V.

At Idlewild was a fat three-year-old who waited to bounce over the tarmac to a waiting plane - Miami, Havana, San Juan - looking blase and heavy-lidded over the dandruffed shoulder of her father's black suit at the claque of relatives assembled to see her off. "Cucarachita," they cried, "adios, adios."

For such wee hours the airport was mobbed. After having Esther paged, Rachel went weaving in and out of the crowd in a random search-pattern for her strayed roommate. At last she joined Profane at the rail.

"Some guardian angels we are."

"I checked on Pan American and all of them," Profane said. "The big ones. They were full up days ago. This Anglo Airlines here is the only one going out this morning."

Loudspeaker announced the flight, DC-3 waited across the strip, dilapidated and hardly gleaming under the lights. The gate opened, waiting passengers began to move. The Puerto Rican baby's friends had come armed with maracas, claves, timbales. They all moved in like a bodyguard to escort her out to the plane. A few cops tried to break it up. Somebody started to sing, pretty soon everybody was singing.

"There she is," Rachel yelled. Esther came scooting around from behind a row of lockers, with Slab running interference. Eyes and mouth bawling, overnight case leaking a trail of cologne which would dry quickly on the pavement, she charged in among the Puerto Ricans. Rachel, running after her, sidestepped a cop only to run head on into Slab.

"Oof," said Slab.

"What the hell's the idea, lout." He had hold of one arm.

"Let her go," Slab said. "She wants to."

"You've slammed her around," yelled Rachel. "You trying to total her? It didn't work with me so you had to pick on somebody as weak as you are. Why couldn't you confine your mistakes to paint and canvas."

One way or another the Whole Sick Crew was giving the cops a busy night. Whistles started blowing. The area between the rail and the DC-3 was swelling into a small-scale riot.

Why not? It was August and cops do not like Puerto Ricans. The multimetronome clatter from Cucarachita's rhythm section turned angry like a swarm of locusts turning for the approach on some rich field. Slab began shouting unkind reminiscences of the days he and Rachel had been horizontal.

Profane meanwhile was trying to keep from being clobbered. He'd lost Esther who was naturally using the riot for a screen. Somebody started blinking all the lights in that part of Idlewild which made things even worse.

He finally broke clear of a small knot of wellwishers and spotted Esther running across the airstrip. She'd lost one shoe. He was about to go after her when a body fell across his path. He tripped, went down, opened his eyes to a pair of girl's legs he knew.

"Benito." The sad pout, sexy as ever.

"God, what else."

She was going back to San Juan. Of the months between the gang bang and now she'd say nothing.

"Fina, Fina, don't go." Like photographs in your wallet, what good is an old love - however ill-defined - down in San Juan?

"Angel and Geronimo are here." She looked around vaguely.

"They want me to go," she told him, on her way again. He followed, haranguing. He'd forgotten about Esther. Cucarachita and father came running past. Profane and Fina passed Esther's shoe, lying on its side with a broken heel.

Finally Fina turned, dry-eyed. "Remember the night in the bathtub?" spat, spun, dashed off for the plane.

"Your ass," he said, "they would have got you sooner or later." But stood there anyway, still as any object.

"I did it," he said after a while. "It was me." Schlemihls being, as he believed, passive, he could not remember ever having admitted anything like this. "Oh, man." Plus letting Esther get away, plus having Rachel now for a dependent, plus whatever would happen with Paola. For a boy not getting any he had more woman problems than anybody he knew.

He started back for Rachel. The riot was breaking up. Behind him propellers spun; the plane taxied, slewed, became airborne, was gone. He didn't turn to watch it.

VI.

Patrolman Jones and Officer Ten Eyck, disdaining the elevator, marched in perfect unison up two flights of palatial stairway, down the hall toward Winsome's apartment. A few tabloid reporters who had taken the elevator intercepted them halfway there. Noise from Winsome's apartment could be heard down on Riverside Drive.

"Never know what Bellevue is going to turn up," said Jones.

He and his sidekick were faithful viewers of the TV program Dragnet. They'd cultivated deadpan expressions, unsyncopated speech rhythms, monotone voices. One was tall and skinny, the other was short and fat. They walked in step.

"Talked to a doctor there," said Ten Eyck. "Young fella named Gottschalk. Winsome had a lot to say."

"We'll see, Al."

Before the door, Jones and Ten Eyck waited politely for the one cameraman in the group to check his flash attachment. A girl was heard to shriek happily inside.

"Oboy, oboy," said a reporter.

The cops knocked. "Come in, come in," called many juiced voices.

"It's the police, ma'am."

"I hate fuzz," somebody snarled. Ten Eyck kicked in the door, which had been open. Bodies inside fell back to provide the cameraman a line-of-sight to Mafia, Charisma, Fu and friends, playing Musical Blankets. Zap, went the camera.

"Too bad," the photographer said, "we can't print that one. " Ten Eyck shouldered his way over to Mafia.

"All right, ma'am."

"Would you like to play," hysterical.

The cop smiled, tolerantly. "We've talked to your husband."

"We'd better go," said the other cop.

"Guess Al is right, ma'am." Flash attachment lit up the room from time to time, like a spell of heat lightning.

Ten Eyck flapped a warrant. "All you folks are under arrest," he said. To Jones: "Call the Lieutenant, Steve."

"What charge," people started yelling.

Ten Eyck's timing was good. He waited a few heartbeats. "Disturbing the peace will do," he said.

Maybe the only peace undisturbed that night was McClintic's and Paola's. The little Triumph forged along up the Hudson, their own wind was cool, taking away whatever of Nueva York had clogged ears, nostrils, mouths.

She talked to him straight and McClintic kept cool. While she told him about who she was, about Stencil and Fausto - even a homesick travelogue of Malta - there came to McClintic something it was time he got around to seeing: that the only way clear of the cool/crazy flipflop was obviously slow, frustrating and hard work. Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care. He might have known, if he'd used any common sense. It didn't come as a revelation, only something he'd as soon not've admitted.

"Sure," he said later, as they headed into the Berkshires. "Paola, did you know I have been blowing a silly line all this time. Mister Flab the original, is me. Lazy and taking for granted some wonder drug someplace to cure that town, to cure me. Now there isn't and never will be. Nobody is going to step down from heaven and square away Roony and his woman, or Alabama, or South Africa or us and Russia. There's no magic words. Not even I love you is magic enough. Can you see Eisenhower telling Malenkov or Khrushchev that? Ho-ho."

"Keep cool but care," he said. Somebody had run over a skunk a ways back. The smell had followed them for miles. "If my mother was alive I would have her make a sampler with that on it."

"You know, don't you," she began, "that I have to -"

"Go back home, sure. But the week's not over yet. Be easy, girl."

"I can't. Can I ever?"

"We'll stay away from musicians," was all he said. Did he know of anything she could be, ever?

"Flop, flip," he sang to the trees of Massachusetts. "Once I was hip . . ."

chapter thirteen.

In which the yo-yo string is revealed as a state of mind I.

The passage to Malta took place in late September, over an Atlantic whose sky never showed a sun. The ship was Susanna Squaducci, which had figured once before in Profane's long-interrupted guardianship of Paola. He came back to the ship that morning in the fog knowing that Fortune's yo-yo had also returned to some reference-point, not unwilling, not anticipating, not anything; merely prepared to float, acquire a set and drift wherever Fortune willed. If Fortune could will.

A few of the Crew had come to give Profane, Paola and Stencil bon voyage; those who weren't in jail, out of the country or in the hospital. Rachel had stayed away. It was a weekday, she had a job. Profane supposed so.

He was here by accident. While weeks back, off on the fringes of the field-of-two Rachel and Profane had set up, Stencil roamed the city exerting "pull," seeing about tickets, passports, visas, inoculations for Paola and him, Profane felt that at last he'd come to dead center in Nueva York; had found his Girl, his vocation as watchman against the night and straight man for SHROUD, his home in a three-girl apartment with one gone to Cuba, one about to go to Malta, and one, his own, remaining.

He'd forgotten about the inanimate world and any law of retribution. Forgotten that the field-of-two, the twin envelope of peace had come to birth only a few minutes after he'd been kicking tires, which for a schlemihl is pure wising-off.

It didn't take Them long. Only a few nights later Profane sacked in at four, figuring to get in a good eight hours of Z's before he had to get up and go to work. When his eyes finally did come open he knew from the quality of light in the room and the state of his bladder that he'd overslept. Rachel's electric clock whined merrily beside him, hands pointing to 1:30. Rachel was off somewhere. He turned on the light, saw that the alarm was set for midnight, the button on the back switched to ON. Malfunction. "You little bastard"; he picked the clock up and heaved it across the room. On hitting the bathroom door the alarm went off, a loud and arrogant BZZZ.

Well, he got his feet in the wrong shoes, cut himself shaving, token he had wouldn't fit into the turnstile, subway took off about ten seconds ahead of him. When he arrived downtown it was not much south of three and Anthroresearch Associates was in an uproar. Bergomask met him at the door, livid. "Guess what," the boss yelled. It seemed an all-night, routine test was on. Around 1:15, one of the larger heaps of electronic gear had run amok; half the circuitry fused, alarm bells went off, the sprinkler system and a couple of CO2 cylinders kicked in, all of which the attendant technician had slept through peacefully.

"Technicians," Bergomask snorted, "are not paid to wake up. This is why we have night watchmen." SHROUD sat over against the wall, hooting quietly.

Soon as it had all come through to Profane he shrugged. "It's stupid, but it's something I say all the time. A bad habit. So. Anyway. I'm sorry." Getting no response, turned and shuffled off. They'd send him severance pay, he reckoned, in the mail. Unless they intended to make him cover the cost of the damaged gear. SHROUD called after him: Bon voyage.

"What is that supposed to mean."

We'll see.

"So long, old buddy."

Keep cool. Keep coal but care. It's a watchword, Profane, far your side of the morning. There, I've told you too much as it is.

"I'll bet under that cynical butyrate hide is a slob. A sentimentalist."

There's nothing under here. Who are we kidding?

The last words he ever had with SHROUD. Back at 112th Street he woke up Rachel.

"Back to pounding the pavements, lad." She was trying to be cheerful. He gave her that much but was mad with himself for going flabby enough to forget his schlemihl birthright. She being all he had to take it out on, "Fine for you," he said. "You've been solvent all your life."

"Solvent enough to keep us going till me and Space/Time Employment find something good for you. Really good."

Fina had tried to shove him along the same path. Had it been her that night at Idlewild? Or only another SHROUD, another guilty conscience bugging him over a baion rhythm?

"Maybe I don't want to get a job. Maybe I'd rather be a bum. Remember? I'm the one that loves bums."

She edged over to make room for him, having now those inevitable second thoughts. "I don't want to talk about loving anything," she told the wall. "It's always dangerous. You have to con each other a little, Profane. Why don't we go to sleep."

No: he couldn't let it go. "Let me warn you, is all. That I don't love anything, not even you. Whenever I say that - and I will - it will be a lie. Even what I'm saying now is half a play for sympathy."

She made believe she was snoring.

"All right, you know I am a schlemihl. You talk two-way. Rachel O., are you that stupid? All a schlemihl can do is take. From the pigeons in the park, from a girl picked up on any street, bad and good, a schlemihl like me takes and gives nothing back."

"Can't there be a time for that later," she asked meekly. "Can't it wait on tears sometime, a lovers' crisis. Not now, dear Profane. Only sleep."

"No," he leaned over her, "babe I am not showing you anything of me, anything hidden. I can say what I've said and be safe because it's no secret, it's there for anybody to see. It's got nothing to do with me, all schlemihls are like that."

She turned to him, moving her legs apart: "Hush . . ."

"Can't you see," growing excited though it was now the last thing he wanted, "that whenever I, any schlemihl lets a girl think there is a past, or a secret dream that can't be talked about, why Rachel that's a con job. Is all it is." As if SHROUD were prompting him: "There's nothing inside. Only the scungille shell. Dear girl -" saying it as phony as he knew how - "schlemihls know this and use it, because they know most girls need mystery, something romantic there. Because a girl knows her man would be only a bore if she found out everything there was to know. I know you're thinking now: the poor boy, why does he put himself down like that. And I'm using this love that you still, poor stupe, think is two-way to come like this between your legs, like this, and take, never thinking how you feel, caring about whether you come only so I can think of myself as good enough to make you come . . ." So he talked, all the way through, till both had done and he rolled on his back to feel traditionally sad.

"You have to grow up," she finally said. "That's all: my own unlucky boy, didn't you ever think maybe ours is an act too? We're older than you, we lived inside you once: the fifth rib, closest to the heart. We learned all about it then. After that it had to become our game to nourish a heart you all believe is hollow though we know different. Now you all live inside us, for nine months, and when ever you decide to come back after that."

He was snoring, for real.

"Dear, how pompous I'm getting. Good night. . ." And she fell asleep to have cheerful, brightly colored, explicit dreams about sexual intercourse.

Next day, rolling out of bed to get dressed, she continued. "I'll see what we've got. Stand by. I'll call you." Which of course kept him from going back to sleep. He stumbled around the apartment for a while swearing at things. "Subway," he said, like the hunchback of Notre Dame yelling sanctuary. After a day of yo-yoing he came up to the street at nightfall, sat in a neighborhood bar and got juiced. Rachel met him at home (home?) smiling and playing the game.

"How would you like to be a salesman. Electric shavers for French poodles."

"Nothing inanimate," he managed to say. "Slave girls, maybe." She followed him to the bedroom and took off his shoes when he passed out on the bed. Even tucked him in.

Next day, hung over, he yo-yoed on the Staten Island ferry, watching juveniles-in-love neck, grab, miss, connect. Day after that he got up before her and journeyed down to the Fulton Fish Market to watch the early-morning activity. Pig Bodine tagged along. "I got a fish," said Pig, "I would like to give Paola, hyeugh, hyeugh." Which Profane resented. They moseyed by Wall Street and watched the boards of a few brokers. They walked uptown as far as Central Park. This took them till mid-afternoon. They dug a traffic light for an hour. They went into a bar and watched a soap opera on TV.

They came rollicking in late. Rachel was gone.

Out came Paola though, sleepy-eyed, benightgowned. Pig began to shuffle furrows in the rug. "Oh," seeing Pig. "You can put coffee on," she yawned. "I'm going back to bed."

"Right," Pig muttered, "right you are." And glaring at the small of her back, followed zombielike to the bedroom and closed the door behind them. Soon Profane, making coffee, heard screams.

"Wha." He looked into the bedroom. Pig had managed to get atop Paola and seemed linked to her pillow by a long string of drool which glittered in the fluorescent light from the kitchen.

"Help?" Profane puzzled. "Rape?"

"Get this pig off of me," Paola yelled.

"Pig, hey. Get off."