'No.'
'You're getting better.' Unknotting his tie, trousers in a puddle about his feet, Schoenmaker serenaded her:
Have I told you, fella
She's got the sweetest columella
And a septum that's swept 'em all on their ass;
Each casual chondrectomy
Meant only a big fat check to me
Till I sawed this osteoclastible lass:
[Refrain]:
Till you've cut into Esther
You've cut nothing at all;
She's one of the best, Thir,
To her nose I'm in thrall.
She never acts nasty
But lies still as a rock;
She loves my rhinoplasty
But the others are schlock.
Esther is passive,
Her aplomb is massive,
How could any poor ass've
Ever passed her by?
And let me to you say
She puts Ireland to shame;
For her nose is retrousse
And Esther's her name . . .
For the last eight bars she chanted 'no' on one and three.
Such was the (as it were) the Jacobean etiology of Esther's eventual trip to Cuba; which see:
Chapter Five
In which Stencil nearly goes West with an alligator
I
This alligator was pinto: pale white, seaweed black. It moved fast but clumsy. It could have been lazy, or old or stupid. Profane thought maybe it was tired of living.
The chase had been going on since nightfall. They were in a section of 48-inch pipe, his back was killing him. Profane hoped the alligator would not turn off into something smaller, somewhere he couldn't follow. Because then he would have to kneel in the sludge, aim half-blind and fire, all quickly, before the cocodrillo got out of range. Angel held the flashlight, but he had been drinking wine, and would crawl along behind Profane absent-mindedly, letting the beam waver all over the pipe. Profane could only see the coco in occasional flashes.
From time to time his quarry would half-turn, coy, enticing. A little sad. Up above it must have been raining. A continual thin drool sounded behind them at the last sewer opening. Ahead was darkness. The sewer tunnel here was tortuous, and built decades ago. Profane was hoping for a straightaway. He could make an easy kill there. If he fired anywhere in this stretch of short, crazy angles there'd be danger from ricochets.
It wouldn't be his first kill. He'd been on the job two weeks now and bagged four alligators and one rat. Every morning and evening for each shift there was a shapeup in front of a candy store on Columbus Avenue. Zeitsuss the boss secretly wanted to be a union organizer. He wore sharkskin suits and horn rims. Normally, there weren't enough volunteers to cover even this Puerto Rican neighborhood, let alone the city of New York. Still Zeitsuss paced before them mornings at six, stubborn in his dream. His job was civil service but someday he would be Walter Reuther.
'Okay, there, Rodriguez, yeah. I guess we can take you.' And here was the Department without enough volunteers to go round. Still, a few came, straggling and reluctant and not at all constant: most quit after the first day. A weird collection it was: bums . . . Mostly bums. Up from the winter sunlight of Union Square and a few gibbering pigeons for loneliness; up from the Chelsea district and down from the hills of Harlem or a little sea-level warmth, sneaking glances from behind the concrete pillar of an overpass at the rusty Hudson and its tugs and stonebarges (what in this city pass, perhaps, for dryads: watch for them the next winter day you happen to be overpassed, gently growing out off the concrete, trying to be part of it or at least safe from the wind and the ugly feeling they - we? - have about where it is that persistent river is really flowing); bums from across both rivers (or just in from the Midwest, humped, cursed at, coupled and recoupled beyond all remembrance to the slow easy boys they used to be or the poor corpses they would make someday); one beggar - or the only one who talked about it - who owned a closetful of Hickey-Freeman and like-priced suits, who drove after working hours a shiny white Lincoln, who had three or four wives staggered back along the private Route 40 of his progress east; Mississippi, who came from Kielce in Poland and whose name nobody could pronounce, who had had a woman taken at the Oswiecim extermination camp, an eye taken by the bitter end of a hoist cable on the freighter Mikolaj Rej, and fingerprints taken by the San Diego cops when he tried to jump ship in '49; nomads from the end of a bean- picking season somewhere exotic, so exotic it might really have been last summer and east of Babylon, Long Island, but they with only the season to remember had to have it just ended, only just fading; wanderers uptown from the classic bums' keep of them all - the Bowery, lower Third Avenue, used shirt bins, barber schools, a curious loss of
