Nobel Laureates

Chapter 4 of A Snoose Boulevard Christmas

Warmth, like wealth, has never been equally shared among earth’s creatures. There are people who live in big houses or in Arizona who will never know what it’s like to be cold. And there are other folks who just never seem to get warm in the winter. Tokay Red lowered himself into the tub until only his eyes and nose remained clear. For old time’s sake, he blew a few melodious bubbles, humming a forgotten tune into the warm, soapy water.

Somewhere, there must be other people who are always too hot — like Arabs and pygmies and Italians. It gets hotter than hell in the desert and in jungles and stuff. If a guy could just trade some of this cold for a little bit of their heat, everybody would be just fine. He’d have to remember to discuss this with Wise Henry when he got back to the boulevard. If it was possible to do it, Wise Henry would know how. If there was a way to make five dollars at it, Wise Henry would find it. He’d done the hard part; he had thought up the idea all by himself. Now it was up to Wise Henry to work out the details.

But, in the meantime, he had a bath to take and bubbles to blow.

“ . . .and now, ladies and gentlemen, I have the great honor of introducing the nominees for the Nobel Prize in the category of Doing Good Stuff for People. The nominees are . . . the guy who found the cure for all known diseases; the guy who figured out how to end war forever; Tokay Red and Wise Henry the Geek, inventors of the World-Wide Warmth Exchanger; and the guy who discovered a way to feed all the hungry people on earth. May I have the envelope, please?

“And the winners are . . . Tokay Red and Wise Henry.

They rose to acknowledge their deserved adoration and, bathed in the thunderous applause, marched proudly across the stage to accept their gold statuettes from the king. Then, after the king had kissed . . . no! After the king had shaken their hands and the queen had kissed them on both cheeks, they approached the microphone.

“It was all your idea, Red. You do the talking for both of us.” Wise Henry deferred. That was one of the nice things about Wise Henry; he never tried to hog all the credit — when you were the one who’d thought the whole thing up in the first place.

Red looked especially handsome in his tuxedo with the white carnation and the rows of medals, and the bright red sash diagonally across his chest. The standing ovation seemed to go on forever while young, rich ladies in the audience tried to catch his eye. Finally, long moments later, when the applause had died down to some extent, he tipped his new white Stetson hat to the crowd and said into the microphone, “Testing . . . one . . . two . . .three . . .” Then, satisfied that the thing was working all right, he began, “Your royal excellencies, famous people, disgruntled colleagues, ladies and gentlemen . . . may I have your attention, please? Wise Henry and I would like to express our humble thanks for the honor you have done us this evening and to promise you that we’re gonna donate the whole million dollars . . . the whole two-million-dollar prize to charity. We already have more money than we need anyhow, what with those warmth exchangers selling like hotcakes and all. We never were interested in the money anyway. We just wanted to help folks less fortunate than ourselves. And even though we’re about as rich as two guys can get and drive big new Terraplane Super Convertibles and have all this really expensive stuff, we haven’t turned our backs on our old friends. We are still the same down-to-earth people we always were, and those folks know they can count on us just like they always used to when we were poor. We bought this . . . no . . . we built this big brand-new hotel down by the river, and we let all the tramps live there for nothing. And we help teach them how to appreciate the bouquet and the body of a good wine, and not to just swill it down so they get falling-down drunk. And we’re helping them turn their lives around and make something of themselves, because old friends are the best friends, and me and Wise Henry are loyal to our old friends.

“Nowadays folks are so taken up with these new Hollywood starlets that they’ve forgotten all about the real stars. But me and Wise Henry know that Elizabeth Taylor is still the best actress in the world and the most beautiful woman who ever lived. Someday, when all these starlet-type people go back to waiting tables and turning tricks, folks will look around and say to themselves that she was really the best one all along. But me and Wise Henry always knew that, and we’ve been loyal to her all the time.”

He held out his hand to her, and she rose from her seat in the audience and came to him. As she ascended to the stage and the folks saw how truly beautiful she was, they felt ashamed for paying so much attention to cheap Hollywood starlets and ignoring her for so long. By the time she reached him and took his outstretched hand, the applause thundered through the hall, almost as loudly as it had for him and Wise Henry. Tears of gratitude ran down her cheeks because she knew that he had just breathed new life into her career. She parted her full, red lips and whispered into his ear . . .

“Dirty red Jesus Christ!” Water erupted from the tub and sloshed out over the bathroom floor as he scrambled to his feet, then lost his footing on the slick ceramic surface and fell back into the water, launching a second tidal wave out and across the worn linoleum. “Shey-it, that hurts!”

Josie, who had been in the basement loading the washing machine when she heard the commotion overhead, suddenly remembered that old saying about ninety percent of all accidents happening within twenty-five miles of your own bathroom. And she scrambled up the stairs with visions of her newly reclaimed brother lying unconscious in the tub while his lifeblood poured from his broken head into the bath water. Decorum be damned, she burst through the door ready to apply tourniquets or administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation — whatever might be required — only to find her anguished brother trying again to stand in the slippery tub and simultaneously groping blindly for a towel.

In her relief at finding him still alive and without serious injury, she took only the most cursory notice of the colossal mess he had managed to create in the few scant minutes she had left him unattended. Nor was she unduly distressed by the dangling testimony to his masculinity. Though there had been occasions long ago when Red’s peephole had borne two-way traffic, she had been married to Waldo for over twenty years, and she had long since satisfied her curiosity regarding the secret precincts of the male anatomy.

For his part, while the Lifebuoy suds burned in his eyes, Tokay Red harbored no concerns for unwarranted modesty. She handed him the towel from the rack on the wall, and then, as he rubbed his eyes with one corner, allowing the rest to drag in the water, she brought out a second from the linen closet. When he had finally purged his eyes of the fire, she retrieved the soggy towel, handed him the dry one, and retreated into the hall, closing the door behind her. She was gone before he realized that she had seen him naked.

Tokay Red wasn’t like a lot of folks; he didn’t mind a little water. In fact, he kind of enjoyed a nice hot bath on a cold day like this. But when a man gets soap in his eyes, it just takes the pleasure right out of it. He probably didn’t get as clean as he might have, but at least he had shampooed his greasy hair, and he smelled a whole lot better. To hell with it; he was no damned fanatic about cleanliness being next to godliness.

It was one of those huge and fluffy fifty-cent towels from J. C. Penney, the ones that are a half-inch thick and capable of sucking up water from ten feet away. He couldn’t remember ever having anything so soft next to his skin before, except on the rare occasions when Wise Henry asked him to varmint-sit with Farley. A good brisk rub took off any of the dirt that the water had softened but hadn’t quite dissolved, and it rolled the dead skin up in little balls that flaked off, exposing new pink skin underneath. Rubbing is good for the circulation too; Wise Henry had told him so. And what’s good for the circulation is good for the heart. It’s no wonder rich people live so long, having these big fluffy towels to rub off the excess dirt and ball up their dead skin with.

All the spilled water on the bathroom floor precluded the possibility of drying his feet there. So he wrapped the towel around him and tiptoed past the stairway — he didn’t want Josie to hear him being naked in the hall — into his old room where a pair of Waldo’s long underwear lay waiting for him on the bed. The room was a lot smaller than he had remembered it; still, it was as close to luxury as a man who usually sleeps in a packing crate under the Washington Avenue Bridge is likely ever to enjoy. While his backside renewed an old acquaintance with the bed, he massaged his weary feet, discovering secret itches between his toes and removing several weeks’ worth of dead skin from the balls and heels.