as well.
Evil Dead II had ended, and channel two was about fifteen minutes into Blood on Satan’s Claw. I let the last couple of songs on Pink Flag play out, and then put on Black Rose. I carefully replaced Siddhartha in its slot amongst the other books, feeling a bit solemn as I always did when handling them. Then I stood there staring at them for a while.
Something was bugging me. Something about the books . . .
Many of the titles would make great band names. I had always thought that one of the best potential band names among them was La Peste, CEH 1965, a book I hadn’t even considered trying to read because it was in French, and I was pretty sure it would be too tough for me, despite my mastery of the present tense and telling time in the twenty-four-hour system. But obviously, my dad had been able to read French all right, if this had been among his books. I couldn’t imagine reading a whole book in French. The educational system must have been quite a bit better back then, I thought, before they decided to adopt the collage ’n’ Catcher curriculum.
Now, if this were a murder mystery, and I were a weird Belgian guy with a big mustache, this is the point where I 173
would suddenly stop dead, drop my tiny glass of chocolate liqueur, and say something like “But no! But I have been an imbecile! Imbecile! ” And then you’d have to wait another fifty pages or so to find out exactly what the hell I had been talking about. But I won’t do that to you.
The salutation of Tit’s note had been mon cher monsieur,
“my dear sir” in French and kind of a standard French way to start a letter. I hadn’t thought too much about it before. But the thought that struck me while I was standing there in front of the books, looking at La Peste, CEH 1965, and listening to Thin Lizzy was: what if mon cher monsieur hadn’t been a real part of the note, but rather part of the key, like the scratched-out and corrected date?
Well, that was it. Tit had been very, very complicated about it, though and even with the key from the Catcher I almost didn’t realize I had cracked the code. But after a lengthy scribbling session, I pretty much had it. The salutation was indeed an indication to the recipient that the coded message would be in French. Tit had left out the punctuation and accents, regrouped the characters in strings of fourteen, and recopied the resulting coded message backward before arranging the fourteen- character clumps underneath each other—man, those boys must have had a lot of time on their hands.
It decoded to:
“J’ai vu MT hier soir et je l’ai ramonee sec. Details a suivre.
Vas-tu aux funerailles? J’aimerais meiux etre ligote et fouette.”
At first, though I recognized it as French, I wasn’t able to figure out exactly where all the accents and spaces and punctuation went, though it helped that the capital letters had remained in the code-parallelogram. The word mieux had been misspelled. As I’ve said, despite three-plus years of study, French wasn’t my strongest suit. But I was highly motivated.
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In the end I had to ask Madame Jimenez-Macanally a few discreet questions at school the next day, but eventually I was able to punctuate and translate it.
The first line threw me a bit because of the verb ramoner, which I’d never seen before but which grabbed my attention as it would any Ramones fan. According to the dictionary, it literally means “to scrub out or vigorously clean a chimney.”
Here, though, it was clearly being used as a sexual metaphor.
To ramone someone dry, as Tit’s sentence had it, is to, well, you know—do I have to draw a diagram, folks? It couldn’t have had anything to do with the actual Ramones—unless that’s where they got their name or something?
Anyway, the whole thing translates, roughly, as:
“I saw MT last night and I ramoned her dry. Details to follow. Are you going to the funeral? I would rather be tied up and whipped.”
I learned more French translating those sentences with a dictionary and a grammar and a weird conversation with Madame Jimenez-Macanally than I had in three-plus years of Jean and Claude, I can tell you that.
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November
TH E F E STIVAL OF LIG HTS
I can’t even begin to describe how hard it was to refrain from mentioning the Catcher code to Sam Hellerman on the way to school the next day.
He was in a buoyant mood when I met him at the usual corner. He wanted to discuss his new theory:
“Just think what a better world we would have,” he said,
“if David Bowie had never met Brian Eno. That was the worst tragedy of the twentieth century.”
“Really?” I said.
In fact, I disagreed rather strongly with this, but my mind was on other things, and, to be honest, Sam Hellerman was getting on my nerves. Who wanted to think about Eno and Bowie when there was a Deanna Schumacher and a Catcher code on the menu? I didn’t even bother trying to ask him where he had been on Halloween night: I knew he’d only lie, which would demean us both. Plus, I still had some questions to ask Madame Jimenez-Macanally about the French text before I could be totally sure what the message said, so I was preoccupied. I gave him the silent treatment for most of the way. But I doubt he noticed: it wasn’t
