The Grasshopper King Page 18

  “Saucepan.”

  “That’s a terrible code name,” Ellen said. But Charlie was in favor.

  “I’m a saucepan!” he proclaimed. “The secret saucepan! Operation Saucepan!” He drew his face close to mine; no more than six inches of water and wind between us. “This is so much better than being at work,” he said.

  The four of us went over our respective parts until I was convinced that every possibility of error had been eliminated. We stood at the door, dripping from our sleeves and chins, wearing mad conspiratorial smiles.

  “This is great,” Julia said. “I mean it. It’s workable.” She put her hands on my shoulders. “I’m sort of shocked.” Her bangs dangled before her eyes like foliage and her nose was starting to run. She kissed me.

  “Love is the downfall of all secret agents,” Charlie said.

  “Shut up, saucepan,” I said. We went together into the house, Julia and Ellen first, Charlie and I behind, our shoes squelching quietly on the linoleum, synchronized. Charlie leaned toward me again, as if to whisper some last encouragement in my ear. But I put my finger to my lips. From here on in we were sticking to the script.

  I went downstairs to deliver my supposed petition. The basement was crazy with grasshoppers; the whole local population must have been driven from their homes by the rain. They huddled in the corners and nestled among the artifacts, and at any moment dozens of them were in midleap, so that the room seemed held at a low green simmer. This, I thought, was for the best. The chattering of the grasshoppers, along with the steady tattoo of the rain on the windows, could only help obscure our trickery.

  I sat down across from Higgs. The checkerboard lay between us, still in a drawn position from the last game Higgs had played with Julia. There was a grasshopper perched on one of his red kings. It was poised so motionlessly that I hadn’t seen it for a moment; I had taken it for a part of the checker. It seemed a new kind of man entirely, a grasshopper king, part of some variant game that no one had gotten around to teaching me. The grasshopper faced me, a strangely mottled green, its tiny limbs shoved forward like a supplicant’s; but there was something defiant, I thought, in its pose, in the unforgiving set of its thorax. I waved my hands in its direction, trying to shoo it away. But the grasshopper ignored me. It seemed absorbed in a private contemplation.

  “Fine, then,” I told it. Julia, waiting halfway up the stairs, gave me an anxious look; I was off the plan. I made a little grimace of apology.

  “Fine, then, Professor,” I said, louder, and slid into my prepared remarks. “We can see you’ve made your mind up about this. We’ve tried to persuade you in every way we could that it was in your best interest, and in the best interest of the field, for you to speak; but you’ve decided otherwise, for reasons of your own. And we—I think I’m speaking for Julia and me, and of course Mrs. Higgs, and your colleagues here at the university—we respect that decision on your part, and on all of our behalf I just want to wish you good luck through whatever lies ahead.”

  Julia upped her thumbs. Was I good: officious and up-front as a bank president! I felt ready to pull out a railroad watch. But I wasn’t through yet. I took a long breath, and then—drawing up from my grottoed interior the memories of a lifetime of frustration, my thousand humblings, all the mistakes I’d made despite the clarity of the right course and the right courses I’d unaccountably veered from, my vanities, my uncharities, my prejudices, which had deformed my field of vision into something like the surface of a sphere (inalterably finite, I mean, but without even any boundary I could beat my fists against) and the concomitant unlikeliness that any of this would ever, in any way that counted, change—I started to cry.

  “Oh, God, Professor Higgs, please speak! Don’t you know what they’re going to do to you? Can’t you understand? I’m begging you! Speak, Professor! Please, Professor, speak! Speak! Speak!”

  I choked off a convincing sob and gave the agreed-upon hand signal to Julia, who relayed it to Ellen at the top of the stairs. Ellen and Charlie came down together, locked in step. Charlie’s eyes were clamped shut, and his breaths were deep and measured. He was getting into his part. Ellen led him to his spot, by Higgs’s side, and bent him down a bit so his head would be the right distance from the recorders. Crouched over Higgs, Charlie looked like a kibitzer, about to suggest to his companion some arcane maneuver by which he might transmute the abandoned, drawn position into victory. I gave Ellen the second signal; she squeezed Charlie’s arm; Charlie opened his eyes.

  It was difficult for me, at first, to interpret the sudden tightening of Charlie’s features, the drawing back of his brows, the bloodlessness of his face. For a half-second I riffled through possibilities: stage fright? the long-delayed arrival of his moral character? But neither of these adequately explained Charlie’s dawning expression, which could only be called horror. His eyes were frozen; I followed their direction downward, over Higgs’s shoulder, to the red king and its insect tenant, and then I realized what had happened. The criminal—in my mind, the sad, incontestable voice-over—always makes one mistake: one fatal mistake. And mine had come to light. I had forgotten about Charlie and his bugs.

  Charlie’s hands flew to his chest; he jerked his head back and forth wildly, taking in for the first time the cluttered, teeming basement, effervescent with lower life. His jaw fell open.

  “Grasshopper,” he croaked, and then I was on him, one arm around his windpipe and my other hand over his mouth, but of course I was too late. At least he had spoken in Higgs’s voice; he must have been too terrified to drop out of character.

  We had to get Charlie out of the house, I thought; then we could work out an explanation, play-act whatever transition was needed, and bring him back down for a sequel. We still had an hour. And just as I thought this, there came from upstairs a peremptory double knock—RAT-tat. Treech had come early.

  Panic blossomed, my gorge rose. Charlie turned his eyes to me questioningly. His neck was fish-cold under my arm, and fish-moist too, with sweat. OK, I thought, OK, OK, OK. I clung to this reassuring iamb like a scrap of boat and in a moment I had regained my clarity; redoubled it, in fact. I breathed evenly and with assurance. The house seemed laid open before me like a blueprint. It was perfectly simple; here was Treech’s path, here Charlie’s, two threads strung through the rooms. All I had to do was make sure they didn’t cross.

  “Grasshopper,” I said. “Yes, Professor, I’m starting to see it . . .”

  I indicated the row of half-windows with a motion of my head. Ellen, catching my meaning, pulled open the one above Higgs’s table. A gush of frigid rain spilled into the room, sending an outburst of grasshoppers skittering away. The opening looked just tall enough to let Charlie through. I turned him around to face me, my hand still covering his mouth, and attempted to convey to him through my fierce gaze alone that once I let him go, he was not to flee upstairs, nor to make any other sound, but rather to climb as quietly as possible out the window, depart on foot, and await further instructions. Then I released him; and whether because he had gotten my meaning, or because he was simply attracted to the most immediate means of escape, he made for the window at once. I headed upstairs to hold off Treech until order could be restored.

  When I opened the front door Treech was huddled under the lintel, drenched despite his huddling. He pushed his way past me and dripped angrily onto the rug.

  “Some people would consider it rude to make a person wait outside on a day like this,” Treech said. He was wearing a sad orange rain hat in the shape of a frustrum, along whose drooping brim rainwater collected into drops and fell. I guessed Ellen and Julia would need about forty-five seconds to eradicate the evidence. I started a mental count: one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three . . .

  “Is it raining?” I asked.

  For an answer Treech merely flung his sopping rain hat to the floor.

  “Things are a little hectic,” I told him. “Understandably.”

  Treech nudged close to me and maneuvere
d his face into a version of toughness. “Look,” he said. “You know where I stand and I know where you stand. The discussion is over. So let’s see him.”

  “You’re an hour early.” Eleven-one-thousand.

  “People in desperate situations change their minds. Sometimes at the very last minute. I’d hate to miss that.”

  It was a natural opening to tell Treech what had just happened; rather, what we meant him to believe had just happened. But if Treech thought Higgs had already spoken I would never be able to hold him off.

  “He’s still eating breakfast,” I said instead.

  “So?”

  “I think you’d rather wait for Ellen to clean him up.” I had inserted myself between Treech and the stairs.

  “I don’t mind.”

  Treech tried to shoulder me aside, but I stood firm. When he feinted left, I moved with him; when he tried to duck under my outstretched arm, I crouched to block him. I guarded the basement door as grimly as if my life savings were behind it—which, in a way, I suppose they were.

  “Why don’t you wait up here?” I said. “Put your feet up.”

  “I wouldn’t hear of it,” he said, and charged straight at me. Twenty-seven-one-thousand. His head thunked against the fork of my ribs. I held my ground.

  Treech rested his palms on his knees and glared at me.

  “I am tired,” he said, chuffing like a dying engine, “of being treated like an intruder in the household. I’ve been proud to call myself an associate and colleague of Professor Higgs for many years and I belong here as much as any of you. Certainly as much as you.”

  How could I deny that?

  With some effort and even a little dignity he pulled himself straight up. “All I want is what you want, Samuel. No more waiting.” He turned away from me and took a few steps toward the door. “When I think of what it used to be like . . .” he said. The orange rain hat lay in a crumple at his feet like an awful dog.

  “I’ve heard about it,” I said, to keep him talking. He looked pathetic, in his drab, slump-shouldered coat, feeble and somehow sprained. I relaxed.

  Quick as a snake he was past me; he kicked me hard in the ankles and I dropped, helpless, to my knees. It had only been thirty-eight seconds.

  “No,” I said, “wait a minute.”

  Treech paused at the top of the stairs. Glee was stretched across his face; and then, improbably, terrifyingly, he shrieked at me: “Your Momma!” And he started down.

  But immediately he was met by Ellen coming up. Her hair was plastered to her face and she seemed on the verge of tears. Treech, off-guard, allowed himself to be backed up to the foyer.

  “What happened to your dress?” he asked Ellen. She ignored him.

  “The saucepan,” she said tightly, “is stuck in the window.”

  Treech looked back and forth between us, his eyes narrowing. “What?” he said. He shook his head as if trying to dislodge something. “What?”

  I tried as best I could not to blanch. “We use it to prop the window open,” I explained.

  “In this weather?”

  “That,” I said, “is why we have to take it out of the window.”

  “I can’t budge it,” Ellen said.

  I made a move toward the stairs. “Maybe I should give it a try.”

  “I’m good with mechanical things,” Treech said.

  The three of us halted, our attractions and repulsions momentarily summing to nothing. The last shreds of my clarity fluttered away. My stomach felt like something huge and flat had settled there. How could I have thought this would work?

  “For goodness’ sake,” Ellen said, “you’re the guest. Sam’ll do it. Let me fix you a drink.”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “You’ll have a soda.”

  Ellen hauled Treech off by one arm. I rushed downstairs to dislodge the saucepan. I would not have much time.

  In the basement I found Julia struggling tearfully with my old friend’s backside, broader now than I remembered it, broader too than the aperture through which it was necessary, at all costs, that it proceed. Charlie’s legs were kicking jerkily, in a loose frog-style, moving independently in wild ellipses; it was a manner of kicking, I thought distractedly, for which I knew the exact Gravinic verb. It wasn’t helping. Charlie was stuck fast. I clambered onto Higgs’s table, forced Charlie’s legs down by main strength, and applied my right shoulder to the task of pushing him through. His shirt had pulled out of his dungarees, and a squared-off ripple of his flesh bulged from the edges of the window, chafed red from his efforts. Silently I cursed, individually and as a class, all the Clappy Burgers, each soggy carton of Happy Special Onion Os that I had watched him joyfully consume. Through the adjacent window I could see him scrabbling for purchase on the lawn outside; but there was no handhold there, only the slippery wet grass.

  Without some leverage I was lost. Through labored pantomime I conveyed to Julia that she should pass up to me one of the Paiute bison spears that lay bundled under the sign of North America. The flint tip had long since been appropriated by some enterprising collector, and the shaft, as I had hoped, was thin enough to wedge between the top of the windowframe and Charlie, fitting neatly into the groove that nature had provided him. Hoping Charlie had enough sense, or was already sufficiently uncomfortable, not to yell, I leaned down on the free end of the spear with all my weight. I was rewarded with a gratifying bit of give. Upstairs, voices were raising: Treech and Ellen having at each other. I pushed down on the spear again and again, timing each thrust to coincide with the rebound of the last. My face and chest broke out in sweat and the muscles of my arms burned each time I let the spear up. I was making progress; but not enough. Treech was at the stairs.

  “I’ve had enough of this,” he said, his needle-sharp voice perfectly clear even over the grasshoppers’ chattering, even over the rain, even over the blurry tone of exertion sounding in my ears. “I will not be shanghaied around. I will not be obstructed.” And now came his footsteps, ominous and wet.

  “Wait,” Julia shouted desperately, “I’m not dressed!” But Treech would not be dissuaded, now, certainly not by modesty. He was halfway down. His arrow-shaped shadow slunk along the basement floor. I readied myself, aching, for a final push; and as I did so, a grasshopper, stirred by some unguessable impulse, heaved itself out of the drenched mess, rose and fell in a perfect, inevitable parabola whose intercept was the exposed stripe of Charlie’s back. When it touched him—just as I threw myself down on the spear with the meager remainder of my strength—he kicked violently outward and caught me squarely on the side of the head. I stumbled back, remembering just too late that I was standing on a table, but before I went down I saw Charlie’s legs vanishing out the window, into the storm. I landed with a crash against the sarcophagus. The mummified Arab, as if startled out of sleep, tipped forward from his case and fell. His chin caught the edge of the table and his head snapped neatly off, rolled in diminishing circles in front of Higgs, and came to rest sitting jauntily on one leathery ear; and this was the first thing Treech saw when, a moment later, he burst madly into the basement. His eyes widened. Quickly he surveyed the room: the head, and the rain pounding on the head, which was pounding also on Higgs’s table, and on placid Higgs, from the open window; Julia, weeping and fully clothed; the absence of a saucepan or breakfast; and myself, slumped against the empty coffin, bleeding into one eye, still clutching the pointless Paiute spear, the decapitated Arab sprawled across me like an exhausted lover. Treech covered the distance between us instantaneously, seemingly on wheels. He leaned down; his bewildered, furious face drew kissing-close to mine.

  “I demand an explanation,” he said. “Some explanation is required.” Reflected in his glasses, hardly distorted, I could see my own face. To my joyous surprise, I saw that my features had of their own accord formed themselves, at last, into the knowing, sidelong smile of Gregory Corso.

  Then Treech’s face seemed to waver away from me, doubling and quadrupling
as it went. I thought I might have a touch of concussion.

  “Grasshopper,” I told him, weak and triumphant. “He said ‘Grasshopper.’”

  And the room grew red, and subsequently black.

  Three weeks and some hours later I sat at a lengthy and impeccably set table on a marble stage, a melting gin and tonic—my sixth—in front of me, a cooling plate of roast beef and mixed greens at my left hand, untouched. I hadn’t had a bite all day; but my stomach felt as if I’d been scarfing down chili by the quart, chocolate syrup, cold sticks of butter.

  The first thing the Henderson Society had done—once I’d roused enough to feed Treech our story, once he’d played the tapes back, once he’d managed to stammer his astonishing news into Ellen’s dusty telephone—was declare a banquet. Nearly five hundred members and former members had shown up, filing between the cherub-choked pilasters of the convention center, née Temple of Reason, the same bookless library that had hosted the champion Prospectors thirty years before. The scholars were spread out before and beneath me like an allegorical painting of scholarship. Their voices bouncing off the marble were titanic. I thought I might be sick. The dining part of the evening was coming to a close. From every part of the hall I could hear the soft, final impact of forks coming to rest, tines down, on plates; and fit, smiling waitresses in smart vests had materialized to clear the plates away. In a few minutes it would be time for the speech. The speech was to be given by me. And I had no idea what I was going to say.

  All week I had wrestled with the problem of how to suitably commemorate my hoax before the very people it was intended to delude. I had assured myself as the days passed that the solution would come to me, in a dream or a daytime visitation; but the clouds had stayed shut, and I’d woken up each morning as clueless as the night before, and here it was, almost time. If inspiration arrived now it would have to get straight to the point.

  With me on the proscenium were the surviving principals of the Higgs affair. Ellen was there, along with Higgs himself, sitting at the table’s head. Rosso and McTaggett sat side by side across from me; Dean Moresby, wheelchair-bound now, was at the foot of the table, the point farthest from his daughter. There was dour Slotkin, my predecessor, and to his left, seated in order of their service, his predecessors, whose names I had immediately and willfully forgotten after the initial round of introductions. The president of the Society was there, flanked by Treech and Mayor Meadows. Next to Treech sat Cheryl Hister, middle-aged and sallowed, with her husband beside her and a grim toddler clamped in her lap. Once again they’d made her wear her Happy Clappy’s uniform; sallowed too, it bound her across the breasts and belly like a post-surgical dressing. Even Karl-Heinz Sethius had made it. The Society had flown him in, and now he sat on Higgs’s other side, a tiny bright-eyed lawn statue of a man, talking vigorously to his correspondent, whether in English or German I couldn’t tell, either not noticing or not minding Higgs’s failure to respond.