrain the noble jackass. Pippi, prepare to pour.”
With that, Switters destilted onto the scrawny back, straddling it as though he were Don Quixote about to ride into war. “Bring on the windmills!” he yelled, as he grasped the slobbery muzzle, top and bottom, and pried the greenish-yellow teeth apart. “Whew! I’m a model of dental elegance compared to you, buckaroo. Come on, Pippi, pour. Pour!”
“No. More. The whole damn bucket. But not so fast, you don’t want to drown the thing.”
The donkey was struggling mightily, causing Switters, atop it, to resemble a rodeo clown, but they eventually succeeded in emptying most of the sugar water down the creature’s gullet. Masked Beauty held the stilts for Switters, and, with considerable difficulty, he transferred onto them. The little ass was braying now, genuinely braying, and retching as if it might spew out every drop with which they’d flooded its tank. In a minute or two, however, it settled down, seeming dimly to notice that its demon had been exorcised. The humans, too, noticed that the hiccuping had ceased, and as the healed patient squeezed its head into the bucket to lick up residual sugar, they applauded.
Joining in the applause was Domino, who had come upon the scene about the time that Switters was mounting his spasmodic steed.
Shuffling the poles, he hopped awkwardly around to face her. “Switters,” he growled, as if, with gruff modesty, introducing himself. “Errand boy, acquired taste; roving goodwill ambassador for the Redhook Brewing Company, Seattle, Washington; and”—doffing his hat, he attempted a courtly bow, an exercise not easily performed on stilts—”large-animal veterinarian.”
(Sometime, perhaps that evening at dinner, he would confess that his grandmother had taught him the hiccup remedy. Was it before or after she taught him to cure childhood moodiness with Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, and Big Mama Thornton? He couldn’t remember.)
Whether disposed to savor the passing moment or with a view toward advancing himself further in Domino’s good graces, he swept his hat in an ironic parody of a knightly gesture, as though, with ostentatious ceremony, he was dedicating his triumph to her, his lady. His backside happened to be to the donkey—rather too close to the donkey for the donkey’s liking—and at that exact, fastuous instant, the ungrateful creature lashed out with its hind legs, one of its hooves kicking thin air but the other dealing Switters’s right stilt a blow that sent him flying.
Domino dove forward to catch him. She underestimated his momentum, however, and they both ended up on the ground, he on top of her. She was flat on her back. He lay facedown, his manly jut of a chin resting just above her darling little jut of a nose. In that uneven alignment, their eyes could not meet, so he stared for a few seconds, while recovering his wind, at the rocky soil just beyond the crown of her head. “Are you okay?” he asked, afraid to move a muscle.
“Oui. Yeah. Ooh-la-la!” She laughed nervously. “I was trying to keep your feet from touching the earth.”
And she had. The toes of his sneakers rested upon her shins.
“So!” he said. “You do believe in the curse.”
Still not moving, he could feel her half-face flushing beneath his half-face. He could also feel her body, flattened and yet somehow buoyant, under the weight of his body. She was as soft as a marshmallow bunny, he thought, yet simultaneously as firm as a futon. Most of the words that she stammered about her action being intended only for his peace of mind were lost in the folds of his throat—and in the concerned chatter of those Pachomians who’d clustered around them.
It was at about that point—and no more than ten seconds had passed—that he became aware of his pen of regeneration and of the red ink rushing into its inkwell. It was positioned against her belly, not far from where the concave yolk of her umbilicus simmered in its downy poacher, and an equal distance, more or less, from that vital area and favored masculine destination that is known in the Basque language (Switters could verify this) as the
Domino had round cheeks. She had the kind of nice round cheeks that made a person want to press one of their own cheeks against one of hers, to hold it there, slide it around a bit, the way an affectionate mother might lay a cheek against her baby’s bare bottom, or a boy put his cheek to a cold, ripe cantaloupe, sniffing its lush, musky fruitiness out of the corner of his nostrils. Domino had those kind of cheeks, and Switters admittedly had sometimes had that kind of reaction to them, but, naturally, had never yielded to the temptation, nor, alas, could he really yield to it now, despite this unusual opportunity, for his cheeks had landed a few inches to the north of her cheeks, and cheek-to-cheek congruency could be attained only were he to slide downward, a southerly migration that, to phrase it crudely, would have put the carrot dangerously close to the rabbit hole.
As it was, he was pronged against her lower abdomen in such a spring-loaded fashion that he could feature himself, without use of hands or feet, vaulting over the henhouse. Undoubtedly, she was aware of the protuberance—she was practically run through by it: nun on a stick—and that awareness must account for the fact that she was silent, tense, and seemed to be holding her breath. As his own embarrassment turned gradually to panic, he rejected the notion of trying to collapse the bulb by mentally picturing radically anti-erotic images (his mother with the stomach flu, for example, or a Pomeranian humping a sofa leg) and, instead, dug the heels of his hands into the earth and flipped himself off her, onto his back. His talents had no end?
Gasping slightly from the effort, he lay there beside her with his feet in the air, looking like an advertisement for an aerosol insecticide. (Of course, a dead bug wouldn’t be sporting an erection. Or would it? Hanged men are reputed to be so affected, why not a zapped beetle? Perhaps there was a reason why they were called “cockroaches.” And think of the Spanish fly.)
The sisters assisted Domino to an upright position, whereupon she brusquely brushed off her blue chador (which is what Syrian women called their long cotton gowns), and retreated, muttering that there were important matters that required her immediate attention. The others then attempted to hoist Switters back onto his stilts, but the ex-linebacker’s bulk was too much for them. Bob, understandably grateful, and seemingly oblivious to the accidental subtext of his topple onto Domino, volunteered to go fetch his wheelchair. “Merci, Madame Bob,” he said weakly.
For the nearly ten minutes that it took Bob to return with the chair, he lay there like a yogi in the dead-bug asana, growing slowly flaccid; shielding his eyes from the pulsating radiation of a sun, now directly overhead, that resembled a phoenix egg laid in a campfire and impaled on a laser; and talking to his abnormally elevated feet. “Be patient, ol’ pals,” he whispered to his feet. “Please. Another month, that’s all. Then we’re hot-footing it—that’s just a figure of speech—to South-goddamn-America. And one way or another, feets, I’m gonna set you free.”
For the next couple of weeks, Domino and Switters were shy around each other. In fact, without it being overly obvious, even to themselves, and without going to any great lengths to achieve it, they were in avoidance of each other. Cloistered in the confines of an eight-acre oasis, it was, of course, impossible that their paths wouldn’t cross several times daily, but when such encounters occurred, they’d smile, exchange a polite nod or two, fidget,
