White Rabbit Chapter 8

8.

Woodrow decided to take the scenic route to the docks, being one to always prolong the inevitable. He was once married to a squirrel named Valerie and in some beautiful way Delores was like an enormous Valerie, without fur, with no puffy tail, and of course, with a much deeper and sultry voice.  The curious pair walked through a very strange garden that became a field full of ragweed and dandelion spores but with occasional inconceivable flowers the likes of which Delores had never before seen. She sneezed and sniffled but it was well worth her sinus tussles seeing the beauty of the sporadic flower blooms that looked like a busy rainy street full of colorful umbrellas from the twenty fourth floor of a hotel room window. The flowers did not sit still, they moved like pinwheels and if you stared long enough you would be mesmerized as though by a hypnotist and you might start clucking like a chicken, if the flowers wanted you to cluck like a chicken.

Stranger than the flowers, the dark sky lightened immediately as though night was bored with itself and quit without notice. “What time is it, woodchuck?” Delores asked looking up. Her eyes were constantly marveling at the landscape.

            “Time?” Woodrow asked laughing.
            “Yes, the time. It was dark only a minute ago and now it is light. Certainly, it cannot still be 6:30.” She looked up at the sun which was perfect like a fat pregnant lemon cut in half. “It went from moonlight to sunshine in the blink of an eye.”

            Woodrow sighed. “It is always 6:30!” he insisted. “You know, close ups of human lips look like earthworms.”

            “What does that have to do with anything?” Delores complained.

            “Everything—if you are self-conscience lips or adverse to earthworms; or maybe an earthworm that is self-conscience about looking like a pair of fat lips.” Woodrow offered.

            “It is dreadful to be self-conscience!” Delores replied promptly.

            “Easy for you to say, girl.”

            Delores was getting frustrated. “I have lips! And certainly up close my lips may very well resemble earthworms, but it would be silly to be self-conscience about it!”

            “Very well.” Woodrow replied. “It is 6:30.” He said abysmally. He looked at his watch. ‘Why did he look at his watch if it was always 6:30?’ Delores thought.

            “So—the sun?” She reminded.

            “Hasn’t anyone ever taught you not to ask questions?” Just as Woodrow finished the question there was a terrible loud snorting sound that came from the bushes to their left and a hairy pig-man emerged. And in a second the creature was wildly leaping at them but nippily an adept and nimble Woodrow pulled his bow, drew a swift arrow, and shot it directly into the heart of the snarling beast before Delores had the time to comprehend what was happening. The warthog fell, dying, reflexively growling and snorting while its mouth frothed. Woodrow stood over him silent in his disgust.

            “Even in the underworld there is death?” Delores asked.

            “Death abounds us, girl. And sometimes it is deserved.” He said bitterly. Delores regarded the pig man who was wearing brown pants, tattered black boots and a dirty blue collared shirt. He was a nasty-looking thing who looked part man, part hairy pig, as though he was stricken by a curse that changed his appearance when the moon was full or when the sun came out. He didn’t look entirely like a pig and behind his swine features there were the breathing, writhing, unmistakable features of man. Maybe that was the terrible part. He looked twisted, lost in two lives, torn between starkly different worlds. And as she watched him, possessed by the death of a living thing, he faded from being a warthog and was a nasty-looking man who then quickly dissolved humbly into the ground.

            “Let’s carry on.” Woodrow said nonchalantly

            “I have a question.” Delores said.

            “Hasn’t anyone taught you not to ask questions?”

            “Those that dislike questions are either tyrants or ignoramuses.” Delores contested shrewdly. “And those that reply to a question with a question are most certainly hiding something!” She continued sharply. Woodrow said nothing directly in defense of the underworld’s policies on questions. They kept walking. But then Woodrow offered charitably to ease the girl’s curiosity, “Some things are left better unsaid and unquestioned. The day changes with His fancy, light to dark, sun to rain, warm to cold; we get used to it.”

            “Him?”

“Mhm.” Woodrow agreed.

“Well, if you don’t know who He is, couldn’t your He be a She?” Delores was always a revolutionary thinker. She once thought God was a woman until she realized the world He created. A woman God wouldn’t have created such a ghastly place leaving the mice alone to their putrid cage without having the compassion to occasionally clean it. Woodrow’s egg-sized brain processed her revolutionary idea. Processing…processing…processing. Somewhere in that brain on some screen a dreadful hourglass appeared.

            Finally he answered, “Yes. I suppose. But we have a pretty good idea that He is a He.”

            “How so?” Delores was ready to pounce on an incompetent response.

            Woodrow replied, “Because the only ones that ever go to Torga are women.”

            Long pause. “What happens to women in Torga?”

            “No one really knows. But we think they generally work as cocktail waitresses, as strippers, or as prostitutes. But not to worry, Torgans don’t have penises.”

            “Comforting.” She sighed. Her mind couldn’t even conceive of what a Torgan would be like. She imagined large bullish men with the heads of hammerhead sharks, the tongues of snakes, black bulging eyes, and with the breath of komodo dragons. Then she imagined them more as lizard people. The sky got dark again and Delores noticed colorful sheep in the field that scattered at the sound of low-flying biplanes which passed overhead and disappeared quickly out into the distance or into soft gray clouds. Then, over the hill it was—defiling the scenery like an ugly ink spill on a beautiful landscaped canvas. It was the Torgan Sea, which, scientifically speaking, was a lake, but the Torgan Lake didn’t sound nearly as suitable for its dreadfulness as the Torgan Sea did, so the Torgan Sea it was. And on the miserable shore as far down as Delores could see, were a series of ancient-looking longboats spread about fifty yards apart. They were large and brown with ornate carvings on them and oil lanterns in the front and back and bowsprits that were carved to look like some curious breasted creatures that Delores couldn’t distinguish as mermaids from the distance.  Woodrow took her along that awful shore that looked like a perfect place for dead bodies and vultures to mingle. Each dreadful boat captained by a one-man crew, ragged boatmen, each vile by their own definition. Woodrow studied the men as they walked, making unusual grunting sounds upon his quick observations and eyeful inquiries, until he came upon a boat, twenty some down, a thousand or so yards from the first, where he felt satisfied with the looks of the steward.

            Delores ran into many wretched-looking women of all shapes and sorts along that dreary shore carpeted in dirt, bones and rock. Most, she felt terribly for thinking, looked like the sort of drug-addicted hookers she remembered seeing on one of those trips to the city when her mother and she had made a wrong turn and wound up lost in a terribly treacherous district where only junkies and cheating businessmen go. As a matter of fact, she was quite sure one of the women was one of those for she could never forget her red skirt and her white rabbit fur coat. The woman had an unusual duck-like face in the way her lips and nose were smashed together along with her cropped white feathered hair. She wasn’t ugly but she wasn’t pretty and she smelled to high-heaven of menthol cigarettes and renal failure. She looked at Delores as they passed each other. Then there were other girls but seemingly none as young as she, except for a classmate of hers.

“Delores!” the girl called.

            “Natalie?” Delores replied. She knew her voice and she could see her standing in the bowel of a ship as the boatman was putting chains over her and a gag in her mouth.

            Woodrow said, “Come along! Come along!”

            Delores was bemused that she knew someone here. She didn’t like the girl anymore (who was once one of her dearest friends) for she turned out not to be whom she seemed, which, if you haven’t been through high school and have been living in a controlled friendless environment, is the fate of many friends. Friends—such a simple and petty little word. Is it that we are so easily fooled out of our own naivety in our desire to gain companionship, or that people fool us by their own fickleness in their desire to give companionship? The frailty of the human spirit is none so clear than that in a teenage girl, yet, Delores, Delores, was the asterisk. She was one of the limited exceptions that are probably one or two per continent. She was her own being, not a teenager or an adult, not a male or a female, neither fickle nor naïve, one perfect steward of human spirit. “Why must we hurry? This isn’t a Carnival Cruise.”     
            She wouldn’t know that the woodchuck had no idea what a cruise was, let alone a Carnival Cruise. But he threw away what he didn’t understand and answered what he did. “Because, girl,” he said quickly and quietly near to her, tugging at her gray dress with a paw, “it is important that you get the right boat! This is my part, my purpose!”

            Delores was quiet and went along. She didn’t know why she went along with it. She could run but where would she run to? The boats reminded her of old Viking boats and though there was room for many, a few dozen at least, the pig-men who were distinguishable from the warthogs by their lack of hair and a slightly more civilized look, insisted that there be only one slave per ship.

            “Slave?” Delores looked to Woodrow bitterly.

            “Oh,” Woodrow replied nervously, “it, um, doesn’t mean here in the underworld what it means up there.”

            “I don’t like the sound of it anyway.” Then Delores saw the chains that were being put on the meek arms and legs of the women—they were all women or girls. “Have you seen or been to Torga?” Delores asked.

“No.” He said. “They don’t sell postcards or encourage tourism.” The lake reminded Delores of Lake Michigan, which she remembered seeing with her parents from the Navy Pier when she was young. It could very well be an ocean because you couldn’t see an end to it and she noticed it got darker and darker the closer she got to the boat. Stepping into the boat it looked as black as used motor oil, pure black, soulless, lifeless. She stood in the docked boat looking out across the sea at the vast nothingness. Woodrow waved a paw at her from the dirty shore but she didn’t notice him, nor did she notice his goodbyes. He nodded to the boatman who nodded back. It was a simple gesture that made Woodrow feel somehow reassured that everything would be okay.