Minister Faust by From (html) (librera reader txt) 📕

“I did, Doctor. If that isn’t the most sickening truth I could ever divulge. Everything about him. I identified with my master more than my master identified with himself. Even used his Squirrel Erasing Spray to try to whiten my skin, if you can believe it. It just rotted off all my body hair and left me with first-degree burns from brows to balls. I was fourteen when I did that. And all to become like this man. Did he ever tell you his secret origin?”

“No. But I’m familiar with the story.”

“The official story, I’m sure. I only heard it, what, a thousand times…a month? How about the real story?”

Tran produced the very cigarillo I’d imagined he would smoke, made a show of lighting it, and blew decorative smoke trails and twirls in between holding his cigarillo upward as if balancing an invisible plate upon its tip. He seemed to be waiting for Festus to fight back.

“Yes, the real story,” he finally said, lacking any verbalization from Festus. He began pacing and smoking. “How in 1942, when he was only eighteen, his blue-blood bee-baron father, Fountroy Prescott Piltdown V, sicced Hinkleton leg-breakers on the Okie, Mexican, and black migrant laborers trying to organize on his bee fields? How a young public interest lawyer led a class-action lawsuit against Fountroy to get redress for these men, some of whom were stung into hospitalization after the Hinkletons fed poppies and coca blossoms to the bees? How this same public interest attorney investigated Fountroy and discovered he was selling honey by the megaton to the Nazis?”

“This attorney was Jack Zenith?”

“Yes, Jack Zenith. By the time Fountroy’s collaboration made the cover story of The Wall Street Journal he was so mortified he played a round of PGA roulette.”

“What’s that?”

“Golf in a minefield. Grenades instead of balls. Daddy Piltdown didn’t make it to the first green.”

I looked over to Festus, half expecting to see steam shooting from his ears, but he was as silent as his heroic namesake, perched and waiting for the precise moment to strike with deadly, nut-gnawing accuracy.

“So orphan, heir, and Republican Festus, suckled in the pouch of luxury, swears unholy goddamned vengeance against Zenith and the wretched of the Earth he represents. I must’ve heard him ten million times on the poor: Parasites, leeches, tapeworms, foreskin-fleas… as if the poor had killed his father, rather than his own greed and Nazi-trading treason.”

Once again, I looked toward Festus expecting an explosion. Yet he offered nothing but his cold blue eyes glinting like sapphire ice picks.

“So what does he do with his daddy gone and the war on, you ask?” said Tran, pacing, smoking, and gesticulating. “He retreats to his family’s Floridian properties in the swamps, a southern manor on a not-so-former plantation. All by himself in the spooky bayou, except for an army of butlers, maids, and indentured lick-spittles.

“So during a moonless midnight of the autumn equinox, while he was reading Nietzsche or Blumenbach or de Molay, a Glaucomys sabrinus—a northern hemispheric flying squirrel—plowed right through the twenty-foot-high bay window and showered him with glass, bloody fur, and squirrel musk. Making the young Master Festus soil his silks, I’m sure.”

“Your mawkish, mocking attempts to provoke me, Tran,” whispered Festus, “will be fruitless. But after you’re finished ripping into me with your Zenith-certified rib-spreader, I’d suggest you reread Lear, Act One, Scene Four, for some self-description.”

“And I’d suggest you remember, Lord Piltdown,” said Tran, “that even while ranting about serpent’s teeth, Lear was not only a foolish, bad, and stupid king—he was loopier than a snake in a garden hose.”

Neither man spoke until I asked Tran about the squirrel collision with the window.

“Yes,” said Tran, “that, apparently, is when the light goes on over young F.P.’s noggin regarding the power of the flying squirrel to instill terror in the reptilian brain, the ‘dominant portion,’ he said, of ‘your typical urban phrenological reprobate.’

“And he also told me, as I recall, that he identified with squirrels because they’re ‘so productive…they collect nuts and store them while lazy animals freeze to death, as befits their miserable existences.’

“Somehow he never bothered to notice the obvious: that the trees are the ones making the nuts and all the squirrel does is take them. Parasitic, not productive. Like his family.”

The Truth About Squirrels and Chip Monks

Tran’s tirade, unsolicited, uninterrupted, and unanswered, proceeded for several minutes. And whereas I’d assumed Festus had been lying in wait for the perfect opportunity to destroy his former apprentice, I soon lost that certainty. The elder man, who’d finally sat down, looked less like the poised hunter than the felled hunted, like an aged hound dog on its side, breathing shallowly and awaiting the ripping teeth of rats.

Then Tran shifted to a new topic: hypocrisy. Tran said that Festus had spent years of their time together exhaustively denouncing Wally W. Watchtower’s argonium addiction. But the seventy-year-old Festus had the body and looks of an athletic forty-five-year-old for a reason no one was ever intended to know.

“He’s,” said Tran, shaking his cigarillo at his ex-mentor, “been riding on his argonium high horse like English royalty on a foxhunt, when he’s a goddamned junkie himse-e-e-elf!” He elongated the word as if he were kissing it. “Addicted to GI Juice, Doctor. Ever heard of it?”

“That’s…Hyper-regenerative Growth Hormone?”

“HGH, the one and only. The steroid of the long-underwear world. And ten thousand times more expensive.” Tran blew an O, then shredded it with a spear of smoke. “The army stopped using HGH after Lance Lanternman was the only living GI to survive the trials—”

“That was Captain Manifest Destiny?”

“Yes, yes, Cap. Another addict, thanks to the army. Took HGH until his death in ’56, when, according to the newspapers of the time and the history books of today, the Iron Kross killed him. But you can thank Piltdown Propaganda News for that. Why don’t you tell her, Lord Piltdown? Tell her!”

After ten seconds burned away, Tran answered for him.

“The Iron Kross,” he said, tracing