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By Root 493 0

of midnight with lost marbles in the mud). As Joe Plouffe lifts his heel from the last wood plank of the bridge, suddenly you see a faint brown light come on far in the night of the river–just about on Snake Hill– and beneath the bridge, slouching, dark, emitting a high laugh, “Mwee hee ha ha ha,” fading, choking, mad, maniac, caped, green-faced (a disease of the night, Visagus Nightsoil) glides Doctor Sax–along by the rocks, the roars–along the steep dump bank, hurrying–flapping, flying, floating, sweeping to the reedy flats of Rosemont, in one movement removing the rubber boat from his slouched hat and blowing it up into a little rowboat–goes rowing with rubber paddles, red-eyed, anxious, serious, in the gloom of rains and bat-spans and roar hush mist-masts—real river–keeping an eye on the Castle–as over the basin of that Merrimac with eager petite birdy wings bat-boned little Count Condu the Vampire hastens to his baggy dusty crumbled old girl in the unspeakable brown of the Castle door, O ghosts.

14

COUNT CONDU CAME FROM Budapest–he wanted good Hungarian earth to lie still in during the long dull afternoons of the Europe void–so he flew to America by rainy night, by day slept in his six-foot sand box aboard an N.M.U. ship–came to Lowell to feast on the citizens of Merrimac … a vampire, flying in the rainy night river from the old dump along back Textile field to the shores of Centralville … flying to the door of the Castle which was located on top of the dreaming meadow near Bridge and 18th. Upon the top of this hill, located symmetrically with the old stone castle-house on Lakeview Avenue near Lupine Road (and the long lost French Canadian hoogah names of my infancy) there stands a Castle, high in the air, the king surveyor of the Lowell monarchial roofs and stanchion-chimneys (O tall red chimneys of the Cotton Mills of Lowell, tall redbrick goof of Boott, swaying in the terminus clouds of the wild hoorah day and dreambell afternoon—)

Count Condu wanted his chickens plucked just right–He came to Lowell as part of a great general movement of evil–to the secret Castle– The Count was tall, thin, hawk-nosed, caped, whitegloved, glint eyed, sardonic, the hero of Doctor Sax whose shaggy eyebrows made him so blind he could hardly see what he was doing hopping over the dump at night– Condu was sibilant, sharp-tongued, aristocratic, snappy, mawk-mouthed like a bloodless simp, mowurpy with his mush-lips swelled inbent and dommer-fall as if with a little hanging Mandarin mustache which he didn’t have– Doctor Sax was old, his strength of hawk-shaw jowls was used on age, sagged a bit (looked a little like Carl Sandburg but shaped with a shroud, tall and thin in a shadow on the wall, not Minnesota road walking open air curly Gawd-damn glad in saintliness days and Peace–) (Carl Sandburg disguised with a dark hat I saw one night in the Jamaica Long Island Negro neighborhood, the Down Stud district, back of Sutphin, walking a long tragic lit up boulevard of islands and mortuaries not far from Long Island railroad tracks, just come in off a Montana freight train)–

The bat dissolved from the air and materialized at the door of the Castle a Vampire Count in evening cape. La Contessa de Franziano, a descendant of Welsh bwerps who fell off a trireme off the coast of Leghorn when it still had its Medieval wall guards, but claiming to be a pure Franconi of the old Medici heirs, came to the door gilt in rapid declining old lace with cobwebs joining threads and dust caking when she bent her back, with a pendant pearl and spider sleeping on it, her eyes all how-low, her voice all verbalisms in a reverberatory vat–“Dearest Count, you’ve come!” — she aims for the door with sobbing arms, opens it to the rainy night and few dull lights of Lowell ’cross the basin–but Condu stands firm, severe, prim, unemotional, Nazi-like, removing a glove–draws breath with a slight poof of the lips and a sniff-up–rattles–

“My dear, unemotional as I allegedly may be I’m sure the antics of the gnome girls don’t rival yours when old Sugar Pudding comes home.