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His attitude verified what I had noticed already. These people, though uninhibited by the Brew in other respects, retained enough awe to give the higher gods plenty of privacy. Whatever the priests relayed to them was enough to keep them happy.
When we came to the foot of Main Street, which ran right into the Illinois, we looked for a place to rest. Both of us were bone-weary. It was almost dawn. We had to have some sleep, if we wanted to be at all efficient for our coming work.
First, though, we had to watch the Fountain. This was a thin arc of the Brew which rose from the Bottle, set on the top of the bluffs across the river from Onaback, and ended in the middle of the waters. The descending moon played a rainbow of wavering and bright colors along it. How that trick was done, I didn’t know, but it was one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen.
I studied it and concluded that some force was being exerted linearly to keep the winds from scattering it into fine spray. And I saw how easy it would be to locate the Bottle. Follow the fountain to its source, a mile and a half away. Then destroy it, so the power of the Bull would be gone. After that, sit back and watch the Marines glide in and begin the conquest of Onaback.
It was as simple as that. We looked around some more and found a place on the riverside park to lie down. Alice, snuggled in my arms, said, “Dan, I’m awfully thirsty. Are you?”
“No,” she said, kissing my chest, “I’m not. I’m sticking with you. After all, I want to see if your hair turns out curly or straight. And don’t tell me!”
“I won’t. But you’re going to get awfully thirsty before this assignment is over.”
Secretly, I was pleased. If she wanted to be with me, then my returning hair wasn’t putting a roadblock in the course of true love. Maybe it was the real thing, not just something laid by a trauma and hatched by a complex. Maybe…
There I was in the tavern in the little town ofCroncruachshin. I’d just fulfilled my mother’s deathbed wish that I visit her mother, who was living when I stepped aboard the plane for Ireland and died the day I set foot on the green sod.
After the funeral, I’d stopped in Bill O’basean’s for a bite, and Bill, who was wearing horns like a Texas steer’s, picked the bottle off the shelf where he kept his other curios, and bellowed, “Da
“What happened to the owner?” I said, and he answered, “Sure and bejasus, all the Old Ones—Erse and Greek and Dutch and Rooshian and Chinee and Indian—found they was crowdin each other, so they had a trooce and left Airth and went elsewhere. Only Pan stayed here for a few centuries, and he flew away on the
wings o’light when the New Ones came. He didn’t die as the big mouths claim.
“And then, in the eighteenth century, the New Ones, who’d become Old Ones now, thought that, begorry, they’d better be leavin,‘ too, now that they was crowdin each other and makin a mess o’things. But the Bottle o’ Goibniu has been lyin‘ around here collectin dust and stories and here ye are, my bhoy, for ten American dollars, and what do ye intend doin with it?”
So I said, “I’ll wrap it up and send it on to my old professor as a joke. It’ll tickle him when I tell him it’s for sure the genuine everflowing bottle o‘ Goibniu.”
And Bill O’basean winked and said, “And him a teetotaller. What’ll his wife, the old hag and wicked witch, say to that?”
And I said, “Wouldn’t it be fu
And Bill, who had now become the Rational Man, looked severely at me and said to the squirrel crouched on his shoulder, “O Nuciferous One, what this simpleton don’t know nohow! Hasn’t he intellect enough, begorry, to see that the bottle was destined from its making for Boswell Durham? ‘Bos,’ which is Latin for the bovine species, and ‘well,’ a combination of the Anglo-Saxon ‘wiella,’ meaning fountain or well-spring ‘wiellan’ or ‘wellen? meaning to pour forth, and the Anglo-Saxon adverb ’well meaning worthily or abundantly, and the adjective, meaning healthy. Boswell—the foun-taining, abundantly healthy bovine. And of course, Durham. Everybody knows that that is sign and symbol for a bull.” “And he was born under Taurus too,” I said.
But I wouldn’t do it, and I awoke moaning, with the sun in my eyes and Alice shaking me and saying, “Dan, Dan, what’s the matter?”
I told her about my dream and how it was mixed up with things that had actually happened. I told her how I had bought this bottle from O’basean and sent it to the Professor as a hoax. But she didn’t pay much attention because, like me, she had one thing uppermost in the cells of both body and mind. Thirst. Thirst was a living lizard that, with a hot rough skin, forced its swelling body down our throats and pulsed there, sucking moisture from us with every breath.
She licked her dry, cracked lips and then, glancing wistfully toward the river, where bathers shouted and plunged with joy, asked, “I don’t suppose it’d hurt me if I sat in it, do you?”
“Be careful,” I said, my words rattling like pebbles in a dried gourd. I ached to join her, but I couldn’t even get near the water. I was having trouble enough combatting the panic that came with the odor of the Brew blowing from the river on the morning breeze.
While she waded out until the water was hip-deep and cupped it in her hands and poured it over her breasts, I examined my surroundings in the daylight. To my left was a warehouse and a wharf. Tied alongside the latter was an old coal barge that had been painted bright green. A number of men and women, ignoring the festivities, were busy carrying bags and long mummy-shaped bundles from the warehouse to the boat. These were the bones that had been dug up recently. If my information was correct, they’d be ferried across to the other side after the ceremonies.
That was fine. I intended to go over with them. As soon as Alice came back out of the water, I’d unfold my plans to her and if she thought she could go through with it, we’d…
A big gri
After sputtering and blowing the water out, she stood there with the most ecstatic expression, then bent over and began drinking great mouthfuls. That was enough for me. I was dying within, because she was now on the enemy’s side, and I’d wanted so badly to do something for her that I hurt. But I had to get going before she saw me and yelled, “Come on in, Dan, the beer’s fine!”
I trotted through the crowd, moaning to myself at losing her, until I came to the far end of the warehouse, where she couldn’t possibly see me enter. There, under the cool cavernous roof, I paused until I saw a lunch-basket sitting by a pile of rags. I scooped it up, untied one of the bags, put the basket inside, and hoisted the bag over my shoulder. I stepped, unchallenged, into the line of workers going out to the barge. As if I belonged there, I briskly carried my burden over the gangplank.
But instead of depositing it where everybody else was, I walked around the mountain of bags. Out of view on the riverside, I took the basket out and dumped the bones inside the bag over the railing into the river. I took one peek around my hiding place. Alice was nowhere to be seen.
Satisfied she would not be able to find me, and glad that I’d not disclosed my plans to her last night, I took the basket and crawled backward into the bag. Once there, I succumbed to the three things that had been fighting within me—grief, hunger, and thirst. Tears ran as 1 thought of Alice. At the same time, I greedily devoured, in rapid succession, an orange, a leg and breast of chicken, a half-loaf of fresh bread, and two great plums.