“What if I remove it?”
“You’ll leave,” Duggan said. He shook the bin to signal I should reclaim its contents, among which I found a pair of foam earplugs sealed inside a baggie.
I pocketed my stuff and underarmed the Crunch box.
“Take the earplugs,” said Duggan.
“Why?”
“For Ulysses.”
“Ulysses?” I said, taking the earplugs.
“Main event,” he said.
I waited for more.
He aimed his chin west, toward the compound’s only intersection. “That,” he said, “over there is Jason Terrace. Hang a right at Jason and go all the way down to the end of the cul-de-sac. Join the crowd. Someone’ll alert you when it’s time for brunch.”
I waved and walked off.
“We’ll see each other soon, Mr. Magnet,” said Valentine, and although all I heard was a friendly salutation—an attempt, I thought, to compensate for Duggan’s cold officiousness—it turned out to be a sound prediction as well. I saw both of them again just a few minutes later.
* * *
In preparation for Ulysses, the other Yachts joined Triple-J on the carousel, and Valentine handcuffed them each by a wrist to a different handrail while Duggan and Burroughs crowdworked together: the former circulating briskly among us, cradling the “sirencase”—a mirror-lidded, otherwise translucent box twice the size of a PillowNest—and the latter describing the Curio inside of it from his perch near the top of the jungle gym.
“Our main event’s siren,” Burroughs carnival-barked, “is a single-legged, long-tailed, calico three-year-old, cuddlefarmed by Wheelatine’s own Catrina Hogg, and valued at seven hundred fifty dollars. Its name is Spotsy, and it’s being brought around so you can see it up close. No shoving please. Everyone’ll get a look. Slow down a little, Duggan. Let everyone see. Good, that’s better. We’re not in any rush.
“Now, you’ll notice Spotsy seems larger than average, but that’s just an illusion created by the sirencase: the walls have been inlaid with magnifying glass. You might also notice Spotsy’s shading its eyes and squinting a little. That owes to its having been dosed with Vampire, the effects of which will get a lot less subtle once we remove that mirrored lid and clamp on the high-wattage lamp—you’ll see. Depending how close you are, you may hear, too. The Yachts sure will. On top of the Vampire, Spotsy’s been given some Wailer and Melodize for increased volume and beauty of painsong.
“How we doing there, Yachts? We ready to play some Ulysses or what?”
“Out naked from my mother’s bosom, I say, was I pulled ready,” Chaz Jr. said, and, with his balled, free hand—he’d been the first Yacht cuffed—invited a pound from Chaz.
Chaz, the second cuffed, glanced at the fist, and left his friend hanging. To the audience he said, “Be you muddy, all-class, or any way in between, I beg you not hold against our doe-eyed and verily virginal pally his rather telling ignorance of basic female plumbing. He’s a good one. Hear hear?”
“Word up,” said Bryce, who Valentine was cuffing.
“Word straight to the dang-darn muth,” Lyle said.
Lowering his fist, Chaz Jr. told Chaz: “I venture my knowledge of basic female plumbing is greatly and deeply understated, homeslice.”
“Me-o, my-o, the hay-o you say!” Chaz said to Chaz Jr., and then, turning to Lyle and Bryce: “Need I put a finer point upon it?”
“Indeed,” Lyle said.
“Let the good chap know where it be at,” said Bryce.
Triple-J, who, if Valentine continued working clockwise, would be the last of the Yachts to be cuffed, crossed his arms on his handrail and lowered his head.
“Though all we swell fellows can be said to have once been pulled out naked from his mother’s womb,” Chaz told Chaz Jr., “not a one of us has ever been so outwardly pulled from his mother’s bosom, sir. Not unless something truly unYachtlike and wiggity-wack, to say nothing of illicit, were going on.”
“Hear hear,” Bryce said.
“There there,” said Lyle.
“And perhaps I didn’t want to say womb?” said Chaz Jr., once the chuckles from the audience started dying down. “Perhaps referring to the womb of one’s own dear mother smacks of more than a little impropriety, given that womb’s nearness to other parts of one’s mother that no chap worth even but his diggity-doggity weight in copper pennies would want to incite another to envisage, for that is total disrespect plus gross on the real, yo? And as for the borderline-illicit wackness you’ve suggested, I wonder if your having even come up with such a rankly, boogada-boogity notion doesn’t go to show that your mind’s in the gutter? In dissing me, my dear man, I fear you’ve dissed yourself.”
“That’s an awful lot of protest, kindly chum—too much? Who’s to judge?” Chaz replied. “Word it up now on the razzly-dazzly rizzle McT tip: I may, yes, be quite out my dang mind, but your reasoning seems to me to lack a, shall we say, certain integrity? I ask you, Chaz Jr., does not speaking loosely of one’s dear mother’s bosom bring no impropriety to bear? Speaking loosely of climbing out naked from one’s dear mother’s bosom, dog? That’s—”
“Stop acting like fucking dorks,” Triple-J said, as Valentine knelt by his handrail, cuffing him.
“Word up, dork down, hey hey,” Bryce agreed.
“Truly,” Lyle said, “let’s recork that dork, what, and have us a contest of Ulysses, shall we?”
“Burroughs,” Triple-J said.
“Duggan,” said Burroughs, then leapt from the jungle gym.
Duggan, who’d been nearing the back of the crowd—he’d gotten close enough to where I was standing that Spotsy, which had been waving presidentially from inside the sirencase, seemed, for a moment, to be waving at me—turned on his heel and headed for the carousel, where Valentine waited for him next to its spindle.
At this point, I became distracted. Fondajane Henry had appeared near the jungle gym. She spoke softly to Burroughs, whose soft response garnered him a squeeze on the shoulder paired with her signature, feel-great horse-laugh. They turned in my direction. Burroughs pointed me out. Fondajane showed me all ten of her fingers, then pressed them together, five against five, just above her heart, and flurried them, and smiled. I’m all but certain I smiled back. I might have even mouthed, “Hi,” or, “Pleased to meet you, Fondajane,” but I was so very taken by seeing her in person—how glowingly, iconically spectacular she was, how feminine and splendidly commanding was her figure, even seen from a distance of fifteen yards and slackly obscured by her terry-cloth tracksuit—I can’t say for sure what I said or did. Then she was going, and then she was gone, and one of the boys standing next to me whispered, “I really hate that she had to split, but I loved to watch her walk away,” and the boys on either side of him slapped him on the back and ruffled his hair and I realized how quiet the audience had gotten, how quiet they’d been since she’d first appeared—how else could I have heard her signature horse-laugh?—and despite the whispered statement’s having been a cliché since at least as far back as the hat-tipping era, the boy had deployed it so very aptly I couldn’t begrudge him his friends’ congratulations: he’d spoken our hearts.