CHAPTER SIXTEEN

G stood before D and exhorted his attention. Now, G had goo on his pants and fear in his heart. His pulse was racing like Fangio over a Keremeos backstreet. But D was in a reverie. He had a bag of ice on his head, but the bag was really a poorly-tied dish towel, and the ice was melting. D was wet, and clad in narry but a nightgown that had once belonged to Ms. Tartan. G had given up asking him where he got such things.

"Will you, for God's sake - ?" began G.

"No longer believe in God," said D, his voice obviously hurting the inside of his oddly-shaped cranium.

"Will you, for the Universal Life Force's sake, listen to me?"

Good, he had managed an entire sentence, though an interrogative one.

"That's an interesting religio-sexual phenomenon," said D, taking the slushy cloth from his head and tossing it into his sink, atop three TV-dinner boxes. Turkey? wondered G. Why three servings of turkey? The meat loaf would have been a nice respite. Comes with peach cobbler in the triangular indentation at 12 O'Clock.

"What?" he asked, beginning to surrender. D had an English accent that intensified from time to time. G, having been brought up in the dirt-road Interior of the Province, was conditioned to feel secure and uneducated in the presence of an English accent.

"Until this year, I always called upon the name of the deity while experiencing a climax of a sexual nature. It seemed natural to do so, especially while the partner of the occasion was calling my name out, louder and louder."

"Dorcas?"

"Dorkus? Just about kill us!"

G looked around the kitchen-sitting room-bedroom for something to eat while being instructed. There was nothing but some dried sauce the colour of his desert boot. This sauce was on the wallpaper.

"So you see," said D, now combing his hair with water out of the saucepan beside the sink, "I find it ludicrous trying to exclaim Oh Universal Life Force while ejaculating."

"So, what do you exclaim?"

"Usually I call my own name louder and louder."

Now D began to remove Miss Tartan's peach-coloured nightgown while roving the living space looking for items of English male attire. G averted his gaze. He looked out the sooty window at the creepy plants in the Shaughnessy back yard while D was probably checking under the rollaway bed for underpants. G took this opportunity to describe their calamity.

"M is in the hands of the police. He is probably even now whimpering under a hail of billyclubs," he said. A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth, but he fought it.

"What has the miscreant done this time?" asked D. "You can look now."

D was attired in brown seersucker slacks that hung like soft air ducts around his legs. His grey shirt flecked with silver thread was done up at the neck button. He was holding in his hand a necktie that appeared to sport a design part Stewart plaid and part UBC cafeteria beef and barley soup.

"A metric ton of policemen grabbed him while he was throwing a handful of capers into the spaghetti sauce," said G. His voice rose as if he were connubing Dorcas, or as if he were enunciating one of his faux Corso poems in the quad.

"Are you certain that they were policemen?" asked D. The way he did so impressed G more than any English accent could do. D spoke the words in a kind of intradental hiss while his alarming beard neared G's ear and finally abutted it. It was like Chaimss Mayssson hissing into Randolph Scott.

"Well," and now G's hard-won urbanity fell from him like dust from a moth's wings. "They were wearing police uniforms. They had guns and moustaches. They were all wide in the hips."

"Eggsackly," intoned D. His tie was now perfectly knotted though not dead centre. He had a brown oxford on one foot and a strange sock on the other. Now he stood in apparent distraction while he should have been looking under something or perhaps outside for the other. It was not distraction, however, but reverie. Finally he spoke, the English accent nearly gone, replaced by a kind of unpracticed democracy.

"Tell me, fellow poet and true, when you were playing footsie with Amanda Tunefork under the long table in Creative Writhing 302, was that an idle moment, opportunity idly taken? Or did I miss something?"

"Amanda had eyes only for the bard. Amanda wanted Prester John himself," replied G, evasively.

"I am not reminiscing here about eyes, Delsing. You will remember that Miss Tunefork walked around squishing. She descended upon our leafy campus from the high mountain country, an innocent valkerie unaware of her beakish powers. One day she walked before me into the Gorp Building wearing, it appeared, nothing but high heels and a knitted dress of a dove-grey shade. When she mounted the heartbreakingly few steps into the Gorp, I nearly perished in the Herrickean sense. I broke into a sweat. I heard a ringing in my ears and said ringing was not a subtle electromagnetic buzz - I heard ringing such as a bat must hear in the belfry of St Crispin's Cathedral, Snarlton-upon-Twylle, Bucks. At eleven in the morn. I am asking you, man, did you ever swizzle that apéritif? Did you play handsies with the creature?"

G was trying to remember the words spoken by the four uniformed lardomorphs while they were bouncing M toward their van, but the image of Amanda Tunefork intruded upon his panopticon. He viewed all her parts. He viewed all her elements. He recalled the squeak of her skin. He began to mumble:

Her eyes, the sheets her fingers
work over like lapels.

Morals, faded labels from foreign hotels
we slept in, our luggage.

How pretend nothing has happened
when precisely that is your conviction.

D had somewhere located a leaking ballpoint and a college binder.

"Would you say that more clearly?" he urged. "I want to remember what you said here today."

G was always happy to comply on such occasions. He repeated the words, careful with the end-stops, breathing the way he imagined Gaston Helios, the doyen of the San Francisco Renaissance, to do. D scribbled in his binder.

"White globes with not a lick of perspiration between them," G murmured.

"Cad!"

"Two dorsal dimples you could lay twenty cents in."

"Dog in the manger!"

"Tongue like a frantic escargot."

"I wish to talk about M and these purported minions of the law," said D, now wearing his thick unpressed tweed jacket. It looked pretty good with the Stewart tie, though the soupstains were of another origin.

But now G was thinking of Tunefork. Sugar fell from the sky. Glistening worms emerged from between moist leaves on the forest floor. Blazing quaggas crossed the southern firmament. Oysters leapt into wheelbarrows. Peculiar inscriptions appeared on the yellow wall of the Sick Brewery.

"Lorraine Tartan!" shouted D, his beard touching G's nose.

He woke from his dream into the squalor of D's room. He thought he saw an inflatable doll protuding from beneath the rollaway, but D's foot moved quickly, and it was probably all imagined. Coming out of a vision can do odd things to the ocular organs.

Now D placed a tweed arm over his companion's shoulders.

"Let us go out and procure two Eat More bars and two Creme Sodas, and see whether we can make head or nail of this puzzle," he suggested, something like a cultured leer in his voice.

"That's tail," said G.

"I told you I no longer want to hear about that. Our friend M is, I fear, in dire straits. Maybe even Georgia Strait. If we stumble upon his body, I must tell you, M and I made a verbal agreement whereby I get all his Calypso forty-fives and the rest of his New Yorker subscription."

They did not trust the telephone. They went to the Public Safety Building and enquired about the possible presence there of their chum. After a long wait, during which time D smoked cigarettes and G eyed the female typist in the blue shirt with ironing creases, a doughnut-eater denied all knowledge of an arrest at the Lecovin residence.

Just as our duo was about to depart the building for a few quick ones at the Georgia, they heard loud voices behind a pebbled glass door. Then the door opened and two young men in paint-spattered coveralls emerged, talking loudly and angrily while a policeman with ironing creases and two stripes border-collied them before him. These civilians were Danny Charles and Brian Stewart.

"I'm tellin' ya, they were letters, real letters. There was lots of funny looking squiggles too, but there were these real letters!"

"We have your report, Mr. Stewart," said the border-collie.

"You're so full of pure moose shit, Brian," said Dave Powell.

"I seen a t for sure, and an e, that's no shit," shouted Stewart.

"We'll call you if we need any more information," said the border-collie.

And they were outside. Brian and Dave and G and D.

Brian and Dave looked at the two poet-students casually, and then looked again, recognizing them.

"Hey, we seen you on TV," said Brian.

"Yeah, with that broad and the other guy with the beard."

G and D looked modest. They were thinking of the afternoon darkness under the sidewalk at the Georgia Hotel.

"Boy, that broad really got you guys good," said Dave. "I couldn't understand a word she was saying, but she really had your number."

"Fuckin' eh," agreed Brian.

G and D mumbled their genial agreement. Now all they had to do was edge away, westward.

"That other guy," said Dave. "What happened to his hair?"

"We are kind of in a hurry," said G. "We are trying to locate our friend right this minute. There isn't a second to waste." And Kathy Richards was usually in the Women & Escorts by four o'clock.

But the two young men in coveralls didn't get to talk with television stars every day. They began to walk along with the poet-students.

"I thought I would die when you guys started shouting about the white flash and the wall writing and the kidnappers," said Brian, with a big smile. There was a Craven A in the middle of the smile. G gestured and the painter gave him a Craven A. G had been craving one all afternoon.

"'Cause I seen the writing, too," said Brian. "And now I remember the second word I could make out."

Now G and D were walking at regular speed, and the painters added up to a foursome. But G and D were word people. And G wanted another cigarette.

"What was that second word?" he asked, while they waited for a green light on Main and Georgia.

"Where ya going? The Georgia? I'll tell ya there if you buy me and Dave a barley sandwich."