And they showed up to stand and wait and the captain came out and stood and spit and said go on home but don't be fuckin' each other or yer wives and some men laughed and some men spit and then they fell themselves out and gathered in a looseweave arc about the Old Man who was squinteyed in the sun from having just stepped jackboot from the jakes. Of marshals and witchwomen he spoke his voice husky as if drawing each subject by calloused feel alone from an osnaburg valise and examining it his ownself as each utteration clapped the ears of the assembled sons of Cain.
Attend to your pizzle, he dressed them, attend to it keenly lest ye find it rotted off by leeching magic and he related to them unsmiling an accounting of last week’s blotter and the state of the whorehouse after ex-Specialist deGroot found bedbugs in his unmentionables after paying the madam and came back when they refused him remittance and put a ball into the Victrola in the parlor, winging the whiskered barman and causing a harelipped whore to have an episode of angry hymen and require admittance to a nervous hospital.
Next was the topkick and widdershins spun the octoroon first shirt as he glassed the sepulchral mass, crosswise, hawked and give and emitted a yarping ululy, rending the friscallating dusklight as gaunt appraisers beheld the spectacle and cogitated sourly a prospect and premise of a heaving interlude with a lady onesuchas makes her folding money on her back and studies with acute detail the crenellations of the vaulted chandeliered chamber ceiling.
