Badgers continued


They want to run their teeth up and down the cob of a stevedore's leg and make those small marks that nervous kids leave on pencils. The badgers salivate as they sharpen their teeth and claws on bleached thighbones.

The fops toss a captured stevedore, still sticky with honey, into the pen and the badgers skeletonize it within the time it takes to open and shut three snuff boxes.

Thoughts of a hunt twinkle and leap across badger synapses. The fops vault and leap and play.
Nobody notices the badgers watching.

Colonel Fish Barnett tethers his horse to a tree and strolls through the park to greet the fops, thanking them for coming on such short notice and with badgers, too! The fops, playing four-man Alouette with a deck of forty-eight, dismiss the Colonel with a wave of a handkerchief; some other fops, taking snuff and playing pall-mall, look curiously at the Colonel and twitter at his mode of dress.

One fop, strolling alone, overturns a rock with the business end of his onyx handled panda-bone walking cane and a stevedore lopes out, making a run for it.

But Colonel Fish Barnett has the reflexes of a panther.

As two fops fumble to release a badger, the Colonel has already stolen a mallet from one of the pall-mall players and is on horseback, tearing through the day like a jungle cat equestrian lightning bolt.

Oh my, but those fops can clap!

The Colonel swings the mallet at the woolen cap of the fleeing stevedore and connects, splitting him into fifteen small gigolos. The gigolos run off and scamper into thirteen different bars and hotel lobbies.
"Egads! Gigolos!" yells a fop.

That's okay; gigolos we can handle, thinks the Colonel. Gigolos perform a harmless service.

They aren't the ones throwing exhibits from the Great Blacks-in-Wax museum into the bay. With an impervious stevedore's knot, they lashed the entire Crispus Attucks exhibit to a drum of corn syrup and plunked it into the bay. The museum's curator commented that it sunk not without a certain bit of historical irony. The Colonel agreed; these stevedores are gratuitous and haven't any sense of history.

There is a chill in the air; night is falling and that is when those crepuscular, honey glazed, woolen, bordello hoisters come out to play.

The badgers are getting antsy, too, and begin to fight with one another. A fop bangs on a velocipede with an ivory cane to break them up. Colonel Fish Barnett lights a brooding pipe and leans against his mallet. He will unloose a phalanx of badgers tonight, from suburb to sea, and let them finish things.

And the fops can swing their mallets.

From their tree-top perch, stevedores one and two look at one another and bray with fear, rubbing their legs, anticipating. They don't want to be gigolos; nor do they want to glide through the honey-combed colon of a badger. Stevedore one looks for his platypus-billed stevedore call, but it must have fallen out.

Stevedore one bites at his bottom lip.

The shoulders of stevedore two emit a plangent shrug.

That night, as Colonel Fish Barnett sleeps a hero's sleep, badgers knock down trash cans and blow through town like a stevedore's call, riding on the backs of Irish Wolfhounds, tolerating gigolos, playing pall-mall with the worn kneecaps of begging fops, smoking pipes, picnicking with honey, and adapting like crazy.

Later on, everyone agreed that the badgers had been watching; the curator of the new Great-Fops-in-Wax museum said that the badgers were watching with a sense of great historical irony.

END