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...' They had that nigger chained to the bed, and he was bawling like a cow.... I soon got enough of that ol' nigger. Well, if you all will excuse me I got business in the Privy Coun- cil. He he he!" Lee listened in horror. The County Clerk often spent weeks in the privy living on scorpions and Montgomery Ward catalogues. On several occasions his assistants had forced the door and carried him out in an advanced state of malnutrition. Lee decided to play his last card. "Mr. Anker," he said, "I'm appealing to you as one Razor Back to another," and he pulled out his Razor Back card, a memo of his lush-rolling youth. The Clerk looked at the card suspiciously: "You don't look like a bone feed mast-fed Razor Back to me.... What you think about the Jeeeeews... P" "Well, Mr. Anker, you know yourself all a Jew wants to do is doodle a Christian girl.... One of these days well cut the rest of it off." "Well, you talk right sensible for a city feller.... Find out what he wants and take care of him.... He's a good ol' boy." INTERZONE The only native in Interzone who is neither queer nor available is Andrew Keif's chauffeur, which is not af- fectation or perversity on Keif's part, but a useful pre- text to break off relations with anyone he doesn't want to see: "You made a pass at Aracknid list night. I can't have you to the house again." People are always black- ing out in the Zone, whether they drink or not, and no one can say for sure he didn't make a pass at Aracknid's unappetizing person. Aracknid is a worthless chauffeur, barely able to drive. On one occasion he ran down a pregnant woman in from the mountains with a load of charcoal on her back, and she miscarriaged a bloody, dead baby in the street, and Keif got out and sat on the curb stirring the blood with a stick while the police questioned Aracknid and finally arrested the woman for a violation of the Sanitary Code. Aracknid is a grimly unattractive young man with a long face of a strange, slate-blue color. He has a big nose and great yellow teeth like a horse. Anybody can find an attractive chauffeur, but only Andrew Keif could have found Aracknid; Keif the brilliant, decadent young novelist who lives in a remodeled pissoir in the red light district of the Native Quarter. The Zone is a single, vast building. The rooms are made of a plastic cement that bulges to accommodate people, but when too many crowd into one room there is a soft plop and someone squeezes through the wall right into the next house, the next bed that is, since the rooms are mostly bed where the business of the Zone is transacted. |
