The Witches of Eastwick

of dirty dishwater behind her granny glasses. She never missed a Sun­day, but it may have been simply the unreflective thor­oughness of her race, the German race, that admirable machine always waiting for a romantic demon to seize the levers.

Van Home had been silent a while, pawing through the dictionary clumsily, as if his hands were gloves. Old Mrs. Lovecraft could now be heard as she leaned over to Mrs. Hallybread and distinctly asked, 'Why is he using those filthy words?' Rose Hallybread looked exceedingly amused; she was a tall woman with a tiny head set in a nest of wiry gray and black hair frizzed way out. Her very small face was the color of a walnut, creased and recreased by decades of sun worship; what she whispered back was inaudible. On her other side sat Dawn Polanski; the girl had fascinating wide Mongolian cheekbones and smudged-looking skin and that impervious deadpan calm of the lawless. Between them she and Rose did pack a lot of psychic power.

Van Home dimly heard the commotion and looked up, blinked, pushed his glasses higher on his nose, and apologetically pronounced, 'I know this is taking plenty long enough but here, right on one page, I've just come across 'tapeworm' and 'tarantula.' 'Taran­tula: any of various large hairy spiders that are typ­ically rather sluggish and though capable of biting sharply are not significantly poisonous to man.' Thanks a lot. And his limp little buddy up here: 'Any of numerous cestode worms (as of the genus Taenia) parasitic when adult in the intestine of man or other vertebrates.' Numerous, mind you, not just one or two oddballs tucked back in some corner of Creation, any­body can make a mistake, but a lot of them, a lot of kinds, a terrific idea, Somebody must have thought. I don't know about the rest of you gathered here, wish­ing I'd pipe down and sit down probably, but I've always been fascinated by parasites. I mean fascinated in a negative way. They come in so many sizes, for one thing, from viruses and bacteria like your friendly syphilis spirochete to tapeworms thirty feet long and roundworms so big and fat they block up your big intestine. Intestines are where they're happiest, by and large. To sit around in the slushy muck inside somebody else's guts—that's their catbird seat. You doing all the digesting for 'em, they don't even need stomachs, just mouths and assholes, pardon my French. But boy, the ingenuity that old Great Designer spent with His lavish hand on these humble little dev­ils. Here, I scribbled down some notes, out of the En-cy-clo-pedia, as Jiminy Cricket used to say, if I can read 'em in this lousy light up here; Brenda, I don't see how you do it; week after week. If I were you I'd go on strike. O.K. Enough horsing around.

'Your average intestinal roundworm, about the size of a lead pencil, lays its eggs in the faeces of the host; that's simple enough. Then, don't ask me how—there's a lot of unsanitary conditions in the world, once you get out of Eastwick—these eggs get up into your mouth and you swallow 'em, like it or not. They hatch in your duodenum, the little larvae worm through the gut wall, get into a blood vessel, and migrate to your lungs. But you don't think that's where they're gonna retire and live off their pension, do you? No sir, my dear friends, this little mother of a roundworm, he chews his way out of his cozy capillary there in the lungs and gets into an air sac and climbs what they call the res­piratory tree to the epiglottis, where you go and swal­low him again!—can you believe you'd be so stupid? Once he's had the second ride down he does settle in and becomes your average mature wage-earning roundworm.

'Or take—hold it, my notes are scrambled—take an appealing little number called the lung fluke. Its eggs get out in the world when people cough up spu­tum.' Van Home hawked by way of illustration. 'When they hatch in fresh water that's lying around in these crummy, sort of Third-World places, they move into certain snails they fancy, in the form now of larvae, these lung flukes, follow me? When they've had enough of living in snails they swim out and bore into the soft tissues of crayfish and crabs. And when the Japanese or whoever eat the crayfish or crabs raw or undercooked the way they like it, in they go, these pesky flukes, and chew out through the intestines and diaphragm to get into good old lung and begin this sputum routine all over again. Another of these watery little jobbies, Diphyllobothrium latum if I can read it right, the little swimming embryos are eaten first by water fleas, and then fish eat the water fleas, and bigger fish eat those fish, and finally man bites the bullet, and all the while these itty-bitty monsters instead of being digested have been chewing their way out through the various stomach linings and are thriving. Hoo boy. There're a ton of these stories, but I don't want to bore anybody or, you know, overmake my point here. Wait, though. You got to hear this. I'm quoting. 'Echinococcus granulosus is one of the few tape­worms parasitizing man in which the adult worm inhabits the intestine of the dog, while man is one of the several hosts for the larval stage. Moreover, the adult worm is minute, measuring only three to six millimeters. In contrast, the larva, known as a hydatid cyst, may be large as a football. Man acquires infec­tion'— get this—'from contact with the faeces of infected dogs.'

'So here you have, aside from a lot of feces and sputum, Man, allegedly made in the image of God, as far as little Echinococcus is concerned just a way station on the way to the intestines of a dog. Now you mustn't think parasites don't dig each other; they do. Here's a cutie pie called Trichosomoides crasskauda, of whom we read, quote, 'The female of this species lives as a parasite in the bladder of the rat, and the degen­erate male lives inside the uterus of the female.' So degenerate, even the Encyclopedia thinks it's degen­erate. And, hey, how about this?—'What might be termed sexual phoresis is seen in the blood fluke Schis­tosoma haematobium, in which the smaller female is car­ried in a ventral body-wall groove, the gynecephoric canal, of the male.' They had a drawing in the book I wish I could share with you good people, the mouth up at the tip of something like a Finger and this big ventral sucker and the whole thing looking like a banana with its zipper coming undone. Trust me: it is nasty.'

And to those who were sitting restless now (for the sky in the top panes of the windows was brightening as if a flashlight were shining behind the paper, and the hollyhock tops nodded and shuffled in a clearing breeze, a breeze that nearly capsized Arthur and Ray out in the East Passage, near Dyer Island: Arthur was

unaccustomed to handling the lively little daysailer; his heart began to fibrillate; a bird beat its wings in his chest and his brain chanted rapidly, Not yet. Lord, not yet) it appeared that Van Home's face, as it bobbed back and forth between his scrambled notes and a somehow blinded outward gaze toward the congre­gation, was dissolving, was thawing into nothingness. He tried to gather his thoughts toward the painful effort of conclusion. His voice sounded forced up from far underground.

'So to wind this thing up it's not just, you know, the nice clean pounce of a tiger or a friendly shaggy lion. That's what they sell us with all those stuffed toys. Put a kid to bed with a stuffed liver fluke or a hairy tarantula would be more like it. You all eat. The way you feel toward sunset of a beautiful summer day, the first g-and-t or rum-and-Coke or Bloody Mary beginning to do its work mellowing those synapses, and some nice mild cheese and crackers all laid out like a poker hand on the plate on the glass table out there on the sundeck or beside the pool, honest to God, good people, that's the way the roundworm feels when a big gobbety mess of half-digested steak or moo goo gai pan comes sloshing down to him. He's as real a creature as you and me. He's as noble a creature, designwise—really lovingly designed. You got to pic­ture that Big Visage leaning down and smiling through Its beard while those fabulous Fingers with Their angelic manicure fiddled with the last fine-tuning of old Schistosome's ventral sucker: that's Creation. Now I ask you, isn't that pretty terrible? Couldn't you have done better, given the resources? I sure as hell could have. So vote for me next time, O.K.? Amen.'

In every congregation there has to be a stranger. The solitary uninvited today was Sukie Rougemont, sitting in the back wearing a wide-rimmed straw hat to hide her beautiful pale orange hair, and great round spectacles, so she could see to read the hymnal and to take notes on the margin of her mimeographed program. Her scurrilous column 'Eastwick Eyes and Ears' had been reinstated, to make the Word more 'sexy.' She had gotten wind of Darryl's secular ser­mon and come to cover it. Brenda and Darryl, from their position on the altar dais, must have seen her slip in during the first hymn, but not Greta nor Dawn nor Rose Hallybread had been aware of her presence, and since she slipped out in the first stanza of 'Father, Who on Man Doth Shower,' no