Where Did He Get These Guys? – Xxqxcxqx II

Mouth Farts and a Crackstring

That bottle might have been thrown out of an airplane, or it might have been hurled from a giant slingshot, or maybe God Himself tossed it down into the middle of His Creation. Whatever, it set in train events that would culminate in the Freedonian Empire’s reaching out and touching, even goosing, nearly everyone in the Known World. The incident itself, the bottle business, came to our attention a few weeks later when, Beloved Bravehawk’s equerry, Gobblesnot, knocked diffidently at the Great Man’s office door, wherein the Triumvirate was dividing Freedonia into Spheres of Influence, and begged permission to enter. Bidden to get his ass in, he entered with the short, skinny, pretty much naked ned. Gobblesnot was carrying a paper bag with the pinched top that suggested he was carrying a bottle of some alcoholic substance, street-wino fashion.

“Here we have the kind of thing you instructed me to be on the lookout for,” said Gobblesnot with a touch, albeit an insufficient touch, of obsequiousness. I was, of course, fascinated by the little ned and, presuming it was unlikely a person of his diminutiveness and nakedness would have any English, I signaled for him to turn around for inspection. He was wearing a triangular money pouch of some sort over his personal items. The top of it was secured to a leather string around his waist, and the bottom of the pouch – which seems to me rather large and heavy for such a teeny-weeny person – was secured by a string that ran between his legs and up between his buttocks to its juncture with the beltstring, much like thongish bikini pants you might see on a girl from Ipanema. I asked him, in English, why he wore the thong up along his crack, since it didn’t protect his ass from view; in fact, you couldn’t actually see the crackstring except at the top where it emerged to join the beltstring.

My first guess about his linguistic accomplishments was right, though he wasn’t as stupid as you’d expect from someone with no English; by that I mean he was at least able to recognize that I was addressing him. In response, I presumed, to my question, there ensued a medley of sounds like chicken clucks, door-latch clicks, bubblegum pops, and polite little farts. I told Gobblesnot I couldn’t understand that shit.

“Who could?” he asked, then reddened (for he, like me, was a white man; still is, in fact, as am I) in confusion as he realized the inappropriate brusqueness of his response. “I thought it might be a problem,” he said, taking a half step backward and bowing slightly, “so I brought a man who can speak this person’s lingo.”

“Well done, in a general sense.”

Gobblesnot introduced a grizzled white man, as short and skinny as the dark-skinned fellow (for such indeed was the short, skinny, pretty much naked ned: reddish brown, or possibly brownish red) but wearing clothes, dirty ones. He had a slouch hat on, which he didn’t remove. I considered how I might invite the black ned to sit (he seemed clean enough, and in any case his wouldn’t be the first naked buttocks to touch the sofa cushions in Bravehawk’s office) yet keep the dirty white son of a bitch standing, but Gobblesnot solved the problem by bringing a pair of straight-backed chairs from another office. The grizzled white ned sat in one chair, but the black fellow squatted where he was, his feet perfectly flat and the splayed segments of his ass half an inch off the carpet. How do they do that? I wondered for the thousandth time: I had seen it before.

So the little person told his story with his clucks, clicks, pops, and mouth farts, and the grizzled guy translated, and I then put it into Language for my report with certain modifications, amplifications, and emendations [see “Where Did He Get These Guys – Xxqxcxqx I].

The part of his narrative about the airborne bottle got my attention. I asked if he still had the item from Heaven, and the grizzled ned repeated the question in Qicxq, and the pretty-much-naked ned answered by pointing at the paper bag Gobblesnot had left on the sofa when Bravehawk dismissed him. The white ned gave it to me, and I opened it. Sure enough, it was a Jack Daniel’s bottle, unfortunately completely empty of anything except the faint remains of that famous Jack Daniel’s fragrance, mixed with odors I was unable to identify until I had heard more of the narrative. It smelled not quite bottled in bond, but OK.

It turned out that his name was Xxqxcxqx (I’m using the standard Qicxq language orthography). If you actually pronounce this name, which the grizzled white ned could and did, you could cut through the clucks, clicks, pops, and mouth farts and distinguish four syllables something like Pori Nyika.

“What in the fug does that mean?” demanded Bravehawk.

“Vell,” said the grizzled white ned, “pori mean rough, unclearéd country.”

“OK,” said I: “Bush. So what does nyika mean?”

“Vell, nyika mean rough, unclearéd country.”

“Bush – again? That’s his name? Bushbush?”

“Ya.”

Who? What? Bog Readers, if there are any, will want to know who these people are and what they’re talking about. There are two tools of non-pareil importance in following the history of the Brasvehawk Conspiracy: “How We Talk,” a Bushmanese lexicon, and “Dramatis Personae,” a Registry of Americas’s Bushmen: The Harmful People. Czech ‘em out.