SCIENCE FICTION?
OCCULT
TRUTHS? MEANINGFUL ALLEGORIES? PSYCHOLOGICAL INSIGHTS?
E
Pluribus Unicorn is all
of these and
more. Theodore Sturgeon's imagination
stretches beyond the limits to encompass strange movements backward and forward
in time, bizarre contractions of space,
psychic probings and fusions, powerful
dreams, terrifying foresight, and huge underworlds of hidden instincts and primitive
desires.
E PLURIBUS
UNICORN
A collection of short stories by
Theodore
Sturgeon
With
an introduction by Groff
Conklin
KANGAROO BOOK
PUBLISHED BY
POCKET BOOKS NEW YORK
Distributed In Canada by PaperJacks Ltd., a Licensee of the trademarks of Simon
& Schuster, a division of
Gulf+Western Corporation.
E
PLURIBUS UNICORN Abelard Press edition published 1953 POCKET BOOK edition published August, 1977
This POCKET BOOK edition Includes every word
contained fa the original, higher-priced edition. It is printed from brand-new
plates made from oompletlT reset, clear, easy-to-read type. POCKET BOOK
editions are published by POCEBT BOOKS, a division
of Simon tc Schuster, Ino, A GULF+WESTERN COMPANY
Trademarks registered in the United States
and other oouuliles. In Canada distributed by
Paperjacks Ltd, 830 Steelcase Road, Maikham, Ontario.
ISBN: 0-671-81355-2. This POCKET BOOK edition
is published by arrangement with the author and the author's agent. Copyright,
1953, by Theodore Sturgeon. All rights reserved. This book, or portions
thereof, may not be reproduced by any means without permission of the author.
Printed in Canada.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
"The
Silken-Swift ..." copyright 1953
by Fantasy House; "The Professor's Teddy-Bear," copyright 1948 by.
Weird Tales; "Bianca's Hands," copyright 1947 by Consolidated Press,
copyright 1951 by Permabooks for use in Groff Conk-lin's In the Grip of Terror; "A Saucer of Loneliness," copyright 1953
by Galaxy Publishing Corp.; "The World. Well Lost," copyright 1953 by
Bell Publications, Inc.; "It Wasn't Syzygy," copyright 1948 by Weird
Tales; "Scars" was originally titled "The Deadly Ratio,"
copyright 1949 by Theodore Sturgeon; "Fluffy," copyright 1947 by
Weird Tales; "The Sex Opposite," copyright 1952 by Ziff-Davis
Publishing Co.; "Cellmate" was originally titled "Fluke,"
copyright 1949 by Popular Publications, Inc.; "Die, Maestro, Die,"
copyright 1947 by Weird Tales; "A Way of Thinking," copyright 1953 by
Ziff-Davis Publishing Co.
To Marion
My book and I may say,
since with her we are crowned,
"I have my full content,
wherever I am bound."
Contents
Page DC Essay on Sturgeon
1 The Silken-Swift
20 The Professor's Teddy-Bear
30 Bianca's Hands
39 A Saucer of Loneliness
52 The World Well Lost
71 It Wasn't Syzygy
98 The Music
100 Scars
108 Fluffy
116 The Sex Opposite
142 Die, Maestro, Die!
174 Cellmate
185 A Way of Thinking
Essay on
Sturgeon
I have traveled far and seen much in modern
imaginative fiction, but never have I met the likes of this man Sturgeon.
Particularly have I never met the Sturgeon you will discover in this
extraordinary collection of Love Letters to the Spirit of the Unicorn. (There
are some Hate Letters, too.) Most of us modern escapists hang around the stage
door of the science fictioneers, handing out bouquets to the inventors of new
and better supergadgets. To discover that Sturgeon, the man of
"Killdozer" and "Mewhu's Jet" and "The Chromium
Helmet" is also a master of the weird, the supernatural, the horrible, the
uncompromisingly fantastic, may come as something of a shock to those who have
not peeked into his first collection. Without Sorcery, where there was a mixed bag of fowl, both
science fictional and pure Shottle Boppian, or magical.
This
slight and bearded satyr, with his wholly uncontrollable imagination and his
completely enchanting black-banged wife, is wilful, disobedient, lyrical,
cruel, tender, taunting, haunting, and (I suspect) a bit "fetched in the
haid." No one could write so explodingly if he were not. Certainly no
living writer has quite Sturgeon's grasp on horror and hilarity nor knows quite
so many kinds of people as well. You don't read these stories: they happen to
you. When you meet some of their characters, you will wish you hadn't—and
that's a warning. But once you've met them you'll never forget them —and that's
a promise!
This
is no place to try and parse the compleat Sturgeon. I suppose I should at least
take off a day or so and try to analyze the stories in this book for their
content, their meaning and their influence, but to hell with it. I'm too
sulphur-ously busy wiping the sweat of terror out of my eyes to be able to
concentrate on such arcanities. (New word; Mr. S. always makes me want to
invent a new vocabulary to describe him, and I always fail.)
The
point is that in the thirteen items in this book you will find everything you
need to set you beside yourself, send you into jet-propelled shivers, and
generally termite your placidity. For this faun-headed gent does not believe
in being placid. He believes it is his mission to upset your neat little
IX
apple carts. He loves to conduct you politely by the hand into regions of roiling emotion and tenebrous imagination where you wouldn't think of going by yourself as long as you had a shred of common sense left about you.
That, actually, is the key that will unlock this book for you. Just go quietly mad (or not so quietly) before you start reading it: ifs the only way you can thoroughly enjoy this stuff. Forget you are a Modem Man, a Rationalist, an Agnostic, a Scientific-Minded Bloke, before you go any further. Let loose your most hidden instincts, your most primitive desires; unbutton the waistband of your proprieties and uninhibit your super ego; let everything go as you start into this collection; otherwise you'll be shocked, and who would like that?
But don't let me frighten you too much. Not too much— just enough to get you started. As a matter of fact, there are lovely and tender tales in this book, as well as delightfully repulsive ones. I don't know which I like best! And if you have any regard for writing with the scintillation of sheer poetry in it, you too won't know which type you go for most, either. All I know is that in the present volume you will find practically everything your little Unconscious desires, from shocking bloodiness and sudden death to the softest kind of ethereal loveliness—often in one and the same story, too. For Sturgeon is a man who covers the waterfront of the Impossible—and does it with distinction, individuality, and a special brand of marvelling on which only he has a patent.
Perhaps a word of explanation should be offered as to why the present volume has not completely occupied itself with traditional science fiction. The trouble is that Sturgeon cannot keep up with the anthologies. Practically every piece of short science fiction he has ever written has been anthologized or is about to be, except for those longer items which have been turned into novels.
But enough of this. Get on to the lovely (and lusty) fable of the Unicorn, and read on through to the ghoulish little affair of the wax-doll-in-reverse that ends this book. Approach with strong heart and strong stomach, friends, for you are about to read of mysteries and monsters never heretofore imagined by man!
Groff
Conklin
ühe
Silken-Swift
There's
a village
by the
Bogs, and in the village
is a
Great House. In the Great House
lived a squire who had
land and treasures and, for a
daughter, Rita.
In the village
lived Del, whose voice was
a thunder
in the
inn when he drank
there; whose corded, cabled body
was golden-skinned, and whose
hair flung challenges back to
the sun.
Deep in the
Bogs, which were brackish, there
was a
pool of purest water, shaded by
willows and wide-wondering aspen,
cupped by banks of a
moss most marvellously blue. Here grew mandrake, and there
were strange pipings in midsummer.
No one
ever heard them but a
quiet girl whose beauty was so
very contained that none of
it showed.
Her name was Barbara.
There was a
green evening, breathless with growth,
when Del took his usual way
down the lane beside the
manor and saw a white shadow
adrift inside the tall iron
pickets. He stopped, and the shadow
approached, and became Rita. "Slip
around to the gate,"
she said,
"and I'll open it for
you."
She wore a
gown like a cloud and
a silver
circlet round her head. Night was
caught in her hair, moonlight
in her
face, and in her great eyes,
secrets swam.
Del said,
"I have no business with
the squire."
"He's gone," she said. "I've sent the servants away.
Come to the gate."
"I need no
gate." He leaped and caught
the top
bar of
the fence, and in a continuous
fluid motion went high and
across and down beside her. She
looked at his arms, one,
the other;
then up at his
hair. She pressed her small
hands tight together and made a
little laugh, and then she
was gone
through the tailored trees, lightly, swiftly,
not looking
back. He followed, one step for
three of hers, keeping pace
with a new pounding in the sides of his
neck. They crossed a flower
bed and
a wide
marble terrace. There was
an open
door, and when he passed
through it he stopped,
for she
was nowhere
in sight.
Then the door clicked shut behind
him and
he whirled.
She was
there, her back to
the panel,
laughing up at him in
the dimness.
He thought
she would
come to him then, but
instead she twisted by, close, her
eyes on his. She smelt
of violets
and
sandalwood. He followed
her into
a great
hall, quite dark but full of
the subdued
lights of polished wood, cloisonne,
tooled leather and gold-threaded
tapestry. She flung open another door, and they were
in a
small room with a carpet
made of rosy silences,
and a
candle-lit table. Two places were set, each with five
different crystal glasses and old
silver as prodigally used as
the iron
pickets outside. Six teak-wood steps
rose to a great oval
window. "The moon," she said, "will
rise for us there."
She motioned him
to a
chair and crossed to a
sideboard, where there was
a rack
of decanters—ruby
wine and white; one with a
strange brown bead; pink, and
amber. She took down the first
and poured.
Then she lifted the silver
domes from thé salvers on the
table, and a magic of
fragrance filled the air. There were
smoking sweets and savories, rare
seafood and slivers of fowl,
and morsels
of strange
meat wrapped in flower petals, spitted
with foreign fruits and tiny
soft sea-shells. All about were
spices, each like a separate
voice in the distant murmur of
a crowd:
saffron and sesame, cumin and marjoram
and mace.
And all the
while Del watched her in
wonder, seeing how the candles left
the moonlight
in her
face, and how completely she trusted her hands,
which did such deftness without
supervision—so composed she was,
for all
the silent
secret laughter that tugged
at her
hps, for all the bright
dark mysteries that swirled and swam
within her.
They ate, and
the oval
window yellowed and darkened while
the candlelight grew bright.
She poured
another wine, and another, and with
the courses
of the
meal they were as May
to the crocus and as frost
to the
apple.
Del knew it
was alchemy
and he
yielded to it without question.
That which was purposely over-sweet
would be piquantly cut; this induced
thirst would, with exquisite timing,
be quenched. He knew she was
watching him; he knew she
was aware of the heat in
his cheeks
and the
tingle at his fingertips. His wonder grew, but he
was not
afraid.
In all
this time she spoke hardly
a word;
but at
last the feast was over and
they rose. She touched a
silken rope on the wall, and
panelling slid aside. The table
rolled silently into some ingenious recess
and the
panel returned. She waved him
to an L-shaped couch in one
corner, and as he sat
close to her, she turned and
took down the lute which
hung on the wall behind her. He had his
moment of confusion; his arms
were ready for her, but not
for the
instrument as well. Her eyes
sparkled, but her composure
was unshaken.
Now she spoke,
while her fingers strolled and
danced on the lute, and her
words marched and wandered in
and about
the music. She had
a thousand
voices, so that he wondered
which of them was
truly hers. Sometimes she sang;
sometimes it was a wordless crooning.
She seemed
at times
remote from him, puzzled at the
turn the music was taking,
and at
other times she seemed to hear
the pulsing
roar in his * eardrums,
and she played laughing
syncopations to it. She sang
words which he almost understood:
Bee
to blossom, honey dew, Claw to mouse, and rain to tree, Moon to midnight, I to
you; Sun to starlight, you to me . ..
and she sang
something wordless:
Ake
ya rundefle, rundefle fye, Orel ya rundefle kown, En yea, en yea, ya bunderbee
bye En sor, en see, en sown.
which he also
almost understood.
In still another
voice she told him the
story of a great hairy
spider and a little
pink girl who found it
between the leaves of a half-open
book; and at first he
was all
fright and pity for the girl,
but then
she went
on to
tell of what the spider
suffered, with his home
disrupted by this yawping giant,
and so
vividly did she tell of it
that at the end he
was laughing
at himself
and all but crying for the
poor spider.
So the hours
slipped by, and suddenly, between
songs, she was in his arms;
and in
the instant
she had
twisted up and away from him,
leaving him gasping. She said,
in still
a new
voice, sober and low, "No, Del.
We must
wait for the moon."
His thighs ached
and he
realized that he had half-risen,
arms out, hands clutching and feeling
the extraordinary
fabric of her gown though it
was gone
from them; and he sank
back to the couch with an
odd, faint sound that was
wrong for the room. He flexed
his fingers
and, reluctantly, the sensation of
white gossamer left them.
At last
he looked
across at her and she laughed
and leapt
high lightly, and it was
as if
she stopped
in midair to stretch
for a
moment before she alighted beside
him, bent and kissed
his mouth,
and leapt
away.
The roaring in
his ears
was greater,
and at
this it seemed to acquire a
tangible weight. His head bowed;
he tucked
his knuckles into the upper curve
of his
eye sockets
and rested
his elbows on his knees. He
could hear the sweet sussurrus
of Rita's gown as she moved
about the room; he could
sense the violets and sandalwood. She was dancing, immersed
in the
joy of movement and of his
nearness. She made her own
music, humming, sometimes whispering
to the
melodies in her mind.
And at length
he became
aware that she had stopped;
he could hear nothing, though he
knew she was still near.
Heavily he raised his head. She
was in
the center
of the
room, balanced like a huge white
moth, her eyes quite dark
now with
their secrets quiet. She was staring
at the
window, poised, waiting.
He followed her
gaze. The big oval was
black no longer, but dusted over
with silver light. Del rose
slowly. The dust was a mist,
a loom,
and then,
at one
edge, there was a shard
of the moon itself creeping and
growing.
Because Del stopped
breathing, he could hear her
breathe; it was rapid and so
deep it faintly strummed her
versatile vocal cords.
"Rita ..."
Without answering she
ran to
the sideboard
and filled
two small glasses. She gave him
one, then, "Wait,"
she breathed,
"oh, wait!"
Spellbound, he waited
while the white stain crept
across the window. He understood suddenly that he must
be still
until the great oval was completely
filled with direct moonlight, and this helped him, because
it set
a foreseeable
limit to his waiting; and
it hurt
him, because nothing in life,
he thought,
had ever moved so slowly. He
had a
moment of rebellion, in which
he damned himself for
falling in with her complex
pacing; but with it he realized
that now the darker silver
was wasting
away, now it was a finger's
breadth, and now a thread,
and now,
and now—.
She made
a brittle
feline cry and sprang up
the dark
steps to the window. So bright
was the
light that her body was
a jet cameo against it. So
delicately wrought was her gown
that he could see the epaulettes
of silver
light the moon gave her.
She was so beautiful
his eyes
stung.
"Drink," she whispered. "Drink with me,
darling, darling . . ."
For an
instant he did not understand
her at
all, and only gradually did he
become aware of the little
glass he held. He raised it
toward her and drank. And
of all
the twists
and titillations of taste
he h'ad
had this
night, this was the most
startling; for it had
no taste
at all,
almost no substance, and a temperature
almost exactly that of blood.
He looked
stupidly down at the glass and
back up at the girl.
He thought
that she had turned about and
was watching
him, though he could not
be sure, since her
silhouette was the same.
And then he
had his
second, of unbearable shock, for
the light went out.
The moon
was gone,
the window,
the room,
Rita was gone.
For a stunned
instant he stood tautly, stretching
his eyes
wide. He made a
sound that was not a
word. He dropped the glass and
pressed his palms to his
eyes, feeling them blink, feeling the stiff silk of
his lashes
against them. Then he snatched the hands away, and
it was
still dark, and more than
dark; this was not
a blackness.
This was like trying to
see with
an elbow or with
a tongue;
it was
not black,
it was
Nothingness.
He fell
to his
knees.
Rita laughed.
An odd, alert
part of his mind seized
on the
laugh and understood it, and horror
and fury
spread through his whole being; for
this was the laugh which
had been
tugging at her lips all evening,
and it
was a
hard, cruel, self-assured laugh.
And at
the same
time, because of the anger
or in
spite of it, desire exploded whitely
within him. He moved toward
the sound, groping, mouthing.
There was a quick, faint
series of rustling sounds from the
steps, and then a light,
strong web fell around him. He
struck out at it, and
recognized it for the unforgettable thing it was—her robe.
He caught
at it,
ripped it, stamped upon it. He
heard her bare feet run
lightly down and past him, and
lunged, and caught nothing. He
stood, gasping painfully.
She laughed
again.
"I'm blind,"
he said
hoarsely. "Rita, I'm blind!" "I know," she said coolly, close
beside him. And again she
laughed.
"What have
you done
to me?"
"I've watched
you be
a dirty
animal of a man," she said.
He grunted and
lunged again. His knees struck
something —a chair, a cabinet—and he fell heavily. He
thought he touched her foot.
"Here, lover,
here!" she taunted.
He fumbled about
for the
thing which had tripped him,
found it, used it
to help
him upright
again. He peered uselessly about.
"Here, lover!"
He leaped, and
crashed into the door jamb:
cheekbone, collarbone, hip-bone, ankle
were one straight blaze of
pain. He clung to the polished
wood.
After a time he
said, in agony, "Why?"
"No man has
ever touched me and none
ever will," she sang. Her breath
was on
his cheek.
He reached
and touched
nothing, and then he
heard her leap from her
perch on a statue's pedestal by
the door,
where she had stood high
and leaned over to speak.
No pain, no
blindness, not even the understanding
that it was her witch's brew
working in him could quell
the wild
-desire he felt at
her nearness.
Nothing could tame the fury
that shook him as
she laughed.
He staggered
after her, bellowing.
She danced around
him, laughing. Once she pushed
him into a clattering rack of
fire-irons. Once she caught his
elbow from behind and spun him.
And once,
incredibly, she sprang past him and,
in midair,
kissed him again on the
mouth.
He descended into
Hell,' surrounded by the small,
sure patter of bare feet and
sweet cool laughter. He rushed
and crashed, he crouched arid bled
and whimpered
like a hound. His roaring and
blundering took an echo, and
that must have been the great
hall. Then there were walls
that seemed more than unyielding; they struck back. And
there were panels to lean against,
gasping, which became opening doors
as he
leaned. And always the
black nothingness, the writhing temptation
of the
pat-pat of firm flesh on
smooth stones, and the ravening fury.
It was cooler,
and there
was no
echo. He became aware of
the whisper of the
wind through trees. The balcony,
he thought;
and then, right in
his ear,
so that
he felt
her warm
breath, "Come, lover .
. ."
and he
sprang. He sprang and missed,
and instead of sprawling on the
terrace, there was nothing, and
nothing, and nothing, and
then, when he least expected
it, a
shower of cruel thumps
as he
rolled down the marble steps.
He must have
had a
shred of consciousness left, for
he was
vaguely aware of the
approach of her bare feet,
and of
the small, cautious hand that touched
his shoulder
and moved
to his mouth, and then his
chest. Then it was withdrawn,
and either she laughed or the
sound was still in his
mind.
Deep in the
Bogs, which were brackish, there
was a
pool of purest water, shaded by
willows and wide-wondering aspens, cupped by banks of a
moss most marvellously blue. Here
grew mandrake, and there
were strange pipings in mid-summer.
No one
ever heard them but a
quiet girl whose beauty was so very contained that
none of it showed. Her
name was Barbara.
No one
noticed Barbara, no one lived
with her, no one cared. And Barbara's life was
very full, for she was
born to receive. Others are born
wishing to receive, so they
wear bright masks and make attractive
sounds like cicadas and operettas,
so others will be
forced, one way or another,
to give
to them.
But Barbara's receptors were
wide open, and always had
been, so that she needed no
substitute for sunlight through a
tulip petal, or the sound of
morning-glories climbing, or
the tangy
sweet smell of formic
acid which is the only
death cry possible to an ant,
or any
other of the thousand things
overlooked by folk who can only
wish to receive. Barbara had
a garden
and an orchard, and took things
in to
market when she cared to,
and the rest of
the time
she spent
in taking
what was given. Weeds grew in
her garden,
but since
they were welcomed, they grew only
where they could keep the
watermelons from being sunburned. The rabbits
were welcome, so they kept
to the two rows of carrots,
the one
of lettuce,
and the
one of
tomato vines which were planted
for them,
and they
left the rest alone. Goldenrod shot
up beside
the bean
hills to lend a hand upward,
and the
birds ate only the figs
and peaches
from the waviest top branches, and
in return
patrolled the lower ones for caterpillars
and egg-laying
flies. And if a fruit
stayed green for two weeks longer
until Barbara had time to
go to
market, or if a
mole could channel moisture to
the roots
of the
corn, why it was
the least
they could do.
For a brace
of years
Barbara had wandered more and
more, impelled by a
thing she could not name—if
indeed she was aware of it
at all.
She knew
only that over-the-rise was a
strange and friendly place,
and that
it was
a fine
thing on arriving there to find
another rise to go over.
It may
very well be that she now
needed someone to love, for
loving is a most receiving thing, as anyone can
attest who has been loved
without returning it. It is
the one
who is
loved who must give and
give. And she found
her love,
not in
her wandering,
but at
the market. The shape
of her
love, his colors and sounds,
were so much with her that
when she saw him first
it was
without surprise; and thereafter,
for a
very long while, it was
quite enough that he lived. He
gave to her by being
alive, by setting the air athrum
with his mighty voice, by
his stride,
which was, for a man afoot,
the exact
analog of what the horseman
calls a "perfect seat."
After seeing him,
of course,
she received
twice and twice again as much
as ever
before. A tree was straight
and tall
for the magnificent sake of being
straight and tall, but wasn't
straightness a part of
him, and being tall? The
oriole gave more now than song,
and the
hawk more than walking the
wind, for had they
not hearts
like his, warm blood and
his same striving to keep it
so for
tomorrow? And more and more,
over-the-rise was the place
for her,
for only
there could there be more and
still more things like him.
But when she
found the pure pool in
the brackish
Bogs, there was no more over-the-rise
for her.
It was
a place
without hardness or hate,
where the aspens trembled only
for wonder,
and where all contentment
was rewarded.
Every single rabbit there was the champion nose-twinkler, and every waterbird could stand on one leg
the longest,
and proud
of it.
Shelf-fungi hung to the
willow-trunks, making that
certain, single purple of which the
sunset is incapable, and a
tanager and a cardinal gravely granted one another his
definition of "red."
Here Barbara brought
a heart
light with happiness, large with love, and set it
down on the blue moss.
And since
the loving heart can receive more
than anything else, so it
is most
needed, and Barbara took
the best
bird songs, and the richest
colors, and the deepest
peace, and all the other
things which are most worth giving.
The chipmunks
brought her nuts when she was
hungry and the prettiest stones
when she was not. A
green snake explained to
her, in pantomime, how a
river of jewels may flow uphill,
and three
mad otters
described how a bundle of joy
may slip
and slide
down and down and be
all the more joyful for it.
And there
was the
magic moment when a midge hovered,
and then
a honeybee,
and then
a bumblebee,
and at last a hummingbird; and there
they hung, playing a chord in
A sharp
minor.
Then one day
the pool
fell silent, and Barbara learned
why the water was pure.
The aspens
stopped trembling.
The rabbits
all came
out of
the thicket
and clustered
on the
blue bank, backs straight,
ears up, and all their
noses as still as coral.
The waterbirds stepped backwards, like courtiers,
and stopped on the brink with
their heads turned sidewise, one
eye closed, the better
to see
with the other.
The chipmunks respectfully
emptied their cheek pouches, scrubbed their paws together and
tucked them out of sight;
then stood still as
tent pegs.
The pressure of
growth around the pool ceased:
the very
grass waited.
The last sound
of all
to be
heard—and by then it was
very quiet—was the soft
whickl of an
owl's eyelids as it awoke
to watch.
He came like a cloud, the earth
cupping itself to take each
of his golden hooves. He stopped
on the
bank and lowered his head, and
for a
brief moment his eyes met
Barbara's, and she looked into a
second universe of wisdom and
compassion. Then there was
the arch
of the
magnificent neck, the blinding flash of his golden horn.
And he
drank, and he was gone.
Everyone knows the water is pure,
where the unicorn drinks.
How long had
he been
there? How long gone? Did
time wait too, like the grass?
"And couldn't
he stay?"
she wept.
"Couldn't he stay?"
To have seen
the unicorn
is a
sad thing;
one might
never see him more. But then—to
have seen the unicorn!
She began to
make a song. •
It was
late when Barbara came in
from the Bogs, so late
the mood was bleached
with cold and fleeing to
the horizon.
She struck the highroad
just below the Great House
and turned to pass it and
go out
to her
garden house.
Near the locked
main gate an animal was
barking. A sick animal, a big
animal. . . .
Barbara could
see in
the dark
better than most, and soon
saw the creature clinging
to the
gate, climbing, uttering that coughing moan as it went.
At the
top it
slipped, fell outward, dangled; then there
was a
ripping sound, and it fell
heavily to the ground and lay
still and quiet.
She ran to
it, and
it began
to make
the sound
again. It was a man, and
he was
weeping.
It was
her love,
her love,
who was
tall and straight and so
very alive—her love, battered
and bleeding,
puffy, broken, his clothes torn, crying.
Now of
all times
was the
time for a lover to
receive, to take from the loved
one his
pain, his trouble, his fear.
"Oh, hush, hush," she whispered, her hands touching his
bruised face like swift feathers. "It's
all over
now. It's all over."
She turned him
over on his back and
knelt to bring him up
sitting. She lifted one
of his
thick arms around her shoulder.
He was very heavy, but she
was very
.strong. When he was upright, gasping weakly, she looked
up and
down the road in the waning
moonlight. Nothing, no one. The
Great House was dark. Across the
road, though, was a meadow
with high hedgerows which might break
the wind
a little.
"Come, my love,
my dear
love," she whispered. He trembled
violently.
All but carrying
him, she got him across
the road,
over the shallow ditch, and through
a gap
in the
hedge. She almost fell with him
there. She gritted her teeth
and set
him down
gently. She let him
lean against the hedge, and
then ran and swept up great
armfuls of sweet broom. She
made a tight springy bundle of
it and
set it
on the
ground beside him, and put a
corner of her cloak over
it, and
gently lowered his head until it
was pillowed.
She folded
the rest
of the
cloak about him. He was very
cold.
There was no
water near, and she dared
not leave
him. With her kerchief she cleaned
some of the blood from
his face. He was still very
cold. He said, "You devil.
You rotten
little devil."
"Shh." She crept
in beside
him and
cradled his head. "You'll be warm
in a
minute."
"Stand still,"
he growled.
"Keep running away."
"I won't run
away," she whispered. "Oh, my
darling, you've been hurt, so hurt.
I won't
leave you. I promise I
won't leave you."
He lay
very still. He made the
growling sound again.
"I'll tell you
a lovely
thing," she said softly. "Listen
to me,
think about the lovely
thing," she crooned.
"There's a place
in the
bog, a pool of pure
water, where the trees live beautifully,
willow and aspen and birch,
where everything is peaceful,
my darling,
and the
flowers grow without tearing their petals.
The moss
is blue
and the
water is like diamonds."
"You tell
me stories
in a
thousand voices," he muttered.
"Shh. Listen, my
darling. This isn't a story,
it's a real place. Four miles north and a
little west, and you can
see the
trees from the ridge with the
two dwarf
oaks. And I know why
the
water is purel"
she cried
gladly. "I know why I"
He said
nothing. He took a deep
breath and it hurt him,
for he shuddered
painfully.
"The unicorn drinks
there," she whispered. "I saw himl" Still he
said nothing. She said, "I
made a song about it
Listen, this is
the song
I made:
And
He—suddenly gleamed! My dazzled eyes
Coming
from outer sunshine to this green
And
secret gloaming, met without surprise
The
vision. Only after, when the sheen
And
splendor of his going fled away,
1
knew amazement, wonder and despair,
That
he should come—and pass—and would not stay,
The
Silken-swift—the gloriously Fair!
That
he should come—and pass—and would not stay,
So
that, forever after, I must go,
Take
the long road that mounts against the day,
Travelling
in the hope that I shall know
Again
that lifted moment, high and sweet.
Somewhere—on
purple moor or windy hill—
Remembering
still his wild and delicate feet,
The
magic and the dream—remembering still!
His breathing
was more
regular. She said, "I truly saw him!"
"I'm blind," he said. "Blind, I'm blind." "Oh,
my dear
. .
."
He fumbled for
her hand,
found it. For a long
moment he held it Then, slowly,
he brought
up his
other hand and with them both
he felt
her hand,
turned it about, squeezed it
Suddenly he grunted, half
sitting. "You're herel"
"Of course,
darling. Of course I'm here."
"Why?" he shouted.
"Why? Why? Why all of this? Why blind me?"
He sat
up, mouthing,
and put
his great
hand on her throat. "Why do
all that
if .
. ."
The words
ran together
into an animal noise.
Wine and witchery, anger and
agony boiled in his veins.
Once she
cried out
Once she
sobbed.
"Now," he said,
"you'll catch no unicorns. Get
away from me." He cuffed her.
"You're mad. You're
sick," she cried. "Get away," he said ominously.
Terrified, she rose.
He took
the cloak
and hurled
it after
her. It almost toppled
her as
she ran
away, crying silently.
After a long
time, from behind the hedge,
the sick,
coughing sobs began again.
Three weeks
later Rita was in the
market when a hard hand took
her upper
arm and
pressed her into the angle
of a cottage wall. She did
not start.
She flashed
her eyes
upward and recognized him, and then
said composedly, "Don't
touch me."
"I need
you to
tell me something," he said.
"And tell me you will!" His voice
was as
hard as his hand.
"I'll tell you
anything you like," she said.
"But don't touch
*****" me.
He hesitated,
then released her. She turned
to him
casually. "What is it?"
Her gaze
darted across his face and
its almost-healed
scars. The small smile tugged
at one
corner of her mouth.
His eyes were
slits. "I have to know
this: why did you make up
all that
. .
. prettiness,
that food, that poison .
. .
just for me? You
could have had me for
less."
She smiled.
"Just for you? It was
your turn, that's all."
He was
genuinely surprised. "It's happened before?"
She nodded. "Whenever
it's the full of the
moon—and the squire's away."
"You're lying!"
"You forget
yourself!" she said
sharply. Then, smiling, "It
is the
truth, though." "I'd've heard
talk—"
"Would you
now? And tell me—how many
of your
friends know about your humiliating adventure?" He hung
his head.
She nodded. "You
see? They go away until
they're healed, and they come back
and say
nothing. And they always will."
"You're a devil .
. .
why do
you do
it Why?"
"I told you,"
she said
openly. "I'm a woman and
I act
like a woman in my own
way. No man will ever
touch me, though. I am virgin
and shall
remain so."
"You're what?" he roared.
She held up
a restraining,
ladylike glove. "Please,"
she said, pained.
"Listen," he
said, quietly now, but with
such intensity that for once she
stepped back a pace. He
closed his eyes, thinking hard. "You told me—the pool,
the pool
of the
unicorn, and a song, wait. "The
Silken-swift, the gloriously Fair .
. .'
Remember? And then I—I saw
to it
that you'd never catch a unicorn 1"
She shook her
head, complete candor in her
face. "I like that, 'the Silken-swift.'
Pretty. But believe me—nol That
isn't mine."
He put his
face close to hers, and
though it was barely a
whisper, it came out
like bullets. "Liar! Liar! I
couldn't forget. I was sick,
I was
hurt, I was poisoned, but
I know
what I did!" He turned on
his heel
and strode
away.
She put
the thumb
of her
glove against her upper teeth
for a second, then ran after
him. "Del!"
He stopped but,
rudely, would not turn. She
rounded him, faced him. "I'll not have you believing
that of me—it's the one thing
I have
left," she said tremulously.
He made no
attempt to conceal his surprise.
She controlled
her expression with a
visible effort, and said, "Please.
Tell me a little more—just about
the pool,
the song,
whatever it was."
"You don't
remember?"
"I don't
know!" she flashed.
She was
deeply agitated.
He said with
mock patience, "You told me
of a
unicorn pool out on the Bogs.
You said
you had
seen him drink there. You made a
song about it. And then
I—"
"Where? Where
was this?"
"You forget
so soon?"
"Where? Where
did it
happen?"
"In the
meadow, across the road from
your gate, where you followed me,"
he said.
"Where my sight came back
to me, when the sun came
up."
She looked at
him blankly,
and slowly
her face
changed. First the imprisoned
smile struggling to be free,
and then—
she was herself again,
and she
laughed. She laughed a great
ringing peal of the
laughter that had plagued him
so, and
she did not stop
until he put one hand
behind his back, then the other,
and she
saw his
shoulders swell with the effort
to keep from striking her dead.
"You animal!" she said, goodhumoredly. "Do you know what you've
done? Oh, you . .
. you
animal!" She glanced
around to see that
there were no ears to
hear her. "I left you at
the foot
of the
terrace steps," she told him.
Her eyes
sparkled. "Inside the gates, you
understand? And you .
. ."
"Don't laugh,"
he said
quietly.
She did
not laugh.
"That was someone else out
there. Who, I can't imagine.
But it
wasn't I." He paled. "You followed
me out."
"On my soul
L did
not," she said soberly. Then
she quelled
another laugh.
"That can't
be," he said. "I couldn't
have . . ."
"But you
were blind, blind and crazy,
Del-my-lover!"
"Squire's daughter, take
care," he hissed. Then he
pulled his big hand through his
hair. "It can't be. It's
three weeks; I'd have been accused
. .
."
"There are those
who wouldn't,"
she smiled.
"Or—perhaps she will, in
time."
"There has
never been a woman so
foul," he said evenly, looking her straight in the
eye. "You're lying—you know you're lying."
"What must I
do to
prove it—aside from that which
I'll have no man do?"
His lip
curled. "Catch the unicorn," he said.
"If I did, you'd
believe I was virgin?"
"I must," he admitted. He turned
away, then said, over his shoulder,
"But—you?"
She watched him
thoughtfully until he left the
marketplace. Her eyes sparkled; then
she walked
briskly to the goldsmith's, where she ordered a
bridle of woven gold.
If the
unicorn pool lay in the
Bogs nearby, Rita reasoned, someone who was familiar with
that brakish wasteland must know of
it. And
when she made a list
in her
mind of those few who travelled
the Bogs,
she knew
whom to ask. With that, the other deduction came
readily. Her laughter drew stares as she moved through
the marketplace.
By the vegetable
stall she stopped. The girl
looked up patiently.
Rita stood
swinging one expensive glove against
the other
wrist, half-smiling. "So you're
the one."
She studied
the plain, inward-turning, peaceful
face until Barbara had to
turn her eyes away. Rita said,
without further preamble, "I want
you to show me the unicorn
pool in two weeks."
Barbara looked up
again, and now it was
Rita who dropped her eyes. Rita
said, "I can have someone
else find it, of course.
If you'd rather not."
She spoke
very clearly, and people turned to listen. They looked
from Barbara to Rita and
back again, and they waited.
"I don't mind,"
said Barbara faintly. As soon
as Rita
had left, smiling, she packed up
her things
and went
silently back to her house.
The goldsmith,
of course,
made no secret of such
an extraordinary
commission; and that, plus the
gossips who had overheard Rita talking
to Barbara,
made the expedition into a cavalcade.
The whole
village turned out to see;
the boys
kept firmly in check
so that
Rita might lead the way;
the young bloods ranged behind her
(some a little less carefree
then they might be)
and others
snickering behind their hands. Behind them the girls, one
or two
a little
pale, others eager as cats to
see the
squire's daughter fail, and perhaps
even . . . but then,
only she had the golden
bridle.
She carried it
casually, but casualness could not,
hide it, for it was not
wrapped, and it swung and
blazed in the sun. She wore
a flowing
white robe, trimmed a little
short so that she might negotiate
the rough
bogland; she had on a
golden girdle and little gold sandals,
and a
gold chain bound her head
and hair like a
coronet.
Barbara walked quietly
a little
behind Rita, closed in with
her own thoughts. Not
once did she look at
Del, who strode somberly by himself.
Rita halted a
moment and let Barbara catch
up, then
walked beside her. "Tell
me," she said quietly, "why
did you
come? It needn't have
been you."
"I'm his friend,"
Barbara said. She quickly touched
the bridle with her finger. "The
unicom."
"Oh," said Rita.
"The unicorn." She looked archly
at the
other girl. "You wouldn't
betray all your friends, would
you?"
Barbara looked
at her
thoughtfully, without anger. "If— when you catch the unicorn,"
she said
carefully, "what will you do with
him?"
"What an
amazing question! I shall keep
him, of course!"
"I thought
I might
persuade you to let him
go."
Rita smiled, and
hung the bridle on her
other arm. "You could never do
that."
"I know,"
said Barbara. "But I thought
I might,
so that's
why I came." And before Rita
could answer, she dropped behind
again.
The last ridge,
the one
which overlooked the unicorn pool,
saw a series of gasps as
the ranks
of villagers
topped it, one after the other,
and saw
what lay below; and it
was indeed
beautiful.
Surprisingly, it was
Del who
took it upon himself to
call out, in his great voice,
"Everyone wait here!"
And everyone
did; the top of
the ridge
filled slowly, from one side
to the
other, with craning, murmuring
people. And then Del bounded
after Rita and Barbara.
Barbara said,
"I'll stop here."
"Wait," said Rita,
imperiously. Of Del she demanded,
"What are you coming
for?"
"To see fair
play," he growled. "The little
I know
of witchcraft
makes me like none of
it."
"Very well," she said calmly. Then
she smiled
her very
own smile. "Since you insist, I'd
rather enjoy Barbara's company too."
Barbara hesitated. "Come, he won't hurt
you, girl," said Rita. "He doesn't
know you exist."
"Oh," said
Barbara, wondermgly.
Del said
gruffly, "I do so. She
has the
vegetable stall."
Rita smiled at
Barbara, the secrets bright in
her eyes.
Barbara said nothing, but came
with them.
"You should go
back, you know," Rita said
silkily to Del, when she could.
"Haven't you been humiliated enough yet?"
He did
not answer.
She said,
"Stubborn animall Do
you think
I'd have
come this far if I weren't
sure?"
"Yes," said
Del, "I think perhaps you
would."
They reached the
blue moss. Rita shuffled it
about with her feet and then
sank gracefully down to it.
Barbara stood alone in the shadows
of the
willow grove. Del thumped gently
at an aspen with his fist.
Rita, smiling, arranged the bridle
to cast, and laid it across
her lap.
The rabbits stayed
hid. There was an uneasiness
about the grove. Barbara sank to
her knees,
and put
out her
hand. A chipmunk ran to nestle
in it.
This time there
was a
difference. This time it was
not the
slow silencing of living
things that warned of his
approach, but a sudden babble from
the people
on the
ridge.
Rita gathered
her legs
under her like a sprinter,
and held
the bridle poised. Her
eyes were round and bright,
and the
tip of her tongue showed between
her white
teeth. Barbara was a statue. Del
put his
back against his tree, and
became as still as Barbara.
Then from the
ridge came a single, simultaneous
intake of breath, and silence. One
knew without looking that some
stared speechless, that some
buried their faces or threw
an arm over their eyes.
He came.
He came slowly
this time, his golden hooves
choosing his paces like so many
embroidery needles. He held his
splendid head high. He regarded the
three on the bank gravely,
and then turned to look at
the ridge
for a
moment. At last he turned, and came round the
pond by the willow grove.
Just on the blue moss, he
stopped to look down into
the pond.
It seemed that he
drew one deep clear breath.
He bent
his head then, and drank, and
lifted his head to shake
away the shining drops.
He turned toward
the three
spellbound humans and looked at them
each in turn. And it
was not
Rita he went to, at
last, nor Barbara. He came to
Del, and he drank of
Del's eyes with his own just
as he
had partaken
of the
pool—deeply and at leisure. The beauty
and wisdom
were there, and the compassion,
and what
looked like a bright white
point of anger. Del knew that
the creature
had read
everything then, and that he knew
all three
of them
in ways
unknown to human beings.
There was a
majestic sadness in the way
he turned
then, and dropped his shining head,
and stepped
daintily to Rita. She sighed, and
rose up a little, lifting
the bridle.
The unicorn
lowered his horn to
receive it—
—and tossed his
head, tore the bridle out
of her
grasp, sent the golden thing high
in the
air. It turned there in
the sun,
and fell into the pond.
And the instant
it touched
the water,
the pond
was a
bog and the birds rose mourning
from the trees. The unicorn
looked up at them,
and shook
himself. Then he trotted to
Barbara and knelt, and
put his
smooth, stainless head in her
lap.
Barbara's hands
stayed on the ground by
her sides.
Her gaze roved over the warm
white beauty, up to the
tip of
the golden horn and back.
The scream
was frightening.
Rita's hands were up like
claws, and she had bitten her
tongue; there was blood on
her mouth.
She screamed again. She
threw herself off the now
withered moss toward the unicorn and
Barbara. "She can't bel" Rita
shrieked. She collided with
Del's broad right hand. "It's
wrong, I tell you, she, you,
I. .
. ."
"I'm satisfied," said Del, low in
his throat
"Keep away, squire's daughter."
She recoiled from
him, made as if to
try to
circle him. He stepped forward. She
ground her chin into one
shoulder, then the other, in a
gesture of sheer frustration, turned suddenly and ran toward
the ridge.
"It's mine, it's mine," she screamed. "I tell you
it can't
be hers,
don't you understand? I never
once, I never did,
but she,
but she—"
She slowed and
stopped, then, and fell silent
at the
sound that rose from the ridge.
It began
like the first patter of
rain on oak leaves, and it
gathered voice until it was
a rumble
and then a roar. She stood
looking up, her face working,
the sound
washing over her. She
shrank from it.
It was
laughter.
She turned once,
a pleading
just beginning to form on
her face. Del regarded her stonily.
She faced
the ridge
then, and squared her shoulders, and walked up the
hill, to go into the
laughter, to go through
it, to
have it follow her all
the way
home and all the
days of her life.
Del turned to
Barbara just as she bent
over the beautiful head. She said,
"Silken-swift ... go
free."
The unicorn raised
its head
and looked
up at
Del. Del's mouth opened. He took
a clumsy
step forward, stopped again. "You!"
Barbara's face was
wet "You
weren't to know," she choked.
"You weren't ever to
know ... I was so
glad you were blind, because I thought you'd never
know."
He fell on
his knees
beside her. And when he
did, the unicorn touched her
face with his satin nose,
and all
the girl's
pent-up beauty flooded outward.
The unicorn
rose from his kneeling, and whickered
softly. Del looked at her,
and only
the unicorn was more
beautiful. He put out his
hand to the shining neck, and
for a
moment felt the incredible silk of the mane flowing
across his fingers. The unicorn
reared then, and wheeled, and in
a great
leap was across the bog,
and in
two more was on the crest
of the
farther ridge. He paused there
briefly, with the sun
on him,
and then
was gone.
Barbara said,
"For us, he lost his
pool, his beautiful pooL"
And Del
said, "He will get another.
He must."
With difficulty he added, "He
couldn't be . . .
punished . . . for
being so gloriously Fair."
7be "Professor's 7eddy Bear
"Sleep," said
the monster.
It spoke
with its ear, with little
lips writhing deep within
the folds
of flesh,
because its mouth was full of
blood.
"I don't want
to sleep
now. I'm having a dream,"
said Jeremy. "When I sleep, all
my dreams
go away.
Or they're
just pretend dreams. I'm
having a real dream now."
"What are you
dreaming now?" asked the monster.
"I am dreaming
that I'm grown up—"
"Seven feet tall
and very
fat," said the monster.
"You're silly," said Jeremy. "I will
be five
feet, six and three-eighth inches tall. I will
be bald
on top
and will
wear eyeglasses like little thick
ashtrays. I will give lectures
to young
things about human destiny
and the
metempsychosis of Plato."
"What's a metempsychosis?"
asked the monster hungrily.
Jeremy was four
and could
afford to be patient. "A
metempsychosis is a
thing that happens when a
person moves from one house to
another."
"Like when your
daddy moved here from Monroe
Street?"
"Sort of. But
not that
kind of a house, with
shingles and sewers and things. This kind of a house," he said,
and smote
his little chest.
"Oh," said the
monster. It moved up and
crouched on Jeremy's throat, looking more
like a teddy bear than
ever. "Now?" it begged.
It was
not very
heavy.
"Not now," said Jeremy petulantly. "It'll make me sleep.
I want to watch my dream
some more. There's a girl
who's not listening to my lecture.
She's thinking about her hair."
"What about her
hair?" asked the monster.
"It's brown," said Jeremy. "It's shiny, too. She wishes
it were golden."
"Why?"
"Somebody named Bert
likes golden hair." "Go
ahead and make it golden
then." "I can't I What would the other young ones
say?" "Does that matter?"
"Maybe not. Could
I make
her hair
golden?" "Who is she?"
countered the monster. "She is a
girl who will be born
here in about twenty years,"
said Jeremy.
The monster
snuggled closer to his neck.
"If she is
to be
born here, then of course
you can
change her hair. Hurry and do
it and
go to
sleep."
Jeremy laughed
delightedly.
"What happened?"
asked the monster.
"I changed it,"
said Jeremy. 'The girl behind
her squeaked
like the mouse with
its leg
caught. Then she jumped up.
It's a big lecture-room, you know,
built up and away from
the speaker-place. It has
steep aisles. Her foot slipped
on the
hard step.
He burst
into joyous laughter.
"Now what?"
"She broke
her neck.
She's dead."
The monster sniggered.
"That's a very funny dream.
Now change the other girl's hair
back again. Nobody else saw
it, except you?"
"Nobody else
saw," said Jeremy. "There! It's changed back again. She never even knew
she had
golden hair for a little
while."
"That's fine.
Does that end the dream?"
"I s'pose it
does," said Jeremy regretfully. "It ends the lecture,
anyhow. The young people are
all crowding
around the girl with the broken
neck. The young men all
have sweat under their noses. The
girls are all trying to
put their
fists into their mouths. You can
go ahead."
The monster
made a happy sound and
pressed its mouth hard against Jeremy's
neck. Jeremy closed his eyes.
The door opened.
"Jeremy» darling," said Mummy. She
had a tired, soft face and
smiling eyes. "I heard you
laugh."
Jeremy opened his
eyes slowly. His lashes were
so long
that when they swung
up, there
seemed to be a tiny
wind, as if they were dark
weather fans. He smiled, and
three of his teeth peeped out
and smiled
too. "I told Fuzzy a
story, Mummy," he said
sleepily, "and he liked it."
"You darling," she murmured. She came
to him
and tucked
the covers around his
chin. He put up his
hand and kept the monster tight against his neck.
"Is Fuzzy sleeping?"
asked Mummy, her voice crooning
with whimsy.
"No," said
Jeremy. "He's hungering himself."
"How does
he do
that?"
"When I eat, the—the
hungry goes away. Fuzzy's different."
She looked
at him,
loving him so much that
she did
not— could not think. "You're a strange child," she whispered, "and you have the pinkest cheeks
in the
whole wide world."
"Sure I have," he said.
"What a funny little
laugh!" she said, paling.
"That wasn't
me. That
was Fuzzy.
He thinks
you're funny."
Mummy stood over
the crib,
looking down at him. It
seemed to be the
frown that looked at him,
while the eyes looked past. Finally
she wet
her lips
and patted
his head.
"Good night, baby."
"Good night, Mummy."
He closed
his eyes.
Mummy tiptoed out. The monster
kept right on doing it.
It was
nap-time the next day, and
for the
hundredth time Mummy had kissed him
and said,
"You're so good
about your nap,
Jeremy!" Well, he was. He
always went straight up to
bed at nap-time, as he did
at bedtime.
Mummy didn't know why, of course.
Perhaps Jeremy did not know.
Fuzzy knew.
Jeremy opened the
toy-chest and took Fuzzy out.
"You're hungry, I bet,"
he said.
"Yes. Let's
hurry."
Jeremy climbed
into the crib and hugged
the teddy
bear close. "I keep thinking about
that girl," he said. "What girl?"
"The one
whose hair I changed."
"Maybe because
it's the first time you've
changed a person." "It
is not!
What about the man who
fell into the subway hole?"
"You moved the
hat. The one that blew
off. You moved it under his
feet so that he stepped
on the
brim with one foot and caught
his toe
in the
crown, and tumbled in."
"Well, what about
the little
girl I threw in front
of the
truck?"
"You didn't touch
her," said the monster equably.
"She was on roller skates. You
broke something in one wheel
so it
couldn't turn. So she
fell right in front of
the truck."
Jeremy thought carefully.
"Why didn't I ever touch
a person
before?"
"I don't know,"
said Fuzzy. "It has something
to do
with being born in this house,
I think."
"I guess
maybe," said Jeremy doubtfully.
"I'm hungry," said the monster, settling
itself on Jeremy's stomach as he
turned on his back.
"Oh, all right," Jeremy said. 'The
next lecture?"
"Yes," said
Fuzzy eagerly. "Dream bright, now.
The big.
things that you say,
lecturing. Those are what I
want. Never mind the people there.
Never mind you, lecturing. The things you say."
The strange
blood flowed as Jeremy relaxed.
He looked
up to the ceiling, found the
hairline crack that he always
stared at while he dreamed real,
and began
to talk.
"There I am.
There's the—the room, yes, and
the—yes, it's all there, again. There's
the girl.
The one
who has
the brown,
shiny hair. The seat
behind her is empty. This
must be after that other girl
broke her neck."
"Never mind that,"
said the monster impatiently. "What do you say?"
"I—" Jeremy was
quiet. Finally Fuzzy nudged him.
"Oh. It's all about
yesterday's unfortunate occurrence,
but, like the show of legend,
our studies
must go on."
"Go on
with it then," panted the
monster.
"All right, all
right," said Jeremy impatiently. "Here it is. We come
now to
the Gymnosophists,
whose ascetic school has had no
recorded equal in its extremism.
Those strange gentry regarded
clothing and even food as
detrimental to purity of thought. The
Greeks also called them Hylobioi, a term our more
erudite students will notice as
analogous to the Sanskrit Vana-Prasthas. It is
evident that they were a
profound influence on Diogenes Laertius,
the Elisian
founder of pure skepticism. . .
."
And so he
droned on and on. Fuzzy
crouched on his body, its soft
ears making small masticating motions; and sometimes when stimulated by some particularly
choice nugget of esotérica, the ears drooled.
At the end
of nearly
an hour,
Jeremy's soft voice trailed off, and he was quiet.
Fuzzy shifted in irritation. "What is it?"
"That girl,"
said Jeremy. "I keep looking
back to that girl while I'm talking."
"Well, stop
doing it. I'm not finished."
"There isn't
any more,
Fuzzy. I keep looking and
looking back to that girl until
I can't
lecture any more. Now I'm
saying all that about the pages
in the
book and the assignment. The lecture is over."
Fuzzy's mouth was
almost full of blood. From
its ears,
it sighed. "That wasn't any too
much. But if that's all,
then it's all. You can sleep
now if
you want
to." "I want to
watch for a while."
The monster puffed
out its
cheeks. The pressure inside was
not great. "Go on,
then." It scrabbled off Jeremy's
body and curled up in a
sulky huddle.
The strange blood
moved steadily through Jeremy's brain.
With his eyes wide
and fixed,
he watched
himself as he would be, a
slight, balding professor of philosophy.
He sat
in the
hall, watching the students tumbling
up the
steep aisles, wondering at
the strange
compulsion he had to look at
that girl, Miss—Miss—what was it?
Oh. "Miss
PatcheUl"
He started, astonished
at himself.
He had
certainly not meant to call out
her name.
He clasped
his hands
tightly, regaining the dry
stiffness which was his closest
approach to dignity.
The girl came
slowly down the aisle steps,
her wideset
eyes wondering. There were
books tucked under her arm,
and her hair shone. "Yes, Professor?"
"I—" He stopped
and cleared
his throat.
"I know it's the last class
today, and you are no
doubt meeting someone. I shan't keep
you very
long . . . and
if I
do," he added, and was again
astonished at himself, "you can
see Bert
tomorrow."
"Bert? Oh!" She
colored prettily. "I didn't know
you knew
about—how could
you know?"
He shrugged. "Miss
Patchell," he said.
"You'll forgive an old—ah—middle-aged
man's rambling, I hope. There
is something
about you that—that—"
"Yes?" Caution, and
an iota
of fright
were in her eyes. She
glanced up and back
at the
now empty
hall.
Abruptly he
pounded the table. "I will
not let this
go on
for another instant without
finding out about it. Miss
Patchell, you are becoming afraid of
me, and
you are
wrong."
"I th-think I'd
better . . ." she
said timidly, and began backing
off.
"Sit
down!" he thundered. It was the very
first time in his entire life that he had
thundered at anyone, and her
shock was not one whit greater
than his. She shrank back
and into
a front-row seat, looking
a good
deal smaller than she actually
was, except about the
eyes, which were much larger.
The professor
shook his head in vexation.
He rose,
stepped down off the dais, and
crossed to her, sitting in
the next
seat.
"Now be quiet
and listen
to me."
The shadow
of a
smile twitched his hps
and he
said, "I really don't know
what I am going to say.
Listen, and be patient. It
couldn't be more important."
He sat a
while, thinking, chasing vague pictures
around in his mind. He heard,
or was
conscious of, the rapid but
slowing beat of her
frightened heart.
"Miss Patchell," he said, turning to
her, his voice gentle, "I have not at any
time looked into your records.
Until—ah— yesterday, you were
simply another face in the
class, another source of quiz papers
to be
graded. I have not consulted
the registrar's files for
information about you. And, to
my almost
certain knowledge, this is
the first
time I have spoken with
you."
"That's right,
sir," she said quietly.
"Very good, then."
He wet
his lips.
"You are twenty-three years old. The
house in which you were
born was a two-story affair, quite old, with a
leaded bay window at the
turn of the stairs. The small
bedroom, or nursery, was directly
over the kitchen. You could hear
the clatter
of dishes
below you when the house was
quiet. The address was 191
Bucyrus Road."
"How—oh yes!
How did
you know?"
He shook his
head, and then put it
between his hands. "I don't know. I don't know.
I lived
in that
house, too, as a child. I
don't know how I knew
that you did. There are
things in here—" He rapped his
head, shook it again. "I
thought perhaps you could
help."
She looked
at him.
He was
a small
man, brilliant, tired, getting
old swiftly.
She put
a hand
on his
arm. "I wish I could," she said warmly. "I
do wish
I could."
"Thank you,
child."
"Maybe if
you told
me more—"
"Perhaps. Some
of it
is—ugly. All of it is
cloudy, long ago, barely remembered. And yet—" "Please
go on."
"I remember," he half whispered, "things that happened long ago that way, and
recent things I remember—twice. One memory is sharp and
clear, and one is old
and misty.
And I remember, in the same
misty way, what is happening
now and—and
what will happen!" "I don't
understand."
"That girl.
That Miss Symes. She—died here
yesterday."
"She was
sitting right behind me," said
Miss Patchell.
"I know it!
I knew
what was going to happen
to her.
I knew it mistily, like an
old memory.
That's what I mean. I don't
know what I could have
done to stop it. I
don't think I could have done
anything. And yet, down deep
I have
the feeling that it's my fault—that
she slipped
and fell
because of something I did."
"Oh, no!"
He touched her
arm in
mute gratitude for the sympathy
in her tone, and grimaced miserably.
"It's happened before," he
said. "Time and time and
time again. As a boy,
as a
youth, I was plagued
with accidents. I led a
quiet life. I was not very
strong and books were always
more my line than baseball. And yet I witnessed
a dozen
or more
violent, useless deaths—automobile accidents,
drownings, falls, and one or
two—" his voice shook—"which
I won't
mention. And there were countless minor
ones—broken bones, maimings, stab-bings . . . and
every time, in some way,
it was
my fault,
like the one yesterday . .
. and
I—I—"
"Don't," she whispered. "Please
don't. You were nowhere near Elaine Symes when she
fell."
"I was nowhere
near any of them! That
never mattered. It never took away
the burden
of guilt.
Miss Patchell—"
"Catherine."
"Catherine. Thank you
so much!
There are people called by insurance
actuaries, 'accident prone.' Most of
these are involved in accidents through
their own negligence, or through some psychological quirk which
causes them to defy the world,
or to
demand attention, by getting hurt.
But some
are simply present at
accidents, without being involved at
all —catalysts of death,
if you'll
pardon a flamboyant phrase. I am,
apparently, one of these."
"Then—how could
you feel
guilty?"
"It was—" He broke off suddenly,
and looked
at her.
She had a gentle face, and
her eyes
were filled with compassion. He shrugged. "I've said so
much," he said. "More would sound no more fantastic,
and do
me no
more damage."
"There'll be no
damage from anything you tell
me," she said, with a sparkle
Of decisiveness.
He smiled
his thanks
this time, sobered, and said,
"These horrors—the maimings, the
deaths—they were funny,
once,
long ago. I
must have been a child,
a baby.
Something taught me, then, that the
agony and death of others
was to
be promoted
and enjoyed.
I remember,
I—almost remember when that stopped. There
was a—a
toy, a—a—"
Jeremy blinked.
He had
been staring at the fine
crack in the ceiling for so
long that his eyes hurt
"What are
you doing?"
asked the monster.
"Dreaming real," said Jeremy. "I am
grown up and sitting in the big empty lecture
place, talking to the girl
with the brown hair that shines.
Her name's
Catherine."
"What are
you talking
about?"
"Oh, all
the funny
dreams. Only—"
"Well?"
"They're not
so funny."
The monster
scurried over to him and
pounced on his chest. "Time to sleep now. And
I want
to—"
"No," said
Jeremy. He put his hands
over his throat. "I have enough now. Wait until
I see
some more of this real-dream."
"What do
you want
to see?"
"Oh, I don't know.
There's something . . ."
"Let's have some
fun," said the monster. "This
is the
girl you can change, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"Go ahead.
Give her an elephant's trunk. Make her grow
a beard. Stop her
nostrils up. Go on. You
can do
anything." Jeremy grinned briefly,
and then
said, "I don't want to."
"Oh, go
on. Just
see how
funny. . . ."
"A toy,"
paid the professor. "But more
than a toy. It could
talk, I think. If
I could
only remember more clearly!"
"Don't try so
hard. Maybe it will come,"
she said.
She took
his hand impulsively. "Go ahead."
"It was—something—" the professor
said haltingly, "—something soft
and not
too large.
I don't
recall . . ."
"Was it
smooth?"
"No. Hairy—fuzzy. Fuzzy! I'm beginning to get
it. Wait,
now. ... A thing
like a teddy bear. It
talked. It—why, of course! It was
alive!"
"A pet,
then. Not a toy."
"Oh, no,"
said the professor, and shuddered.
"It was a toy, all right.
My mother
thought it was, anyway. It
made me— dream real."
"You mean,
like Peter Ibbetson?"
"No, no. Not
like that." He leaned back,
rolled his eyes up. "I used
to see
myself as I would be
later, when I was grown. And before. Oh. Oh—I
think it was then— Yes!
It must have been then that
I began
to see
all those
terrible accidents. It was!
It was!"
"Steady," said
Catherine. "Tell me quietly."
He relaxed. "Fuz2y. The demon—the monster. I
know what it did, the devil.
Somehow it made me see
myself as I grew. It made
me repeat
what I had learned. It—it
ate knowledge! It did;
it ate
knowledge. It had some strange
affinity for me, for
something about me. It could
absorb knowledge that I
gave out. And it—it changed
the knowledge
into blood, the way
a plant
changes sunlight and water into
cellulose!"
"I don't
understand," she said
again.
"You don't? How
could you? How can I?
I know
that that's what it did, though.
It made
me—why, I was spouting my lectures here to the
beast when I was four
years old! The words of them,
the sense
of them,
came from me now to me then. And I gave it to the
monster, and it ate the
knowledge and spiced it with
the things
it made
me do
in my
real-dreams. It made me trip
a man
up on
a hat,
of all
absurd things, and fall
into a subway excavation. And when I was in
my teens,
I was
right by the excavation to see it happen.
And that's the way
with all of them! All
the horrible
accidents I have witnessed, I have
half-remembered before they
happened. There's no stopping any
of them.
What am I going to do?"
There were
tears in her eyes. "What
about me?" she whispered—more, probably to get his
mind away from his despair
than for any other
reason.
"You. There's something
about you, if only I
could remember. Something about what
happened to that—that toy, that
beast. You were in
the same
environment as I, as that
devil. Somehow, you are
vulnerable to it and—Catherine, Catherine, I think that something
was done
to you
that—"
He broke off.
His eyes
widened in horror. The girl
sat beside
him, helping him, pitying him,
and her
expression did not change. But—everything else about her did.
Her face shrank,
shrivelled. Her eyes lengthened. Her ears grew long, grew
until they were like donkey's
ears, like rabbit's ears, like horrible,
long hairy spider's legs. Her
teeth lengthened into tusks.
Her arms
shrivelled into jointed straws, and her body thickened.
It smelled
like rotten meat.
There were filthy
claws scattering out of her
polished open-toed shoes. There were
bright sores. There were—other things. And all the while
she—it—held his
hand and looked at him
with pity and friendliness.
The professor—
Jeremy sat
up and
flung the monster away. "It
isn't funny!" he screamed.
"It isn't funny, it isn't,
it isn't,
it isn't!"
The monster sat
up and
looked at him with its
soft, bland, teddy-bear expression.
"Be quiet," it said. "Let's
make her all squashy now, like
soft-soap. And hornets in her
stomach. And we can put her—"
Jeremy clapped his
hands over his ears and
screwed his eyes shut. The monster
talked on. Jeremy burst into
tears, leapt from the crib and,
hurling the monster to the
floor, kicked it. It grunted. "That's
funny!" screamed the child. "Ha
ha!" he cried, as he planted
both feet in its yielding
stomach. He picked up the twitching
mass and hurled it across
the room.
It struck
the nursery clock. Clock
and monster
struck the floor together in a flurry of glass,
metal, and blood. Jeremy stamped
it all
into a jagged, pulpy mass, blood
from his feet mixing with
blood from the monster,
the same
strange blood which the monster had pumped into his
neck. . . .
Mummy all but
fainted when she ran in
and saw
him. She screamed, but he laughed,
screaming. The doctor gave him
sedatives until he slept,
and cured
his feet
He was
never very strong after that. They
saved him, to live his
life and to see his real-dreams;
funny dreams, and to die
finally in a lecture room, with his eyes distended
in horror
while horror froze his heart, and a terrified young
woman ran crying, crying for
help.
"Bianca's Hands
Bianca's
mother was
leading her when Ran saw
her first.
Bianca was squat and
small, with dank hair and
rotten teeth. Her mouth was crooked
and it
drooled. Either she was blind
or she just didn't care about
bumping into things. It didn't
really matter because Bianca
was an
imbecile. Her hands . .
.
They were lovely
hands, graceful hands, hands as
soft and smooth and white as
snowflakes, hands whose color was
lightly tinged with pink
like the glow of Mars
on Snow.
They lay on the counter side
by side,
looking at Ran. They lay
there half closed and crouching, each pulsing with a
movement like the panting of a
field creature, and they looked.
Not watched.
Later, they watched him.
Now they
looked. They did, because Ran felt their united gaze,
and his
heart beat strongly.
Bianca's mother demanded
cheese stridently. Ran brought it to her in his
own time
while she berated him. She
was a
bitter woman, as any
woman has a right to
be who
is wife
of no man and mother to
a monster.
Ran gave
her the
cheese and took her money and
never noticed that it was
not enough,
because of Bianca's hands.
When Bianca's mother tried to
take one of the
hands, it scuttled away from
the unwanted
touch. It did not
lift from the counter, but
ran on
its fingertips
to the
edge and leaped into a
fold of Bianca's dress. The
mother took the unresisting
elbow and led Bianca out.
Ran stayed there
at the
counter unmoving, thinking of Bianca's hands. Ran was strong
and bronze
and not
very clever. He had never been
taught about beauty and strangeness,
but he
did not
need that teaching. His shoulders
were wide and his arms were
heavy and thick, but he
had great
soft eyes and thick lashes. They
curtained his eyes now. He
was seeing Bianca's hands again dreamily.
He found
it hard
to breathe . . .
Harding came back.
Harding owned the store. He
was a
large man whose features
barely kept his cheeks apart.
He said, "Sweep up, Ran. We're
closing early today." Then he
went behind the counter,
squeezing past Ran.
Ran got
the broom
and swept
slowly.
"A woman bought
cheese," he said suddenly. "A
poor woman, with very old clothes.
She was
leading a girl. I can't
remember what the girl
looked like, except—who was she?"
"I saw
them go out," said Harding.
"The woman is Bianca's mother, and the girl is
Bianca. I don't know their
other name. They don't talk to
people much. I wish they
wouldn't come in here. Hurry up,
Ran."
Ran did what
was necessary
and put
away his broom. Before he left
he asked,
"Where do they live, Bianca
and her
mother?"
"On the other
side. A house on no
road, away from people. Good night, Ran."
Ran went
from the shop directly over
to the
other side, not waiting for his
supper. He found the house
easily, for it was indeed away from the road,
and stood
rudely by itself. The townspeople had cauterized the house
by wrapping
it in
empty fields.
Harshly, "What
do you
want?" Bianca's mother asked as
she opened the door.
"May I come in?"
"What do you want?"
"May I come
in?" he asked again. She
made as if to slam
the door, and then
stood aside. "Come."
Ran went in
and stood
still. Bianca's mother crossed the
room and sat under
an old
lamp, in the shadow. Ran
sat opposite
her, on a three-legged stool. Bianca was not
in the
room.
The woman tried
to speak,
but embarrassment
clutched at her voice. She withdrew
into her bitterness, saying nothing.
She kept peeping at
Ran, who sat quietly with
his arms
folded and the uncertain light in
his eyes.
He knew
she would
speak soon, and he could wait.
"Ah, well .
. ."
She was
silent after that, for a
time, but now she had forgiven
him his
intrusion. Then, "It's a great
while since anyone came
to see
me; a
great while ... it was
different before. I was
a pretty
girl—"
She bit her
words off and her face
popped out of the shadows,
shrivelled and sagging as she
leaned forward. Ran saw that she
was beaten
and cowed
and did
not want
to be
laughed at.
"Yes," he said
gently. She sighed and leaned
back so that her face disappeared
again. She said nothing for
a moment,
sitting looking at Ran,
liking him.
"We were happy,
the two
of us,"
she mused,
"until Bianca came. He didn't like
her, poor thing, he didn't,
no more
than I do now. He went
away. I stayed by her
because I was her mother. I'd go away myself,
I would,
but people
know me, and I haven't a penny—not a penny. . . .
They'd bring me back to her,
they would, to care for
her. It doesn't matter much
now, though, because people
don't want me any more
than they want her, they don't
. .
."
Ran shifted his
feet uneasily, because the woman
was crying.
"Have you room for me
here?" he asked.
Her head crept
out into
the light.
Ran said
swiftly, "111 give you money
each week, and I'll bring
my own
bed and
things." He was afraid
she would
refuse.
She merged with
the shadows
again. "If you like," she said, trembling at her
good fortune. "Though why you'd
want to . . . still,
I guess
if I
had a
little something to cook up
nice, and a good reason for
it, I
could make someone real cosy
here. But—why?" She rose.
Ran crossed
the room
and pushed
her back into the chair. He
stood over her, tall.
"I never want
you to
ask me
that," he said, speaking very
slowly. "Hear?"
She swallowed
and nodded.
"I'll come back tomorrow with
the bed and things,"
he said.
He left her
there under the lamp, blinking
out of
the dimness,
folded round and about with
her misery
and her
wonder.
People talked about
it. People
said, "Ran has moved to
the house of Bianca's mother." "It must be because—"
"Ah," said some, "Ran was always a
strange boy. It must be
because—" "Oh, no!" cried others appalled. "Ran
is such
a good
boy. He wouldn't—"
Harding was told.
He frightened
the busy
little woman who told him. He
said, "Ran is very quiet,
but he
is honest
and he does his work. As
long as he comes here
in the
morning and earns his wage, he
can do
what he wants, where he
wants, and it is not my
business to stop him." He said this so
very sharply that the little woman
dared not say anything more.
Ran was very
happy, living there. Saying little,
he began
to learn about Bianca's
hands.
He watched Bianca
being fed. Her hands would
not feed
her, the lovely aristocrats.
Beautiful parasites they were, taking
their animal life from
the heavy
squat body that carried them,
and giving nothing in
return. They would lie one
on each
side of her plate, pulsing, while
Bianca's mother put food into
the disinterested drooling mouth.
They were shy, those hands,
of Ran's bewitched gaze. Caught out
there naked in the light
and open of the table-top, they would creep to
the edge
and drop
out of sight—all but four rosy
fingertips clutching the cloth.
They never
lifted from a surface. When
Bianca walked, her hands did not
swing free, but twisted in
the fabric
of her
dress. And when she approached a table or the
mantelpiece and stood, her hands would
run lightly
up and
leap, landing together, resting silently,
watchfully, with that pulsing peculiar
to them.
They cared
for each
other. They would not touch
Bianca herself, but each
hand groomed the other. It
was the
only labor to which they would
bend themselves.
Three evenings after
he came,
Ran tried
to take
one of
the hands in his. Bianca was
alone in the room, and
Ran went
to her and sat beside her.
She did
not move,
nor did
her hands.
They rested on a
small table before her, preening
themselves. This, then, was
when they really began watching
him. He felt it, right down
to the
depths of his enchanted heart.
The hands
kept stroking each other,
and yet
they knew he was there,
they knew of his
desire. They stretched themselves before him, archly, languorously, and his blood pounded
hot. Before he could stay himself
he reached
and tried
to grasp
them. He was strong, and his
move was sudden and clumsy.
One of
the hands seemed to disappear, so swiftly did it
drop into Bianca's lap. But the
other—
Ran's thick
fingers closed on it and
held it captive. It writhed, all but tore itself
free. It took no power
from the arm on which it
lived, for Bianca's arms were
flabby and weak. Its strength, like
its beauty,
was intrinsic,
and it
was only by shifting his grip
to the
puffy forearm that Ran succeeded
in capturing
it. So
intent was he on touching
it, holding
it, that
he did
not see
the other
hand leap from the idiot
girl's lap, land crouching
at the
table's edge. It reared back,
fingers curling spiderlike, and sprang at him,
fastening on his wrist. It clamped
down agonizingly, and Ran felt
bones give and crackle. With a
cry he
released the girl's arm. Her
hands fell together and
ran over
each other, feeling for any
small scratch, any tiny
damage he might have done
them in his passion. And as
he sat
there clutching his wrist, he
saw the hands run to the
far side
of the
little table, hook themselves over the edge and,
contracting, draw her out of
her place. She had no volition
of her
own—ah, but her hands had
I Creeping over the walls, catching
obscure and precarious holds in the
wainscoting, they dragged the girl
from the room.
And Ran sat
there and sobbed, not so
much from the pain in his
swelling arm, but in shame
for what
he had
done. They might have been won
to him
in another,
gentler way . . .
His head was
bowed, yet suddenly .he felt
the gaze
of those
hands. He looked up
swiftly enough to see one
of them
whisk round the doorpost It had
come back, then, to see
. .
. Ran
rose heavily and took
himself and his shame away.
Yet he
was compelled to stop
in the
doorway, even as had Bianca's
hands. He watched covertly
and saw
them come into the room dragging
the unprotesting
idiot girl. They brought her
to the long bench where Ran
had sat
with her. They pushed her on to it, flung
themselves to the table, and
began rolling and flattening themselves most curiously about Ran
suddenly realized that there was
something of his there, and
he was comforted, a little. They
were rejoicing, drinking thirstily, revelling in his
tears.
Afterwards for nineteen
days, the hands made Ran
do penance. He knew them as
inviolate and unforgiving; they would not show themselves to him, remaining always
hidden in Bianca's dress or under
the supper
table. For those nineteen days
Ran's passion and desire grew.
More—his love became true love,
for only
true love.knows reverence—and
the possession of the
hands became his reason for
living, his goal in the life
which that reason had given
him.
Ultimately they forgave
him. They kissed him coyly
when he was not looking, touched
him on
the wrist
caught and held him for one
sweet moment. It was at
table ... a great power
surged through him, and
he gazed
down at the hands, now
returned to Bianca's lap.
A strong
muscle in his jaw twitched
and twitched, swelled and
fell. Happiness like a golden
light flooded him; passion spurred him,
love imprisoned him, reverence was the gold of
the golden
light The room wheeled and
whirled about him and
forces unimaginable flickered through him. Battling with himself, yet
lax in
the glory
of it,
Ran sat
unmoving, beyond the world,
enslaved and yet possessor of
all. Bianca's hands flushed
pink, and if ever hands
smiled to each other, then they
did.
He rose abruptly,
flinging his chair from him,
feeling the strength of his back
and shoulders.
Bianca's mother, by now beyond surprise, looked at him
and away.
There was that in his eyes
which she did not like,
for to
fathom it would disturb her,
and she
wanted no trouble. Ran strode
from the room and outdoors, to
be by
himself that he might learn
more of this new thing that
had possessed
him.
It was evening.
The crooked-bending
skyline drank the buoyancy of the
sun, dragged it down, sucking
greedily. Ran stood on a knoll,
his nostrils
flaring, feeling the depth of
his lungs. He sucked in the
crisp air and it smelled
new to
him, as though the sunset shades
were truly in it. He
knotted the muscles of his thighs
and stared
at his
smooth, solid fists. He raised his
hands high over his head
and, stretching, sent out such a
great shout that the sun
sank. He watched it, knowing
how great and tall
he was,
how strong
he was,
knowing the meaning of longing and
belonging. And then he lay
down on the clean earth and
he wept.
When the
sky grew
cold enough for the moon
to follow
the sun beyond the
hills, and still an hour
after that, Ran returned to
the house.
He struck
a light
in the
room of Bianca's mother, where she
slept on a pile of
old clothes.
Ran sat
beside her and let the light
wake her. She rolled over
to him
and moaned, opened her eyes and
shrank from him. "Ran .
. .
what do you want?"
"Bianca. I want to
marry Bianca."
Her breath hissed
between her gums. "No!" It was not a
refusal, but astonishment. Ran touched her arm
impatiently. Then she laughed.
'To—marry—Bianca. It's late,
boy. Go back to bed,
and in the morning you'll have
forgotten this thing, this dream."
"Will you give me
Bianca, or not?"
"I've not
been to bed," he said
patiently, but growing angry.
She sat up
and rested
her chin
on her
withered knees. "You're right
to ask
me, for
I'm her
mother. Still and all— Ran, you've
been good to us, Bianca
and me.
You're—you are a good
boy but—forgive
me, lad,
but you're
something of a fool. Bianca's a
monster. I say it though
I am
what I am to her. Do
what you like, and never
a word
will I say. You should have known. I'm sorry
you asked
me, for
you have
given me the memory
of speaking
so to
you. I don't understand you; but do what
you like,
boy."
It was to
have been a glance, but
it became
a stare
as she
saw his face. He
put his
hands carefully behind his back,
and she knew he would have
killed her else.
"I'll—marry her,
then?" he whispered.
She nodded,
terrified. "As you like, boy."
He blew
out the
light and left her.
Ran worked
hard and saved his wages,
and made
one room
beautiful for Bianca and
himself. He built a soft
chair, and a table that was
like an altar for Bianca's
sacred hands. There was a great
bed, and heavy cloth to
hide and soften the walls,
and a rug.
They were
married, though marrying took time.
Ran had
to go far afield before he
could find one who would
do what
was necessary. The man
came far and went again
afterwards, so that none
knew of it, and Ran
and his
wife were left alone. The mother spoke for Bianca,
and Bianca's
hand trembled frighteningly at
the touch
of the
ring, writhed and struggled and then lay passive, blushing
and beautiful.
But it
was done.
Bianca's mother did not
protest, for she didn't dare.
Ran was
happy, and Bianca—well, nobody cared about Bianca.
After they were
married Bianca followed Ran and
his two
brides into the beautiful
room. He washed Bianca and
used rich lotions. He washed and
combed her hair, and brushed
it many times until
it shone,
to make
her more
fit to
be with
the hands he had
married. He never touched the
hands, though he gave them soaps
and creams
and tools
with which they could groom themselves.
They were pleased. Once one
of them ran up his coat
and touched
his cheek
and made
him exultant
He left them
and returned
to the
shop with his heart full
of music. He worked
harder than ever, so that
Harding was pleased and let him
go home
early. He wandered the hours
away by the bank
of a
brook, watching the sun on
the face
of the chuckling water. A bird
came to circle him, flew
unafraid through the aura
of gladness
about him. The delicate tip
of a wing brushed his wrist
with the touch of the
first secret kiss from the hands
of Bianca.
The singing
that filled him was part of
the nature
of laughing,
the running
of water,
the sound of the wind in
the reeds
by the
edge of the stream. He
yearned for the hands,
and he
knew he could go now
and clasp them and own them;
instead he stretched out on
the bank and lay smiling, all
lost in the sweetness and
poignance of waiting, denying desire. He
laughed for pure joy in
a world
without hatred, held in
the stainless
palms of Bianca's hands.
As it grew
dark he went home. All
during that nuptial meal Bianca's hands twisted about one
of his
while he ate with the
other, and Bianca's mother
fed the
girl. The fingers twined about each other and about
his own,
so that
three hands seemed to be wrought
of one
flesh, to become a thing
of lovely
weight at his arm's
end. When it was quite
dark they went to the beautiful
room and lay where he
and the
hands could watch, through the window,
the clean,
bright stars swim up out of
the forest.
The house
and the
room were dark and silent. Ran was so happy
that he hardly dared to
breathe.
A hand fluttered
up over
his hair,
down his cheek, and crawled into the hollow of
his throat.
Its pulsing
matched the beat of his heart.
He opened
his own
hands wide and clenched his fingers,
as though
to catch
and hold
this moment.
Soon the other
hand crept up and joined
the first.
For perhaps an hour they lay
there passive with their coolness
against Ran's warm neck.
He felt
them with his throat, each
smooth convolution, each firm
small expanse. He concentrated, with his mind and
his heart
on his
throat, on each part of the
hands that touched him, feeling
with all his being first one touch and then
another, though the contact was
there unmoving. And he
knew it would be soon
now, soon.
As if at
a command,
he turned
on his
back and dug his head into
the pillow.
Staring up at the vague
dark hangings on the wall, he
began to realize what it
was for
which he had been working and
dreaming so long. He put
his head
back yet farther and
smiled, waiting. This would be
possession, completion. He breathed deeply,
twice, and the hands began to move.
The thumbs crossed
over his throat and the
fingertips settled one by one
under his ears. For a
long moment they lay there, gathering strength. Together, then,
in perfect
harmony, each co-operating with the other,
they became rigid, rock-hard. Their touch was still
light upon him, still light
. .
. no, now they were passing
their rigidity to him, turning
it to
a contraction. They settled
to it
slowly, their pressure measured and
equal. Ran lay silent. He
could not breathe now, and
did not want to.
His great
arms were crossed on his
chest, his knotted fists under his
armpits, his mind knowing a
great peace. Soon, now . .
.
Wave after wave
of engulfing,
glorious pain spread and receded. He saw color impossible,
without light. He arched his back, up, up .
. .
the hands
bore down with all their
hidden strength, and Ran's
body bent like a bow,
resting on feet and shoulders. Up, up . .
.
Something burst within
him—his lungs, his heart—no matter.
It was
complete.
There was blood
on the
hands of Bianca's mother when
they found her in
the morning
in the
beautiful room, trying to soothe Ran's
neck. They took Bianca away,
and they
buried Ran, but they hanged Bianca's
mother because she tried to
make them believe Bianca
had done
it, Bianca
whose hands were quite dead, drooping
like brown leaves from her
wrists.
A Saucer of Loneliness
If
she's dead, I thought, 111
never find
her in
this white flood of moonlight on
the white
sea, with the surf seething
in and
over the pale, pale
sand like a great shampoo.
Almost always, suicides who stab themselves
or shoot
themselves in the heart carefully bare their chests; the
same strange impulse generally makes the sea-suicide go naked.
A little earlier,
I thought,
or later,
and there
would be shadows for the dunes
and the
breathing toss of the foam.
Now the only real
shadow was mine, a tiny
thing just under me, but black
enough to feed the blackness
of the
shadow of a blimp.
A little earlier,
I thought,
and I
might have seen her plodding
up the
silver shore, seeking a place
lonely enough to die in. A
little later and my legs
would rebel against this shuffling
trot through sand, the
maddening sand that could not
hold and would not help a
hurrying man.
My legs did
give way then and I
knelt suddenly, sobbing— not for her;
not yet—just
for air.
There was such a rush
about me: wind, and tangled spray,
and colors
upon colors and shades of colors
that were not colors at
all but
shifts of white and silver. If
light like that were sound,
it would
sound like the sea on sand,
and if
my ears
were eyes, they would see
such a light.
I crouched there,
gasping in the swirl of
it, and
a flood
struck me, shallow and
swift, turning up and outward
like flower petals where it touched
my knees,
then soaking me to the waist
in its
bubble and crash. I pressed
my knuckles
to my eyes so they would
open again. The sea was
on my
lips with the taste of tears
and the
whole white night shouted and
wept aloud.
And there
she was.
Her white
shoulders were a taller curve
in the
sloping foam. She must have sensed
me—perhaps I yelled—for she turned
and saw me kneeling
there. She put her fists
to her
temples and her face twisted, and
she uttered
a piercing
wail of despair and fury, and
then plunged seaward and sank.
I kicked off
my shoes
and ran
into the breakers, shouting, hunting, grasping at flashes of
white that turned to sea-salt
and coldness in my
fingers. I plunged right past
her, and her body struck my
side as a wave whipped
my face
and tumbled
both of us. I
gasped in solid water, opened
my eyes
beneath the surface and saw a
greenish-white distorted moon
hurtle as I spun. Then there
was sucking
sand under my feet again
and my left hand was tangled
in her
hair.
The receding wave
towed her away and for
a moment
she streamed out from my hand
like steam from a whistle.
In that moment I was sure
she was
dead, but as she settled
to the sand, she fought and
scrambled to her feet.
She hit my
ear, wet, hard, and a
huge, pointed pain lanced into my head. She pulled,
she lunged
away from me, and all
the while my hand
was caught
in her
hair. I couldn't have freed her if I had
wanted to. She spun to
me with
the next
wave, battered and clawed
at me,
and we
went into deeper water.
"Don't . .
. don't
... I
can't swim!" I shouted, so
she clawed me again.
"Leave me alone,"
she shrieked.
"Oh, dear God, why can't
you leave"
(said her
fingernails) "me . . ." (said
her fingernails)
"alone!" (said her
small hard fist).
So by her
hair I pulled her head
down tight to her white
shoulder; and with the
edge of my free hand
I hit
her neck
twice. She floated again,
and I
brought her ashore.
I carried her
to where
a dune
was between
us and
the sea's
broad noisy tongue, and
the wind
was above
us somewhere.
But the light was
as bright.
I rubbed
her wrists
and stroked
her face and said,
"It's all right," and, "There!"
and some
names I used to
have for a dream I
had long,
long before I ever heard of
her.
She lay
still on her back with
the breath
hissing between her teeth, with her
lips in a smile which
her twisted-tight,
wrinkled-sealed eyes made not
a smile
but a
torture. She was well and conscious
for many
moments and still her breath
hissed and her closed
eyes twisted.
"Why couldn't
you leave
me alone?"
she asked
at last.
She opened her eyes and looked
at me.
She had
so much
misery that there was no room
for fear.
She shut
her eyes
again and said, "You know who
I am."
"I know," I said.
She began
to cry.
I waited,
and when
she stopped
crying, there were shadows among
the dunes.
A long
time.
She said,
"You don't know who I
am. Nobody
knows who I am."
I said,
"It was in all the
papers."
"ThatI"
She opened
her eyes
slowly and her gaze traveled
over my face, my
shoulders, stopped at my mouth,
touched my eyes for the briefest
second. She curled her lips
and turned
away her head. "Nobody
knows who I am."
I waited for
her to
move or speak, and finally
I said,
"Tell me."
"Who are
you?" she asked, with her
head still turned away.
"Someone who
. .
."
"Well?"
"Not now,"
I said.
"Later, maybe." She sat up suddenly
and tried
to hide
herself. "Where are my clothes?"
"I didn't
see them."
"Oh," she said.
"I remember. I put them
down and kicked sand over them,
just where a dune would
come and smooth them over, hide
them as if they never
were ... I hate sand.
I wanted to drown
in the
sand, but it wouldn't let
me .
. .
You mustn't look at
mel" she shouted. "I hate
to have
you looking at mel" She threw
her head
from side to side, seeking.
"I can't stay here like
thisl What can I do?
Where can I go?"
"Here," I said.
She let me
help her up and then
snatched her hand away, half-turned from me. "Don't touch me. Get away
from me."
"Here," I said
again, and walked down the
dune where it curved in the
moonlight, tipped back into the
wind and down and became not
dune but beach. "Here." I pointed behind the
dune.
At last she
followed me. She peered over
the dune
where it was chest-high, and again
where it was knee-high. "Back there?"
I nodded.
"So dark .
. She
stepped over the low dune
and into
the aching black of those moon-shadows.
She moved
away cautiously, feeling tenderly with
her feet,
back to where the dune was
higher. She sank down into
the blackness
and disappeared
there. I sat on the
sand in the light. "Stay
away from me," she spat.
I rose and
stepped back. Invisible in the
shadows, she breathed, "Don't
go away,"
I waited,
then saw her hand press
out of the clean-cut shadows. "There,"
she said,
"over there. In the dark. Just
be a
. .
. Stay
away from me now .
. .
Be a—voice."
I did as
she asked,
and sat
in the
shadows perhaps six feet from her.
She told
me about
it. Not
the way
it was
in the
papers.
She was
perhaps seventeen when it happened.
She was
in Central Park in New York.
It was
too warm
for such
an early
spring day, and the
hammered brown slopes had a
dusting of green of precisely the
consistency of that morning's hoar
frost on the rocks.
But the
frost was gone and the
grass was brave and tempted some
hundreds of pairs of feet
from the asphalt and concrete to
tread on it.
Hers were among
them. The sprouting soil was
a surprise
to her feet, as the air
was to
her lungs.
Her feet
ceased to be shoes as she
walked, her body was consciously
more than clothes. It was the
only kind of day which
in itself
can make
a city-bred person raise
his eyes.
She did.
For a moment
she felt
separated from the life she
lived, in which there was no
fragrance, no silence, in which
nothing ever quite fit nor was
quite filled. In that moment
the ordered
disapproval of the buildings
around the pallid park could
not reach her; for
two, three clean breaths it
no longer
mattered that the whole wide
world really belonged to images
projected on a screen;
to gently
groomed goddesses in these steel and glass towers; that
it belonged,
in short,
always, always to someone else.
So she
raised her eyes, and there
above her was the saucer.
It was beautiful.
It was
golden, with a dusty finish
like that of an unripe Concord
grape. It made a faint
sound, a chord composed of two
tones and a blunted hiss
like the wind in tall wheat.
It was
darting about like a swallow,
soaring and dropping. It circled
and dropped
and hovered
like a fish, shimmering. It was
like all these living things,
but with that beauty it had
all the
loveliness of things turned and
burnished, measured, machined, and
metrical.
At first she
felt no astonishment, for this
was so
different from anything she
had ever
seen before that it had
to be
a trick of the eye, a
false evaluation of size and
speed and distance that in
a moment
would resolve itself into a
sun-flash on an airplane or the
lingering glare of a welding
arc.
She looked away
from it and abruptly realized
that many other people saw it—saw
something—too. People
all around
her had stopped moving
and speaking
and were
craning upward. Around her was
a globe
of silent
astonishment, and outside it she was
aware of the life-noise of the city, the
hard-breathing giant who never
inhales.
She looked up
again, and at last began
to realize
how large
and how far away
the saucer
was. No: rather, how small
and how very near it was.
It was
just the size of the
largest circle she might make with
her two
hands, and it floated not
quite eighteen inches over
her head.
Fear came
then. She drew back and
raised a forearm, but the saucer
simply hung there. She bent
far sideways,
twisted away, leaped forward, looked back
and upward
to see
if she
had escaped it. At
first she couldn't see it;
then as she looked up and
up, there
it was,
close and glearning, quivering and
crooning, right over her
head.
She bit her
tongue.
From the corner
of her
eye, she saw a man
cross himself. He
did that because he saw me standing here with a halo over my head, she thought.
And that
was the
greatest single thing that had ever
happened to her. No one
had ever
looked at her and made a
respectful gesture before, not once,
not ever. Through terror, through panic
and wonderment,
the comfort of that thought nestled
into her, to wait to
be taken
out and looked at
again in lonely times.
The terror was
uppermost now, however. She backed
away, staring upward, stepping a ludicrous
Cakewalk. She should have collided with
people. There were plenty of
people there, gasping and craning, but
she reached
none. She spun around and discovered to her horror
that she was the center
of a
pointing, pressing crowd. Its
mosaic of eyes all bulged
and its
inner circle braced its
many legs to press back
and away
from her.
The saucer's gentle
note deepened. It tilted, dropped
an inch or so. Someone screamed,
and the
crowd broke away from her in
all directions,
milled about, and settled again
in a
new dynamic balance, a
much larger ring, as more
and more
people raced to thicken
it against
the efforts
of the
inner circle to escape.
The saucer
hummed and tilted, tilted .
. .
She opened her mouth
to scream,
fell to her knees, and
the saucer struck.
It dropped
against her forehead and clung
there. It seemed almost to lift
her. She came erect on
her knees,
made one effort to raise her
hands against it, and then
her arms
stiffened down and back,
her hands
not reaching
the ground.
For perhaps
a second
and a
half the saucer held her
rigid, and then it passed a
single ecstatic quiver to her
body and dropped it. She plumped
to the
ground, the backs of her
thighs heavy and painful on her
heels and ankles.
The saucer dropped
beside her, rolled once in
a small
circle, once just around its edge,
and lay
still. It lay still and
dull and metallic, different and dead.
Hazily, she
lay and
gazed at the gray-shrouded blue of the good spring
sky, and hazily she heard
whistles. And some tardy screams.
And a great
stupid voice bellowing "Give her aid" which made everyone press closer.
Then there wasn't
so much
sky because
of the
blueclad bulk with its metal buttons
and its
leatherette notebook. "Okay, okay,
what's happened here stand back
figods sake."
And the widening
ripples of observation, interpretation and comment: "It knocked her
down." "Some guy knocked her down." "He knocked her
down." "Some guy knocked her
down and—" "Right in broad daylight this
guy .
. ."
"The park's gettin' to
be .
. ."
onward and outward, the adulteration
of fact
until it was lost altogether
because excitement is so much more
important.
Somebody with a
harder shoulder than the rest
bulling close, a notebook
here, too, a witnessing eye over it, ready
to change "... a
beautiful brunette . . ."
to "an
attractive brunette" for the
afternoon editions, because "attractive" is as dowdy
as any
woman is allowed to get
if she
is a
victim in the news.
The glittering shield and the florid
face bending close: "You
hurt bad, sister?" And the
echoes, back and back through the crowd, Hurt bad,
hurt bad, badly injured, he
beat the hell out
of her,
broad daylight . . ."
And still another
man, slim and purposeful, tan gabardine, cleft chin and
beard-shadow: "Flyin' saucer, hm? Okay,
Officer, I'll take over
here."
"And who
the hell
might you be, takin' over?"
The flash of
a brown
leather wallet, a face so
close behind that its chin was
pressed into the gabardine shoulder.
The face said, awed: "F.B.I." and that rippled outward,
too. The policeman nodded—the
entire policeman nodded in one
single bobbing genuflection.
"Get some help
and clear
this area," said the gabardine.
"Yes, sir!" said the
policeman.
"F.B.I., F.B.I.," the crowd murmured and
there was more sky to look
at above
her.
She sat up
and there
was glory
in her
face. "The saucer talked
to me,"
she sang.
"You shut
up," said the gabardine. "You'll have lots of
chance to talk later."
"Yeah, sister," said the policeman. "My God, this mob
could be full of
Communists."
"You shut up,
too," said the gabardine.
Someone in the
crowd told someone else a
Communist beat up this girl, while
someone else was saying she
got beat
up because she was a Communist
She started
to rise,
but solicitous
hands forced her down again. There were thirty police
there by that time.
"I can walk,"
she said.
"Now you just
take it easy," they told
her.
They put a
stretcher down beside her and
lifted her onto it and covered
her with
a big
blanket.
"I can walk,"
she said
as they
carried her through the crowd.
A woman went
white and turned away moaning,
"Oh, my God, how awfull"
A small man
with round eyes stared and
stared at her and licked and licked his lips.
The ambulance. They slid her in.
The gabardine
was already
there.
A white-coated man with very clean
hands: "How did it happen, miss7"
"No questions," said the gabardine. "Security." The hospital.
She said, "I
got to
get back
to work."
"Take your clothes
off," they told her.
She had a
bedroom to herself then for
the first
time inkier life. Whenever the door
opened, she could see a
policeman outside. It opened
very often to admit the
kind of civilians who were very
polite to military people, and
the kind
of military people who were even
more polite to certain civilians.
She did
not know
what they all did nor
what they wanted. Every single day
they asked her four million,
five hundred thousand questions. Apparently they never talked
to each other because each of
them asked her the same
questions over and over.
"What is
your name?"
"How old
are you?"
"What year
were you born?"
Sometimes they would
push her down strange paths
with their questions.
"Now your uncle.
Married a woman from Middle
Europe, did he? Where in Middle
Europe?"
"What clubs or
fraternal organizations did you belong
to? Ahl Now about that Rinkeydinks
gang on 63rd Street. Who
was really
behind it?"
But over and
over again, "What did you
mean when you said the saucer
talked to you?"
And she
would say, "It talked to
me."
And they
would say, "And it said—"
And she
would shake her head.
There would be
a lot
of shouting
ones, and then a lot
of kind ones. No one had
ever been so kind to
her before,
but she soon learned that no
one was
being kind to her. They were just getting her to relax,
to think
of other
things, so they could suddenly shoot
that question at her: "What
do you
mean it talked to
you?"
Pretty soon
it was
just like Mom's or school
or any
place, and she used to sit
with her mouth closed and
let them
yell. Once they sat her on
a hard
chair for hours and hours
with a light in her eyes
and let
her get
thirsty. Home, there was a
transom over the bedroom
door and Mom used to
leave the kitchen light glaring through
it all
night, every night, so she
wouldn't get the horrors.
So the
light didn't bother her at
all.
They took her
out of
the hospital
and put
her in
jail. Some ways it was good.
The food.
The bed
was all
right, too. Through the window she
could see lots of women
exercising in the yard. It was
explained to her that they
all had
much harder beds.
"You are
a very
important young lady, you know."
That was nice
at first,
but as
usual it turned out they
didn't mean her at all. They
kept working on her. Once
they brought the saucer in to
her. It was inside a
big wooden
crate with a padlock, and a
steel box inside that with
a Yale
lock. It only weighed a couple
of pounds,
the saucer,
but by
the time
they got it packed, it took
two men
to carry
it and
four men with guns to watch
them.
They made her
act out
the whole
thing just the way it
happened with some soldiers holding
the saucer
over her head. It wasn't the
same. They'd cut a lot
of chips
and pieces
out of
the saucer and, besides,
it was
that dead gray color. They
asked her if she
knew anything about that and
for once
she told them.
"It's empty
now," she said.
The only one
she would
ever talk to was a
little man with a fat belly
who said
to her
the first
time he was alone with
her, "Listen, I think
the way
they've been treating you stinks.
Now get this; I
have a job to do.
My job
is to
find out why you won't
tell what the saucer said.
I don't
want to know what it said
and I'll
never ask you. I don't
even want you to tell me.
Let's just find out why
you're keeping it a secret."
Finding out why
turned out to be hours
of just
talking about having pneumonia and the
flower pot she made in
second grade that Mom
threw down the fire escape
and getting
left back in school and
the dream
about holding a wine glass in both hands and
peeping over it at some
man.
And one day
she told
him why
she wouldn't
say about
the saucer, just the way it
came to her: "Because it was talking to
me, and it's
just nobody else's business."
She even told
him about
the man
crossing himself that day. It was
the only
other thing she had of
her own.
He was nice.
He was
the one
who warned
her about
the trial. "I have no business
saying this, but they're going
to give you the full dress
treatment. Judge and jury and
all. You just say what you
want to say, no less
and no
more, hear? And don't let 'em
get your
goat. You have a right
to own
something."
He got
up and
swore and left.
First a man came
and talked
to her
for a
long time about how maybe this
Earth would be attacked from
outer space by beings much stronger
and cleverer
than we are, and maybe
she had
the key
to a
defense. So she owed it
to the
whole world. And then even if
the Earth
wasn't attacked, just think of what
an advantage
she might
give this country over its
enemies. Then he shook
his finger
in her
face and said that what she
was doing
amounted to working for the enemies of her country.
And he
turned out to be the
man that
was defending her at the trial.
The jury found
her guilty
of contempt
of court
and the
judge recited a long
list of penalties he could
give her. He gave her one
of them
and suspended
it. They
put her
back in jail for a few more days, and one fine
day they
turned her loose.
That was wonderful
at first.
She got
a job
in a
restaurant, and a furnished
room. She had been in
the papers
so much
that Mom didn't want
her back
home. Mom was drunk most
of the time and sometimes used
to tear
up the
whole neighborhood, but all the
same she had very special
ideas about being respectable,
and being
in the
papers all the time for
spying was not her
idea of being decent. So
she put
her maiden
name on the mailbox
downstairs and told her daughter
not to live there any more.
At the restaurant
she met
a man
who asked
her for
a date.
The first time. She
spent every cent she had
on a red handbag to go with
her red
shoes. They weren't the same
shade, but anyway they were both
red. They went to the
movies and afterward he didn't try
to kiss
her or
anything, he just tried to find
out what
the flying
saucer told her. She didn't
say anything. She went home and
cried all night
Then some men
sat in
a booth
talking and they shut up
and glared at her
every time she came past
They spoke to the boss, and
he came
and told
her that
they were electronics engineers
working for the government and they were afraid
to talk shop while
she was
around—wasn't she some sort of
spy or something? So she got
fired.
Once she saw
her name
on a
juke box. She put in
a nickel
and punched that number,
and the
record was all about "the
flyin' saucer came down
one day,
and taught
her a
brand new way to play, and
what it was I will
not say,
but she
took me out of this world."
And while
she was
Ustening to it, someone in
the juke-joint
recognized her and called her
by name.
Four of them followed
her home
and she
had to
block the door shut.
Sometimes she'd
be all
right for months on end,
and then
someone would ask for
a date. Three
times out of five, she
and the date were
followed. Once the man she
was with
arrested the man who
was tailing
them. Twice the man who
was tailing them arrested
the man
she was
with. Five times out of five,
the date
would try to find out
about the saucer. Sometimes she would
go out
with someone and pretend that
it was a real date, but
she wasn't
very good at it.
So she moved
to the
shore and got a job
cleaning at night in offices and
stores. There weren't many to
clean, but that just meant there
weren't many people to remember
her face
from the papers. Like
clockwork, every eighteen months, some feature writer would drag
it all
out again
in a
magazine or a Sunday supplement; and every time anyone
saw a
headlight on a mountain or
a light
on a
weather balloon it had to be
a flying
saucer, and there had to
be some
tired quip about the saucer wanting
to tell
secrets. Then for two or
three weeks she'd stay off the
streets in the daytime.
Once she thought
she had
it whipped.
People didn't want her, so she
began reading. The novels were
all right
for a
while until she found
out that
most of them were like
the movies—all about the
pretty ones who really own
the world.
So she learned things—animals,
trees. A lousy little chipmunk
caught in a wire
fence bit her. The animals
didn't want her. The trees didn't
care.
Then she hit
on the
idea of the bottles. She
got all
the bottles she could and wrote
on papers
which she corked into the bottles.
She'd tramp miles up and
down the beaches and throw the
bottles out as far as
she could.
She knew
that if the right
person found one, it would
give that person the only thing
in the
world that would help. Those
bottles kept her going for three
solid years. Everyone's got to
have a secret little something he
does.
And at
last the time came when
it was
no use
any more.
You can go on
trying to help someone who
maybe exists; but soon
you can't
pretend there is such a
person any more. And that's it.
The end.
"Are you
cold?" I asked when she
was through
telling me.
The surf
was quieter
and the
shadows longer.
"No," she answered
from the shadows. Suddenly she
said, "Did you think
I was
mad at
you because
you saw
me without
my clothes?"
"Why shouldn't
you be?"
"You know, I
don't care? I wouldn't have
wanted . . . wanted you
to see
me even
in a
ball gown or overalls. You
can't cover up my
carcass. It shows; it's there
whatever. I just didn't want you
to see me. At all."
"Me, or
anyone?"
She hesitated.
"You."
I got up
and stretched
and walked
a little,
thinking. "Didn't the F.B.I,
try to
stop you throwing those bottles?"
"Oh, sure. They
spent I don't know how
much taxpayers' money gathering
'em up.
They still make a spot
check every once in a while.
They're getting tired of it,
though. All the writing in the
bottles is the same." She laughed. I didn't
know she could.
"What's funny?"
"All of 'em—judges,
jailers, juke-boxes—people. Do you know it
wouldn't have saved me a
minute's trouble if I'd told 'em
the whole
thing at the very beginning?"
"No?"
"No. They
wouldn't have believed me. What
they wanted was a new weapon.
Super-science from a super-race, to slap hell out of
the super-race
if they
ever got a chance, or
out of bur own if they
don't. All those brains," she breathed, with more wonder
than scom, "all that brass.
They think 'super-race' and it
comes out 'super-science.' Don't they
ever imagine a super-race has super-feelings,
too—super-laughter, maybe, or super-hunger?"
She paused.
"Isn't it time you asked
me what the saucer
said?"
"I'll tell
you," I blurted.
"There
is in certain living souls A quality of loneliness unspeakable, So great it
must be shared As company is shared by lesser beings. Such a loneliness is
mine; so know by this That in immensity There is one lonelier than you."
"Dear Jesus,"
she said
devoutly, and began to weep.
"And how is it addressed?"
"To
the loneliest one . . ."
"How did
you know?"
she whispered.
"It's what
you put
in the
bottles, isn't it?"
"Yes," she said.
"Whenever it gets
to be
too much,
that no one cares, that no
one ever
did .
. .
you throw
a bottle
into the sea, and
out goes
a part
of your
own loneliness.
You sit and think of someone
somewhere finding it . .
. learning
for the
first time that the worst
there is can be understood."
The moon was
setting and the surf was
hushed. We looked up and out
to the
stars. She said, "We don't
know what loneliness is like. People
thought the saucer was a
saucer, but it wasn't.
It was
a bottle
with a message inside. It had a bigger ocean
to cross—all
of space—and
not much
chance of finding anybody.
Loneliness? We don't know loneliness."
When I could, I
asked her why she had
tried to kill herself.
"I've had it
good," she said, "with what the saucer told
me. I wanted to . .
. pay
back. I was bad enough
to be
helped; I had to know I
was good
enough to help. No one
wants me? Fine. But don't tell
me no
one, anywhere, wants my help.
I can't stand that."
I took a
deep breath. "I found one
of your
bottles two years ago. I've been
looking for you ever since.
Tide charts, current tables,
maps and . . .
wandering. I heard some talk
about you and the
bottles hereabouts. Someone told me
you'd quit doing it, you'd taken
to wandering
the dunes
at night.
I knew why. I ran all
the way."
I needed another
breath now. "I got a
club foot. I think right, but the words don't
come out of my mouth
the way
they're inside my head.
I have
this nose. I never had
a woman.
Nobody ever wanted to
hire me to work where
they'd have to look at me.
You're beautiful," I said. "You're
beautiful."
She said nothing,
but it
was as
if a
light came from her, more light
and far
less shadow than ever the
practiced moon could cast. Among the
many things it meant was
that even to loneliness there is
an end,
for those
who are
lonely enough, long enough.
7he 'World Well £ost
All
the world
knew them as loverbirds, though they were certainly not birds, but humans.
Well, say humanoids. Feather-less bipeds. Their stay on
earth was brief, a nine-day
wonder. Any wonder that lasts nine
days on an earth of
orgasmic trideo shows; time-freezing
pills; synapse-inverter fields
which make it possible for a
man to
turn a sunset to perfumes,
a masochist to a fur-feeler; and a thousand other
euphorics— why, on such
an earth,
a nine-day wonder
is a
wonder indeed.
Like a sudden bloom across
the face
of the
world came the peculiar magic of
the loverbirds.
There were loverbird songs and loverbird
trinkets, loverbird hats and pins,
bangles and baubles, coins and quaffs
and tidbits.
For there
was that
about the loverbirds which made a
deep enchantment. No one can
be told about a
loverbird and feel this curious
delight. Many are immune even to
a solidograph.
But watch
loverbirds, only for a moment, and
see what
happens. It's the feeling you
had when you were twelve, and
summer-drenched, and you
kissed a girl for the very
first time and knew a breathlessness you were sure
could never happen again. And
indeed it never could—unless you watched
loverbirds. Then you are spellbound
for four
quiet seconds, and suddenly your
very heart twists, and incredulous tears sting and stay;
and the
very first move you make afterward,
you make
on tiptoe,
and your
first word is a whisper.
This magic came
over very well on trideo,
and everyone
had trideo; so for
a brief
while the earth was enchanted.
There were
only two loverbirds. They came
clown out of the sky in
a single
brassy flash, and stepped out
of their
ship, hand in hand. Their eyes
were full of wonder, each
at the
other, and together at
the world.
They seemed frozen in a
fuU-to-bursting moment of discovery;
they made way for one another
gravely and with courtesy, they
looked about them and in the
very looking gave each other
gifts—the color of the sky, the
taste of the air, the
pressures of things growing and meeting and changing. They
never spoke. They simply were together. To watch them was to
know of their awestruck mounting of staircases of bud notes, of
how each
knew the warmth of the other
as their
flesh supped silently on sunlight.
They stepped
from their ship, and the
tall one threw a yellow powder
back to it. The ship
fell in upon itself and
became a pile of
rubble, which collapsed into a
pile of gleaming sand, which
slumped compactly down to dust
and then
to an airblown emulsion so fine
that Brownian movement itself hammered it up and out
and away.
Anyone could see that they intended
to stay.
Anyone could know by simply
watching them that next to their
wondrous delight in each other
came their delighted wonder at earth
itself, everything and everybody about it.
Now, if terrestrial
culture were a pyramid, at
the apex
(where the power is)
would sit a blind man,
for so
constituted are we that only
by blinding
ourselves, bit by bit, may
we rise above our
fellows. The man at the
apex has an immense preoccupation with the
welfare of the whole, because
he regards
it as
the source
and structure
of his
elevation, which it is, and as
an extension
of himself,
which it is not. It
was such
a man who, in the face
of immeasurable
evidence, chose to find a defense
against loverbirds, and fed the
matrices and coordinates of the loverbird
image into the most marvelous
calculator that had ever
been built.
The machine sucked
in symbols
and raced
them about, compared and waited and
matched and sat still while
its bulging
memory, cell by cell, was
silent, was silent—and suddenly, in a far comer, resonated.
It grasped
this resonance in forceps made of mathematics, snatched it
out (translating
furiously as it snatched) and put
out a
fevered tongue of paper on
which was typed:
DIRBANU
Now this utterly
changed the complexion of things.
For earth ships had ranged the
cosmos far and wide, with
few hindrances. Of these
hindrances, all could be understood
but one, and that one was
Dirbanu, a transpalactic planet which
shrouded itself in impenetrable
fields of force whenever an
earth ship approached. There were other worlds
which could do this, but in
each case the crews knew
why it
was done.
Dirbanu, upon discovery, had prohibited landings from
the very first until an ambassador
could be sent to Terra.
In due
time one did arrive
(so reported
the calculator,
which was the only entity that
remembered the episode) and it
was obvious
that Earth and Dirbanu had
much in common. The ambassador, however, showed
a most
uncommon disdain of Earth and all
its work,
curled his lip and went
wordlessly home, and ever
since then Dirbanu had locked
itself tight away from the questing
Terrans.
Dirbanu thereby became
of value,
and fair
game, but we could do nothing
to ripple
the bland
face of her defenses. As
this impregnability repeatedly proved itself, Dirbanu evolved
in our group mind through the
usual stages of being: the
Curiosity, the Mystery, the
Challenge, the Enemy, the Enemy,
the Enemy, the Mystery,
the Curiosity,
and finally
That-which-is-too-far-away-to-bother-with,
or the
Forgotten.
And suddenly, after
all this
time, Earth had two genuine
natives of Dirbanu aboard,
entrancing the populace and giving
no information.
This intolerable circumstance
began to make itself felt throughout
the world—but
slowly, for this time the blind
men's din was cushioned and
soaked by the magic of the
loverbirds. It might have taken
a very
long time to convince the people
of the
menace in their midst had
there not been a truly startling
development:
A direct
message was received from Dirbanu.
The collective impact of loverbird material
emanating from transmitters on Earth had
attracted the attention of Dirbanu,
which promptly informed us
that the loverbirds were indeed
their nationals, that in
addition they were fugitives, that Dirbanu would take
it ill
if Earth
should regard itself as a
sanctuary for the criminals of
Dirbanu but would, on the
other hand, find it in its
heart to be very pleased
if Earth
saw fit
to return
them.
So from
the depths
of its
enchantment, Terra was able to
calculate a course of
action. Here at last was
an opportunity
to consort with Dirbanu
on a
friendly basis—great Dirbanu which,
since it had force fields
which Earth could not duplicate,
must of necessity have many
other things Earth could use; mighty Dirbanu before whom
we could
kneel in supplication (with purely-for-defense
bombs hidden in our pockets)
with lowered heads (making
invisible the knife in our
teeth) and ask for crumbs from
their table (in order to
extrapolate the location of
their kitchens).
Thus the loverbird
episode became another item in
the weary procession of proofs that
Terra's most reasonable intolerance can conquer practically anything, even magic
Especially magic.
So it
was that
the loverbirds
were arrested, that the Star-mite 439 was fitted
out as
a prison
ship, that a most carefully
screened crew was chosen
for her,
and that
she struck
star-ward with the cargo that
would gain us a world.
Two men
were the crew—a colorful little
rooster of a man and a
great dun bull of a
man. They were, respectively, Rootes, who was Captain and
staff, and Grunty, who was
midship and inboard corps. Rootes was
cocky, springy, white and crisp. His hair was auburn
and so
were his eyes, and the
eyes were hard. Grunty was a
shambler with big gentle hands
and heavy shoulders half as wide
as Rootes
was high.
He should
have worn a cowl
and rope-belted
habit. He should, perhaps, have worn a burnoose. He
did neither,
but the
effect was there. Known only to
him was
the fact
that words and pictures, concepts and comparisons were an endless swirling
blizzard inside him. Known
only to him and Rootes
was the
fact that he had
books, and books, and books,
and Rootes
did not care if
he had
or not.
Grunty he had been called
since he first learned to talk,
and Grunty
was name
enough for him. For the words
in his
head would not leave him
except one or two at a
time, with long moments between.
So he
had learned
to condense his verbal
messages to breathy grunts, and
when they wouldn't condense, he said
nothing.
They were primitives,
both of them, which is
to say
that they were doers, while Modern
Man is
a thinker
and/or a feeler. The thinkers compose
new variations
and permutations
of euphoria,
and the
feelers repay the thinkers by
responding to their inventions. The ships had no
place for Modern Man, and Modern
Man had
only the most casual use
for the ships.
Doers can co-operate
like cam and pushrod, like
ratchet and pawl, and such linkage
creates a powerful bond. But
Rootes and Grunty were unique among
crews in that these machine
parts were not interchangeable.
Any good
captain can command any good
crew, surroundings being equivalent. But Rootes would not and
could not ship out with
anyone but Grunty, and Grunty was
just that dependent. Grunty understood
this bond, and the fact
that the only way it
could conceivably be broken would
be to
explain it to Rootes. Rootes
did not understand it because it never
occurred to him to try,
and had he tried,
he would
have failed, since he was
inherently non-equipped for the
task. G runty knew that
their unique bond was for him,
a survival
matter. Rootes did not know
this, and would have
rejected the idea with violence.
So Rootes regarded
Grunty with tolerance and a
modified amusement. The modification
was an
inarticulate realization of Grunty's
complete dependability. Grunty regarded Rootes
with . . . well, with
the ceaseless,
silent flurry of words in
his mind.
There was, besides
the harmony
of functions
and the
other link, understood only by Grunty,
a third
adjunct to their phenomenal efficiency as a crew. It
was organic,
and it
had to
do with the stellar
drive.
Reaction engines were
long forgotten. The so-called "warp"
drive was used only
experimentally and on
certain crash-priority war-craft
where operating costs were not
a factor.
The Starmite 439 was, like most interstellar craft, powered
by an
RS plant. Like the
transistor, the Referential Stasis generator
is extremely simple to
construct and very difficult indeed
to explain. Its mathematics approaches mysticism and its theory
contains certain impossibilities which are ignored in
practice. Its effect is to shift
the area
of stasis
of the
ship and everything in it
from one point of reference
to another.
For example,
the ship
at rest
on the
Earth's surface is in stasis
in reference to the ground on
which it rests. Throwing the
ship into stasis in reference to
the center
of the
earth gives it instantly an effective speed equal
to the
surface velocity of the planet around its core—some one
thousand miles per hour. Stasis referential to the sun
moves the Earth out from
under the ship at the Earth's
orbital velocity. GH stasis "moves"
the ship at the
angular velocity of the sun
about the Galactic Hub. The galactic
drift can be used, as
can any
simple or complex mass center in
this expanding universe. There are
resultants and there are
multipliers, and effective velocities can be enormous. Yet the
ship is constantly in stasis,
so that
there is never an
inertia factor.
The one inconvenience
of the
RS drive
is that
shifts from one referent to another
invariably black the crew out,
for psychoneural reasons. The
blackout period varies slightly between individuals from one to
two and
a half
hours. But some anomaly in Grunty's
gigantic frame kept his blackout
periods down to thirty
or forty
minutes, while Rootes was always out for two hours
or more.
There was that about Grunty which made moments of
isolation a vital necessity, for a man must occasionally
be himself,
which in anyone's company Grunty was
not. But after stasis shifts
Grunty had an hour or so
to himself
while his commander lay numbly
spread-eagled on the blackout
couch, and he spent these
in communions of his own devising.
Sometimes this meant only a good
book.
This, then, was
the crew
picked to man the prison
ship. It had been together longer
than any other crew in
the Space
Service. Its record showed
a metrical
efficiency and a resistance to physical and psychic
debilitations previously unheard of in a
trade where close confinement on long voyages had
come to be regarded
as hazards.
In space,
shift followed shift uneventfully,
and planetfall
was made
on schedule
and without
incident. In port Rootes
would roar off to the
fleshpots, in which he would wallow
noisily until an hour before
takeoff, while Grunty found,
first, the business office, and
next, a bookstore.
Thejr were pleased
to be
chosen for the Dirbanu trip.
Rootes felt no remorse
at taking
away Earth's new delight, since he was one of
the very
few who
was immune
to it
("Pretty," he said at
his first
encounter.) Grunty simply grunted, but then, so did everyone
else. Rootes did not notice,
and Grunty did not remark upon
the obvious
fact that though the loverbirds' expression of awestruck wonderment
in each
other's presence had, if anything,
intensified, their extreme pleasure in
Earth and the things of
Earth had vanished. They were
locked, securely but comfortably,
in the
after cabin behind a new transparent
door, so that their every
move could be watched from the
main cabin and control console.
They sat close, with their arms
about one another, and though
their radiant joy in the contact
never lessened, it was a
shadowed pleasure, a lachrymose
beauty like the wrenching music
of the
wailing wall.
The RS drive
laid its hand on the
moon and they vaulted away. Grunty came up from
blackout to find it very
quiet. The loverbirds lay still in
each other's arms, looking very
human except for the high joining
of their
closed eyelids, which nictated upward
rather than downward like a
Terran's. Rootes sprawled limply on the
other couch, and Grunty nodded
at the sight. He deeply appreciated
the silence,
since Rootes had filled the small
cabin with earthy chatter about
his conquests
in port, detail by
hairy detail, for two solid
hours preceding their departure.
It was
a routine
which Grunty found particularly wearing, partly for its
content, which interested him not
at all, but mostly
for its
inevitability. Grunty had
long ago noted that these recitations,
for all
their detail, carried the tones of
thirst rather than of satiety.
He had
his own
conclusions about it, and, characteristically,
kept them to himself. But inside, his spinning gusts
of words
could shape themselves well to it,
and they
did. "And man, she moaned!"
Rootes would chant. "And take money?
She gave me money. And what did
I do
with it? Why, I bought
up some
more of the same." And what you could buy with a shekel's worth
of tenderness, my prince! his silent words sang.
". . . across the*
floor and around the
rug until,
by damn,
I thought
we're about to climb the wall.
Loaded, Grunty-boy, I tell you,
I was
loaded!" Poor
little one ran the hushed
susurrus, thy poverty is as great as thy joy and a
tenth as great as thine empty noise. One of Grunty's greatest pleasures was
taken in the fact that this
kind of chuntering was limited
to the
first day out, with barely another
word on the varied theme
until the next departure, no matter
how many
months away that might be. Squeak to me of love, dear mouse, his words
would chuckle. Stand up on your cheese and nibble away at
your dream. Then, wearily, But oh, this treasure I carry is too heavy a
burden, in all its fullness, to be so tugged at by your clattering vacuum!
Grunty left the
couch and went to the
controls. The preset courses checked against
the indicators.
He logged
them and fixed the finder control
to locate
a certain
mass-nexus in the Crab Nebula. It
would chime when it was
ready. He set the switch for final closing by
the push-button
beside his couch, and went aft
to wait.
He stood watching
the loverbirds
because there was nothing else for him to do.
They lay quite
still, but love so permeated
them that their very poses expressed
it. Their
lax bodies
yearned each to each, and the
tall one's hand seemed to
stream toward the fingers of his beloved, and then
back again, like the riven
tatters of a torn fabric straining
toward oneness again. And as
their mood was a sadness too,
so their
pose, each and both, together
and singly expressed it, and singly
each through the other silently
spoke of the loss
they had suffered, and how
it ensured
greater losses to come.
Slowly the picture suffused Grunty's
thinking, and his words picked
and pierced
and smoothed
it down,
and murmured finally, Brush away the dusting of sadness from the
future, bright ones. You've sadness enough for now. Grief should live only
after it is truly born, and not before. His words sang,
Come
fill the cup and in the fire of spring Your winter garment of repentance fling.
The bird of time has but a little way To flutter—and the bird is on the wing.
and added Omar Khayyam, born circa 1073, for this,
too, was one of the words'
functions.
And then
he stiffened
in horror;
his great
hands came up convulsively and clawed
the imprisoning
glass . . .
They were
smiling at him.
They were
smiling, and on their faces
and on
and about
their bodies there was
no sadness.
They had heard him I
He glanced convulsively
around at the Captain's unconscious
form, then back to the
loverbirds.
That they should
recover so swiftly from blackout
was, to say the least, an
intrusion; for his moments of
aloneness were precious and more than
precious to Grunty, and would
be useless to him under the
scrutiny of those jewelled eyes.
But that was a minor matter
compared to this other thing,
this terrible fact that they heard.
Telepathic races were
not common,
but they
did exist.
And what he was
now experiencing
was what
invariably happened when humans
encountered one. He could only
send; the loverbirds could only receive. And
they must not receive him!
No one
must. No one must know
what he was, what he thought.
If anyone
did, it would be a
disaster beyond bearing. It would mean
no more
flights with Rootes. Which, of course,
meant no flights with anyone.
And how
could he live—where could he go?
He turned back
to the
loverbirds. His lips were white
and drawn back in a snarl
of panic
and fury.
For a
blood-thick moment he held
their eyes. They drew closer
to one
another, and together sent him a
radiant, anxious, friendly look that
made him grind his
teeth.
Then, at
the console,
the finder
chimed.
Grunty turned
slowly from the transparent door and went to his
couch. He lay down and
poised his thumb over the
push-button.
He hated the loverbirds, and there
was no
joy in
him. He pressed the button, the
ship slid into a new
stasis, and he blacked out
The time passed.
"Grunty!"
"You feed
them this shift?"
"Nuh."
"Last shift?"
"Nuh."
"What the hell's
matter with you, y'big dumb
bastich? What you expect them to
live on?"
Grunty sent
a look
of roiling
hatred aft. "Love," he said.
"Feed 'em," snapped Rootes.
Wordlessly Grunty went
about preparing a meal for
the prisoners. Rootes stood
in the
middle of the cabin, his
hard small fists on his hips,
his gleaming
auburn head tilted to one
side, and watched every
move. "I didn't used to
have to tell you anything," he growled, half pugnaciously,
half worriedly. "You sick?"
Grunty shook
his head.
He twisted
the tops
of two
cans
and set them aside
to heat
themselves, and took down the
water suckers. >
"You got
it in
for those
honeymooners or something?"
Grunty averted
his face.
"We get them
to Dirbanu
alive and healthy, hear me?
They get sick, you get sick,
by God.
I'll see to that. Don't
give me trouble, Grunty. I'll take
it out
on you.
I never
whipped you yet, but I will."
Grunty carried
the tray
aft. "You hear me?" Rootes
yelled.
Grunty nodded without
looking at him. He touched
the control and a small communication
window slid open in the
glass wall. He slid
the tray
through. The taller loverbird stepped forward and took it
eagerly, gracefully, and gave him a
dazzling smile of thanks. Grunty
growled low in his throat like a carnivore. The loverbird carried the
food back to the couch and
they began to eat, feeding
each other little morsels.
A new
stasis, and Granty came fighting
up out
of blackness.
He sat up abruptly, glanced around
the ship.
The Captain
was sprawled out across
the cushions,
his compact
body and outflung arm forming the
poured-out, spring-steel laxness usually
seen only in sleeping cats.
The loverbirds,
even in deep unconsciousness,
lay like
hardly separate parts of something
whole, the small one
on the
couch, the tall one on
the deck,
prone, reaching, supplicating.
Grunty snorted and
hove to his feet. He
crossed the cabin and stood looking
down on Rootes.
The
hummingbird is a yellowjacket, said his words, Buzz
and dart, hiss and flash away. Swift and hurtful, hurtful . . .
He stood for
a moment,
his great
shoulder muscles working one against the
other, and his mouth trembled.
He looked
at the
loverbirds, who were still motionless.
His eyes slowly narrowed.
His words
tumbled and climbed, and ordered
themselves:
/ through love have learned three things,
Sorrow, sin and death it brings.
Yet day by day my heart within
Dares shame and sorrow, death and sin. . . .
And dutifully he
added Samuel Ferguson, born 1810. He glared at
the loverbirds
and brought
his fist
into his palm with a sound
like a club on an
anthill. They had heard him
again, and this time they did
not smile,
but looked
into each other's eyes and then
turned together to regard him,
nodding gravely.
Rootes went through
Grunty's books, leafing and casting
aside. He had never
touched them before. "Buncha crap," he jeered. "Garden of the Plynck. Wind
in the
Willows. Worm Ouroborous. Kid stuff."
Grunty lumbered across
and patiently
gathered up the books the Captain
had flung
aside, putting them one by
one back into their places, stroking
them as if they had
been bruised.
"Isn't there
nothing in here with pictures?"
Grunty regarded him
silently for a moment and
then took down a tall volume.
The Captain
snatched it, leafed through it. "Mountains," he
growled. "Old houses."
He leafed.
"Damn boats." He smashed
the book
to the
deck. "Haven't you got any of what I
want?"
Grunty waited
attentively.
"Do I have to
draw a diagram?" the Captain
roared. "Got that ol' itch, Grunty.
You wouldn't
know. I feel like looking
at pictures, get what
I mean?"
Grunty stared at
him, utterly without expression, but deep within him a
panic squirmed. The Captain never,
never behaved like
this in mid-voyage. It was
going to get worse, he
realized. Much worse. And
quickly.
He shot the
loverbirds a vicious, hate-filled glance. If they weren't aboard . . .
There could be
no waiting.
Not now.
Something had to be done. Something
. .
.
"Come on, come
on," said Rootes. "Goddlemighty Godfrey, even a deadbutt like
you must
have something for kicks."
Grunty turned away
from him, squeezed his eyes
closed for a tortured second, then
pulled himself together. He ran
his hand over the
books, hesitated, and finally brought
out a
large, heavy one. He
handed it to the Captain
and went
forward to the console. He
slumped down there over the
file of computer tapes, pretending to be busy.
The Captain sprawled
onto Grunty's couch and opened
the book. "Michelangelo, what the hell," he growled. He grunted, almost like his shipmate.
"Statues," he half-whispered,
in withering
scorn. But he ogled and
leafed at last, and was quiet.
The loverbirds looked at him with
a sad
tenderness, and then together sent beseeching
glances at Grunty's angry back.
The matrix-pattern
for Terra
slipped through Grunty's fingers, and
he suddenly
tore the tape across, and
across again. A filthy place, Terra.
There is nothing, he thought,
like the conservatism of
license. Given a culture
of sybaritics,
with an endless choice of mechanical
titillations, and you have a
people of unbreakable and hidebound
formality, a people with few but
massive taboos, a shockable, narrow, prissy people obeying the rules—even the rules
of their
calculated depravities—and protecting
their treasured, specialized pruderies. In such a group there
are words
one may
not use
for fear
of their fanged laughter, colors one
may not
wear, gestures and intonations
one must
forego, on pain of being
torn to pieces. The rules are
complex and absolute, and in
such a place one's heart may not sing lest,
through its warm free joyousness,
it betray one.
And if
you must
have joy of such a
nature, if you must be
free to be your
pressured self, then off to
space ... off to the
glittering black
loneliness. And let the days
go by,
and let
the lime pass, and huddle beneath
your impenetrable integument,
and wait,
and wait,
and every
once in a long while
you will have that moment of
lonely consciousness when there is no
one around
to see;
and then
it may
burst from you and you may
dance, or cry, or twist
the hair
on your
head till your eyeballs blaze, or
do any
of the
other things your so unfashionable
nature thirstily demands.
It took Grunty
half a lifetime to find
this freedom: No price would be too great to
keep it. Not lives, nor
interplanetary diplomacy, nor Earth
itself were worth such a
frightful loss.
He would
lose it if anyone knew,
and the
loverbirds knew.
He pressed his
heavy hands together until the
knuckles crackled. Dirbanu, reading
it all
from the ardent minds of
the loverbirds; Dirbanu flashing
the news
across the stars; the roar of
reaction, and then Rootes, Rootes,
when the huge and ugly impact
washed over him . ..
So let Dirbanu
be offended.
Let Terra
accuse this ship of fumbling, even of treachery—anything but the withering news
the loverbirds had stolen.
Another new
stasis, and Grunty's first thought
as he
came alive in the silent ship
was //
has to be soon.
He rolled off
the couch
and glared
at the
unconscious loverbirds. The helpless loverbirds.
Smash their
heads in.
Then Rootes
. .
. what
to tell
Rootes?
The loverbirds
attacked him, tried to seize
the ship?
He shook his
head like a bear in
a beehive.
Rootes woul^ never believe that. Even
if the
loverbirds could open the door, which
they could not, it was
more than ridiculous to imagine those two bright and
slender things attacking anyone —especially so rugged and massive
an opponent.
Poison? No—there was
nothing in the efficient, unfailingly beneficial food
stores that might help.
His glance strayed
to the
Captain, and he stopped breathing.
Of course!
He ran to
the Captain's
personal lockers. He should have
known that such a
cocky little hound as Rootes
could not live, could not strut
and prance
as he
did unless
he had
a weapon.
And if it was the kind
of weapon
that such a man would
characteristically choose—
A movement
caught his eye as he
searched. The loverbirds were awake. That wouldn't matter.
He laughed
at them,
a flashing,
ugly laugh. They cowered close together and their eyes
grew very bright. They knew.
He was aware
that they were suddenly very
busy, as busy as he. And
then he found the gun.
It was a
snug little thing, smooth and
intimate in his hand. It was
exactly what he had guessed,
what he had hoped for—
just what he needed.
It was
silent. It would leave no
mark. It need not even be
aimed carefully. Just a touch
of its
feral radiation and throughout
the body
the axones
suddenly refuse to propagate nerve impulses.
No thought
leaves the brain, no slightest contraction
of heart
or lung
occurs again, ever. And afterward, no sign remains that
a weapon
has been
used.
He went to
the serving
window with the gun in
his hand.
When he wakes, you will be dead, he thought. Couldn't recover from stasis blackout. Too
bad. But no one's to blame, hm? We never had Dirbanu passengers before. So how
could we know?
The loverbirds, instead of flinching, were crowding close to the
window, their faces beseeching, their delicate hands signing and signalling, frantically trying to convey something.
He touched the control,
and the
panel slid back.
The taller loverbird
held up something as if
it would
shield him. The other pointed at
it, nodded
urgently, and gave him one of
those accursed, hauntingly sweet smiles.
Grunty put up
his hand
to sweep
the thing
aside, and then checked himself.
It was only a piece of
paper.
All of the
cruelty of humanity rose up
in Grunty.
A species that can't
protect itself doesn't deserve to live. He raised
the gun.
And then he saw the pictures.
Economical and accurate,
and for
all their
subject, done with the ineffable grace
of the
loverbirds themselves, the pictures showed
three figures:
Grunty himself, hulking,
impassive, the eyes glowing, the
tree-trunk legs and hunched
shoulders.
Rootes, in a
pose so characteristic and so
cleverly done that Grunty gasped. Crisp
and clean,
Rootes' image had one foot
up on a chair, both elbows
on the
high knee, the head half
turned. The eyes fairly
sparkled from the paper. And a girl.
She was beautiful.
She stood
with her arms behind her,
her feet slightly apart,
her face
down a little. She was
deep-eyed, pensive, and to see
her was
to be
silent, to wait for those
downcast lids to lift
and break
the spell.
Grunty frowned and
faltered. He lifted a puzzled
gaze from these exquisite renderings to the loverbirds, and met the appeal, the earnest, eager, hopeful
faces.
The loverbird
put a
second paper against the glass.
There were the
same three figures, identical in
every respect to the previous
ones, except for one detail:
they were all naked.
He wondered how
they knew human anatomy so
meticulously.
Before he
could react, still another sheet
went up.
The loverbirds, this time—the tall one,
the shorter
one, hand in hand. And next
to them
a third
figure, somewhat similar, but tiny, very
round, and with grotesquely short arms.
Grunty stared at
the three
sheets, one after the other.
There was something . . .
something . . .
And then the
loverbird put up the fourth
sketch, and slowly, slowly, Grunty began
to understand.
In the
last picture, the loverbirds
were shown exactly as before,
except that they were naked, and
so was
the small
creature beside them. He had never
seen loverbirds naked before. Possibly
no one
had.
Slowly he lowered
the gun.
He began
to laugh.
He reached
through the window and
took both the loverbirds' hands in one of his,
and they
laughed with him.
Rootes stretched
easily with his eyes closed,
pressed his face down into the
couch, and rolled over. He
dropped his feet to the deck,
held his head in his
hands and yawned. Only then did
he realize
Grunty was standing just before
him.
"What's the
matter with you?"
He followed
Grunty's grim gaze.
The glass
door stood open.
Rootes bounced to
his feet
as if
the couch
had turned
white-hot. "Where—what—"
Grunty's crag of
a face
was turned
to the
starboard bulkhead. Rootes spun to
it, balanced
on the
balls of his feet as
if he were boxing. His smooth
face gleamed in the red
glow of the light over the
airlock.
"The lifeboat .
. .
you mean
they took the lifeboat? They
got away?"
Grunty nodded.
Rootes held his
head. "Oh, fine," he moaned.
He whipped
around to Grunty. "And
where the hell were you
when this happened?"
"Here."
"Well, what in
God's name happened?" Rootes was
on the
trembling edge of foaming
hysteria.
Grunty thumped
his chest.
"You're not
trying to tell me you
let them
go?"
Grunty nodded,
and waited—not
for very
long.
"I'm going to
burn you down," Rootes raged.
"I'm going to break you so
low you'll
have to climb for twelve
years before you get a barracks
to sweep.
And after
I get done
with you I'll turn you over
to the
Service. What do you think
they'll do to you? What do
you think
they're going to do to
me?"
He leapt at
Grunty and struck him a
hard, cutting blow to the cheek.
Grunty kept his hands down
and made
no attempt to avoid the fist.
He stood
immovable, and waited.
"Maybe those were
criminals, but they were Dirbanu
nationals," Rootes roared when
he could
get his
breath. "How are we going to
explain this to Dirbanu? Do
you realize
this could mean war?"
Grunty shook
his head.
"What do you
mean? You know something. You better talk while you
can. Come on, bright boy—what
are we
going to tell Dirbanu?"
Grunty pointed
at the
empty cell. "Dead,"
he said.
"What good will
it do
us to
say they're
dead? They're not. They'll show up
again some day, and—"
Grunty shook his
head. He pointed to the
star chart. Dirbanu showed as
the nearest
body. There was no livable
planet within thousands of parsecs.
"They didn't
go to
Dirbanul"
"Nuh."
"Damn it,
it's like pulling rivets to
get anything
out of
you. In that lifeboat they go
to Dirbanu—which
they won't—or they head out, maybe
for years,
to the
Rim stars.
That's all they can do!"
Grunty nodded,
"And you
think Dirbanu won't track them,
won't bring 'em down?"
"No ships." 'They have ships!"
"Nuh."
"The loverbirds told you?" Grunty agreed.
"You mean
their own ship that they
destroyed, and the one the ambassador
used were all they had?"
"Yuh."
Rootes strode
up and
back. "I don't get it.
I don't
begin to get it. What did
you do
it for,
Grunty?"
Grunty stood for
a moment,
watching Rootes' face. Then he went
to the
computing desk. Rootes had no
choice but to follow. Grunty spread
out the
four drawings.
"What's this? Who
drew these? Them?
What do
you know.
Damn! Who is
the chick?"
Grunty patiently
indicated all of the pictures
in one
sweep. Rootes looked at him, puzzled,
looked at one of Grunty's
eyes, then the other, shook his
head, and applied himself to
the pictures again. "This is more
like it," he murmured. "Wish
I'd 'a known they could draw
like this." Again Grunty drew
his attention to all
the pictures
and away
from the single drawing that fascinated
him.
"There's you, there's
me. Right?
Then this chick. Now, here we
are again,
all buff
naked. Damn, what a carcass.
All right, all right, I'm going
on. Now,
this is the prisoners, right? And who's the little
fat one?"
Grunty pushed
the fourth
sheet over. "Oh," said Rootes.
"Here everybody's naked too.
Hm."
He yelped suddenly
and bent
close. Then he rapidly eyed
all four sheets in
sequence. His face began to
get red.
He gave
the fourth picture a
long, close scrutiny. Finally he
put his
finger on the sketch
of the
round little alien. "This is . . . a ...
a Dirbanu—"
Grunty nodded.
"Female."
"Then those
two—they were—"
Grunty nodded.
"So that's it!"
Rootes fairly shrieked in fury.
"You mean we been shipped out
all this
time with a coupla God
damned fairies? Why, if
I'd a'
known that I'd a' killed
'em!"
"Yuh."
Rootes looked
up at
him with
a growing
respect and con-
siderable amusement. "So you got rid
of 'em
so's I wouldn't kill 'em and
mess everything up?" He scratched
his head.
"Well, I'll be billy-be-damned.
You got
a think-tank
on you
after all. Anything I
can't stand, it's a fruit."
Grunty nodded.
"God," said Rootes,
"it figures. It really figures.
Their females don't look anything like
the males.
Compared with them, our females are
practically identical to us. So
the ambassador
comes, and sees what looks
like a planet full of
queers. He knows better
but he
can't stand the sight. So
back he goes to Dirbanu, and
Earth gets brushed off."
Grunty nodded.
"Then these pansies
here run off to Earth,
figuring they'll be at home. They
damn near made it, too.
But Dirbanu
calls 'em back, not wanting the
likes of them representing their planet. I don't blame
'em a
bit. How would you feel
if the
only Terran on Dirbanu
was a
fluff? Wouldn't you want him
out of there, but quick?"
Grunty said
nothing.
"And now," said Rootes, "we better
give Dirbanu the good news."
He went
forward to the communicator.
It took a
surprisingly short time to contact
the shrouded'
planet. Dirbanu acknowledged and coded out a
greeting. The decoder over the console
printed the message for them:
greetings starmite 439. establish orbit.
can you drop prisoners to dirbanu? never mind parachute.
"Whew," said Rootes.
"Nice people. Hey, you notice
they don't say come on in.
They never expected to let
us land.
Well, what'll we tell
'em about
their lavender lads?"
"Dead," said
Grunty.
"Yeah," said Rootes.
"That's what they want anyway."
He sent rapidly.
In a few minutes
the response
clattered out of the decoder.
stand by for telepath
sweep. we must check. prisoners may be pretending death.
"Oh-oh," said the Captain. "This is where the bottom
drops out."
"Nuh," said
Grunty, calmly.
"But their
detector will locate—oh—I see what
you're driving at. No life,
no signal.
Same as if they weren't
here at all." "Yuh."
The decoder
clattered.
dirbanu grateful. consider
mission complete. do not want bodies. you may eat them.
Rootes retched. Grunty
said, "Custom." The decoder
kept clattering.
now
ready for reciprocal agreement wtth terra.
"We go home
in a
blaze of glory," Rootes exulted.
He sent,
terra also ready.
what do you SUGGEST7
The decoder
paused, then:
terra stay away from
dirbanu and dirbanu will stay away from terra. this is not a suggestion. takes
effect immediately.
"Why that bunch
of bastards!"
Rootes pounded his
codewriter, and although they circled
the planet at a
respectful distance for nearly four
days, they received no further response.
The last
thing Rootes had said before
they established the first stasis on
the way
home was: "Well, anyway—it does
me good to think of those
two queens
crawling away in that lifeboat.
Why, they can't even starve
to death.
They'll be cooped up there for
years before they
get anywhere
they can sit down."
It still rang
in Grunty's
mind as he shook off
the blackout.
He glanced aft to
the glass
partition and smiled reminiscently. "For years," he murmured. His words
curled up and spun, and said,
. . . Yes; love requires the focal space
Of recollection or of hope,
Ere it can measure its own scope.
Too soon, too soon comes death to show
We love more deeply than we know!
Dutifully, then,
came the words: Coventry Patmore, born 1823.
He rose slowly
and stretched,
revelling in his precious privacy. He crossed to the
other couch and sat down
on the
edge of it.
For a time he
watched the Captain's unconscious face, reading it with great
tenderness and utmost attention, like a mother with an
infant.
His words said,
Why must we love where the
lightning strikes, and not where we choose?
And they said,
But I'm glad it's you,
little prince. I'm glad it's you.
He put out
his huge
hand, and with a feather
touch, stroked the sleeping lips.
3t "Wasn't
Syzygy
Better
not read
it. I mean it. No—this isn't one of
those "perhaps it will
happen to you" things. It's
a lot
worse than that. It might very
possibly be happening to you
right now. And you won't know
until it's over. You can't,
by the
very nature of things.
(I wonder
what the population really is?)
On the other
hand, maybe it won't make
any difference
if I do tell you about
it. Once
you get
used to the idea, you
might even be able
to relax
and enjoy
it. Heaven
knows there's plenty to enjoy—and again
I say
it—by the very nature of things.
All right,
then, if you think you
can take
it. .
. .
I met her
in a
restaurant You may know the
place— Murphy's. It has
a big
oval bar and then a
partition. On the other side of
the partition
are small
tables, then an aisle, then
booths.
Gloria was sitting
at one
of the
small tables. All of the
booths but two were
empty; all the other small
tables but one were unoccupied, so there was plenty
of room
in the
place for me.
But there was
only one place I could
sit—at her table. That was because,
when I saw Gloria, there
wasn't anything else in the world.
I have
never been through anything like
that. I just stopped-dead. I dropped
my briefcase
and stared
at her.
She had gleaming auburn
hair and olive skin. She
had delicate
high-arched nostrils and a carved
mouth, lips that were curved above like gull's wings
on the
down-beat, and full below. Her eyes
were as sealed and spice-toned
as a
hot buttered rum, and as deep
as a
mountain night.
Without taking my
eyes from her face, I
groped for a chair and sat
opposite her. I'd forgotten everything.
Even about being hungry. Helen hadn't,
though. Helen was the head waitress
and a
swell person. She was fortyish
and happy. She didn't know my
name but used to call
me "The
Hungry Fella." I never
had to
order. When I came in
she'd fill me a bar-glass full
of beer
and pile
up two
orders of that day's Chefs Special
on a
steak platter. She arrived with
the beer, picked up my briefcase,
and went
for the
fodder. I just kept on looking
at Gloria,
who, by this time, was
registering considerable amazement, and a little awe.
The awe,
she told
me later, was conceived
only at the size of
the beer-glass,
but I have my doubts about
that.
She spoke
first. "Taking an inventory?"
She had one
of those
rare voices which makes noises
out of all other sounds. I
nodded. Her chin was rounded,
with the barest suggestion of a
cleft, but the hinges of
her jaw
were square.
I think
she was
a little
flustered. She dropped her eyes—
I was glad, because I could
see then
how very
long and thick her lashes were—and
poked at her salad. She
looked up again, half-smiling.
Her teeth
met, tip to tip. I'd
read about that but had never
actually seen it before. "What
is it?"
she asked.
"Have I made a
conquest?"
I nodded
again. "You certainly have."
"Well!" she
breathed.
"Your name's
Gloria," I said positively.
"How did
you know?"
"It had
to be,
that's all."
She looked
at me
carefully, at my eyes, my
forehead, my shoulders. "If your name
is Leo,
I'll scream." "Scream then.
But why?"
.
"I—I've always
thought I'd meet a man
named Leo, and—"
Helen canceled the
effects of months of good
relations between herself and me,
by bringing
my lunch
just then. Gloria's eyes widened when
she saw
it. "You
must be very fond of
lobster hollandaise."
"I'm very fond
of all
subtle things," I said, "and
I like
them in great masses."
"I've never
met anyone
like you," she said candidly.
"No one
like you ever has."
"Oh?"
I picked
up my
fork. "Obviously not, or there'd
be a
race of us." I scooped up
some lobster. "Would you be
good enough to watch carefully while
I eat?
I can't
seem to stop looking at you,
and I'm
afraid I might stab my
face with the fork."
She chortled.
It wasn't
a chuckle,
or a
gargle. It was a true
Lewis Carroll chortle. They're
very rare. "I'll watch."
"Thank you.
And while
you watch,
tell me what you don't
like."
"What I don't like? Why?"
"I'll probably
spend the rest of my
life finding out the things you do like, and
doing them with you. So
let's get rid of the nonessentials."
She laughed. "All
right. I don't like tapioca
because it makes me feel conspicuous,
staring that way. I don't
like furniture with buttons
on the
upholstery; lace curtains that cross each other; small flower-prints,
hooks-and-eyes and snap
fasteners where zippers ought
to be;
that orchestra leader with the candy
saxophones and the yodeling brother;
tweedy men who smoke pipes; people
who can't
look me in the eye
when they're lying; night
clothes; people who make mixed
drinks with Scotch—my, you eat fast."
"I just do
it to
get rid
of my
appetite so I can begin
eating for esthetic reasons. I like
that list."
"What don't
you like?"
"I don't like
literary intellectuals with their conversations
all dressed up in
overquotes. I don't like bathing-suits
that don't let the sun in
and I
don't like weather that keeps
bathing-suits in. I
don't like salty food; clinging-vine
girls; music that doesn't go anywhere
or build
anything; people who have forgotten how to wonder like
children; automobiles designed to
be better
streamlined going backwards than going
forward; people who will
try anything
once but are afraid to
try it
twice and acquire a
taste; and professional sceptics." I went back to my
lunch.
"You bat a
thousand," she said.
"Something remarkable is happening here."
"Let it happen,"
I cautioned.
"Never mind what it is
or why. Don't be like the
guy who
threw a light-bulb on the
floor to find out
if it
was brittle."
Helen passed and I ordered
a Slivovitz.
"Prune brandy!"
cried Gloria. "I love it!"
"I know.
It's for you."
"Some day you're
going to be wrong," she said, suddenly somber, "and that will be
bad."
"That will be
good. It'll be the difference
between harmony and contrast, that's
all."
"Leo—"
"Mm?"
She brought her
gaze squarely to me, and
it was
so warm
I could feel it
on my
face. "Nothing. I was just
saying it, Leo. Leo!"
'
Something choked
me—not the lobster. It was
all gone.
"I have
no gag
for that.
I can't
top it.
I can
match it, Gloria."
Another thing
was said,
but without
words.
There are still
no words
for it.
Afterward she reached across and touched
my hand
with her fingertips. I saw
colors.
I got up
to go,
after scribbling on a piece
of the
menu. "Here's my phone
number. Call me up when
there's no other way out."
She raised
her eyebrows.
"Don't you want my phone,
or my address, or anything?" "No," I said.
"But—"
"This means
too much,"
I said.
"I'm sorry if I seem
to be
dropping it in your
lap like
this. But any time you
are with
me, I want it to be
because you want to be
with me, not because you
think it's what I might
want. We've got to be
together because we are
traveling in the same direction
at approximately the same
speed, each under his own
power. If I call you up
and make
all the
arrangements, it could be that I
was acting
on a
conditioned reflex, like any other
wolf. If you call, we can
both be sure."
"It makes sense."
She raised
those deep eyes to me.
Leaving her was coming up
out of
those eyes hand over hand.
A long haul. I only just
made it
Out on
the street
I tried
valiantly to get some sense
of proportion.
The most
remarkable thing about the whole
remarkable business was simply this:
that in all my life
before, I had never been able
to talk
to anyone
like that. I had always
been diffident, easy-going, unaggressive to a fault,
and rather
slow on the uptake.
I felt like
the daydreams
of the
much advertised 97-pound weakling
as he
clipped that coupon.
"Hey—you!"
I generally answered
to that
as well
as anything
else. I looked up and recoiled
violently. There was a human
head floating in midair next to
me. I
was so
startled I couldn't even stop walking.
The head
drifted along beside me, bobbing
slightly as if invisible
legs carried an invisible body
to which
the visible head was
attached. The face was middle-aged,
bookish, dryly humorous.
"You're quite
a hell
of a
fellow, aren't you?"
Oddly, my tongue
loosened from the roof of
my mouth.
"Some pretty nice
people think so," I faltered.
I looked
around nervously, expecting a
stampede when other people saw
this congenial horror.
"No one can
see me
but you,"
said the head. "No one
that's likely to make a fuss,
at any
rate."
"Wh-what do
you want?"
"Just wanted to
tell you something," said the
head. It must have had a
throat somewhere because it cleared
it. "Parthenogenesis,"
it said
didactically, "has little survival value,
even with syzygy. Without it—" The
head disappeared. A little lower down, two bony, bare
shoulders appeared, shrugged
expressively, and vanished. The
head reappeared. "—there isn't
a chance."
"You don't
say," I quavered.
It didn't
say. Not any more, just
then, It was gone.
I stopped, spun
around, looking for it. What
it had
told me made as little sense
to me,
then, as its very appearance.
It took quite a while for
me to
discover that it had told
me the
heart of the thing
I'm telling
you. I do hope I'm
being a little more lucid than
the head
was.
Anyway, that was
the first
manifestation of all. By itself,
it wasn't enough to
make me doubt my sanity.
As I
said, it was only the first,
I might
as well
tell you something about Gloria.
Her folks
had been poor enough
to evaluate
good things, well enough off to be able to
have a sample or two
of these
good things. So Gloria could appreciate
what was good as well
as the
effort that was necessary
to get
it. At
twenty-two she was the assistant buyer of a men's
department store. (This was toward
the end
of the
war.) She needed some extra
money for a pet project, so
she sang
at a
club every night. In her
"spare" time she practiced
and studied
and at
the end
of a
year she had her
commercial pilot's license. She spent
the rest of the war ferrying
airplanes.
Do you begin
to get
the idea
of what
kind of people she was?
She was one
of the
most dynamic women who ever
lived. She was thoughtful and articulate
and completely
un-phony.
She was strong.
You can
have no idea—no; some of
you do
know how strong. I
had forgotten.
. .
. She
radiated her strength. Her strength surrounded
her like
a cloud
rather
than like armor,
for she
was tangible
through it She influenced everything and everyone she
came near. I felt, sometimes,
that the pieces of ground
which bore her footprints, the chairs she used, the
doors she touched and the
books she held, continued to radiate
for weeks
afterward, like the Bikini ships.
She was completely
self-sufficient. I had hit the matter squarely when I
insisted that she call me
before we saw each other again. Her very presence
was a
compliment. When she was with me,
it was,
by definition,
because that was where she would
rather be than any other
place on earth. When she
was away from me,
it was
because to be with me
at that
time would not have been a
perfect thing, and in her
way she
was a perfectionist.
Oh, yes—a
perfectionist. I should know!
You ought to
know something about me, too,
so that
you can realize how completely a thing like this
is done,
and how
it is being done to so
many of you.
I'm in my
twenties and I play guitar
for a
living. I've done a lot of
things and I carry around
a lot
of memories
from each of them—things that only
I could
possibly know. The color of the
walls in the rooming house
where I stayed when I
was "on the beach" in Port
Arthur, Texas, when the crew
of my
ship went out on
strike. What kind of flowers
that girl was wearing the night
she jumped
off the
cruise ship in Montego Bay, down in Jamaica.
I can remember,
hazily, things like my brother's
crying because he was
afraid of the vacuum cleaner,
when he was four. So I
couldn't have been quite three
then. I can remember fighting
with a kid called Boaz,
when I was seven. I remember Harriet, whom I
kissed under a fragrant tulip
poplar one summer dusk
when I was twelve. I remember
the odd little lick that drummer
used to tear off when,
and only
when he was really
riding, while I was playing
at the
hotel, and the way the trumpet
man's eyes used to close
when he heard it. I remember
the exact
smell of the tiger's wagon
when I was pulling ropes on
the Barnes
Circus, and the one-armed roustabout
who used
to chantey
us along
when we drove the stakes, he
swinging a twelve-pound maul with
the rest of us—
"Hit down, slap it down, haul back, snub,
bub, "Half back, quarter back, all back, whoa!"
76
—he used to
cry, with the mauls rat-tatting
on the
steelbound peg and the
peg melting
into the ground, and the
snubber grunting over his
taut half-hitch while the six
of us
stood in a circle around the
peg. And those other hammers,
in the
blacksmith's shop in Puerto
Rico, with the youngster swinging
a sledge
in great
full circles, clanging on the
anvil, while the old smith touched
the work
almost delicately with his shaping hammer and then tinkled
out every
syncopation known to man
by bouncing
it on
the anvil's
hom and
face between his own strokes and
those of the great metronomic
sledge. I remember the
laboring and servile response of
a power shovel under my hands
as they
shifted from hoist to crowd to
swing to rehaul controls, and
the tang
of burning
drum-frictions and hot crater
compound. That was at the
same quarry where the
big Finnish
blast foreman was killed by a
premature shot. He was out
in the
open and knew he couldn't get clear. He stood
straight and still and let
it come,
since it was bound
to come,
and he
raised his right hand to
his head. My mechanic said he
was trying
to protect
his face
but I thought at the time
he was
saluting something.
Details; that's whaj
I'm trying
to get
over to you. My head
was full of details
that were intimately my own.
It was
a little
over two weeks—sixteen days, three
hours, and twenty-three minutes, to be
exact—before Gloria called. During that time
I nearly
lost my mind. I was
jealous, I was worried, I was
frantic. I cursed myself for
not having
gotten her number—why, I didn't even
know her last name! There
were times when I
determined to hang up on
her if
I heard
her voice, I was
so sore.
There were times when I
stopped work—I did a
lot of
arranging for small orchestras—and sat before the silent phone,
begging it to ring. I
had a
routine worked out: I'd
demand a statement as to
how she
felt about me before I let
her say
another thing. I'd demand an
explanation of her silence. I'd
act casual
and disinterested.
I'd—
The phone did
ring, though, and it was
Gloria, and the dialogue went
like so:
"Hello?"
"Leo."
"Yes, Gloria!" "I'm coming up."
"I'm waiting."
And that
was it.
I met
her at
the door.
I had
never touched her before, except for
that one brief contact of
her hands;
and yet, with perfect confidence, with no idea of
doing anything different, I took her
in my
arms and kissed her. This
whole thing has its terrible aspects,
and yet,
sometimes I wonder if moments like that don't justify
the horror
of it.
I took her
hand and led her into
the living
room. The room wavered like an
underwater scene because she was
in it.
The air tasted different. We sat
close together with our hands
locked, saying that wordless
thing with our eyes. I
kissed her again. I didn't ask
her anything
at all.
She had the
smoothest skin that ever was.
She had
a skin
smoother than a bird's
throat. It was like satin-finished
aluminum, but warm and yielding.
It was
smooth like Gran' Marnier between
your tongue and the roof
of your
mouth.
We played records—Django
Reinhardt and The New Friends of Rhythm, and Bach's
Passacaglia and Fugue and Tubby the Tuba. I showed
her the
Smith illustrations from Fantazius Mallare and my
folio of Ed Weston prints.
I saw
things and heard things
in them
all that
I had
never known before, though they were
things I loved.
Not one of
them—not a book, nor a
record, nor a picture, was new
to her.
By some
alchemy, she had culled the
random flood of esthetic expression (hat had come her
way, and had her choices; and
her choices
were these things that I
loved, but loved in a way exclusively hers, a way in which I could share.
We talked
about books and places, ideas
and people.
In her way, she was something
of a
mystic. "I believe that there
is something behind the
old superstitions
about calling up demons and materializations
of departed
spirits," she said
thoughtfully. "But I don't
think it was ever done
with mumbo-jumbo—witches' brew
and pentagrams
and toads'
skins stuffed with human hair buried
at the
crossroads on a May midnight, unless these rituals were
part of a much larger
thing —a purely psychic and un-ghostly
force coming from the •wizard' himself."
"I never
thought much about it," I
said, stroking her hair. It
is the only hair that was
not fine
that I have ever touched
with pleasure. Like everything
else about her, it was
strong and controlled and glowing.
"Have you ever tried anything
like that?
You're some sort
of a sorceress. I know when I'm enchanted
at any rate."
"You're not
enchanted," she said
gravely. "You're not a thing with
magic on it. You're a
real magic all by yourself."
"You're a darling," I said. "Mine."
"I'm not!" she answered, in that
odd way
she had
of turning
aside fantasy for fact.
"I don't belong to you.
I belong
to me!"
I must have
looked rather stricken, for she
laughed suddenly and kissed my
hand. "What belongs to you
is only
a large part of 'us,'" she explained carefully. "Otherwise you belong
to you
and I
belong to me. Do you
see?"
"I think I
do," I said slowly. "I
said I wanted us to
be together
because we were both travelling
together under our own power. I—didn't know it was
going to be so true,
that's all."
"Don't try to
make it any different, Leo. Don't ever. If I started to really
belong to you, I wouldn't
be me any more, and then you wouldn't have
anything at all."
"You seem
so sure
of these
hazy things."
'They aren't hazy
things! They're important. If it
weren't for these things, I'd have
to stop
seeing you. I—would stop seeing you."
I put
my arms
tight around her. "Don't talk about that," I whispered, more frightened than I have ever
been in my life before. 'Talk about something else.
Finish what you were saying about pentagrams and spirits."
She was still
a moment.
I think
her heart
was pounding
the way mine was,
and I
think she was frightened too.
"I spend a
lot of
time reading and mulling over
those things," she said
after a quiet time. "I don't know why.
I find
them fascinating. You know
what, Leo? I think too
much has been written about manifestations
of evil.
I think
it's true that good is more
powerful than evil. And I
think that far toq much
has been written and
said about ghosties an' ghoulies
an' things
that go 'boomp' i'
th' nicht,
as the
old Scottish
prayer has it I think those
things have been too underlined.
They're remarkable enough, but have
you ever
realized that things that are
remarkable are by definition,
rare?"
"If the cloven-hoofed
horrors and the wailing banshees
are remarkable—which they are—then
what's commonplace?"
She spread her
hands—square, quite large hands, capable
and beautifully kept. "The
manifestations of good,
of course.
I believe that they're
much easier to call up.
I believe
they happen all the time. An
evil mind has to be
very evil before it can project
itself into a new thing
with a life of its
own. From all accounts I have
read, it takes a tremendously
powerful mind to call up even
a little
demon. Good things must be
much easier to materialize,
because they fall in the
pattern of good living. More people
live good lives than such
thoroughly bad ones that
they can materialize evil things."
"Well then, why
don't more people bring more
good things from behind this mystic
curtain?"
"But they do!"
she cried.
"They must! The world is
so full
of good things! Why
do you
suppose they're so good? What
put the innate goodness
into Bach and the Victoria
Falls and the color of your
hair and Negro laughter and
the way
ginger ale tickles your nostrils?"
I shook my
head slowly. "I think that's
lovely, and I don't like it."
"Why not?"
I looked at
her. She was wearing a
wine-colored suit and a marigold silken
kerchief tucked into the throat.
It reflected
on the warm olive of her
chin. It reminded me of
my grandmother's
saying when I was very
small. "Let's see if you
like butter," as she
held a buttercup under my
chin to see how much yellow
it reflected.
"You are good," I said
slowly, searching hard for the
words. "You are about the—the
goodest thing that ever happened. If
what you say is really
true, then you might be just
a shadow,
a dream,
a glorious
thought that someone had."
"Oh, you
idiot," she said, with sudden
tears in her eyes. "You big, beautiful hunk of
idiot!" She pressed me close
and bit my cheek so hard
that I yelped. "Is that
real?"
"If it isn't,"
I said,
shaken, "I'll be happy to
go on
dreaming.
She stayed
another hour—as if there were
such a thing as time when
we were
together—and then she left. I
had her
phone number by then.
A hotel.
And after
she was
gone, I wandered around my apartment,
looking at the small wrinkles
in the couch-cover where she had
sat, touching the cup she
had held, staring at
the bland
black surface of a record,
marvelling at the way its
grooves had unwound the Passacaglia for her. Most
wonderful of all was a
special way I discovered to turn my head as
I moved.
Her fragrance
clung to my cheek, and if
I turned
my face
just so, I could sense
it. I
thought about every one
of those
many minutes with her, each by
itself, and the things we
had done.
I thought,
too, about the things we had
not done—I
know you wondered— and I gloried
in them.
For, without a word spoken,
we had
agreed that a thing
worth having was a thing
worth awaiting and that where faith
is complete,
exploration is uncalled for.
She came back
next day, and the day
after. The first of these two
visits was wonderful. We sang,
mostly. I seemed to know all
her very
favorite songs. And by a
happy accident, my pet key on
the guitar—B
flat—was exactly within her lovely contralto range. Though I
say it
as shouldn't,
I played
some marvellous guitar behind
and around
what she sang. We laughed a
lot, largely at things that
were secret between us—is there a
love anywhere without its own
new language?
—and we talked for
a long
time about a book called
"The Fountainhead" which seemed
to have
had the
same extraordinary effect on her
that it had on me;
but then,
it's an extraordinary book.
It was
after she left that day
that the strangeness began— the strangeness that turned into
such utter horror. She hadn't
been gone more than
an hour
when I heard the frightened
scramble of tiny claws
in the
front room. I was poring
over the string-bass part of a
trio arrangement I was doing
(and not seeing it for my
Gloria-flavored thoughts) and
I raised
my head and listened.
It was
the most
panic-struck scurrying imaginable, as
if a
regiment of newts and salamanders
had broken ranks in a wild
retreat. I remember clearly that
the little
claw susurrus did not disturb
me at
all, but the terror behind
the movement
startled me in ways that
were not pleasant.
What
were they running from? was infinitely more important than What were they?
Slowly I put down
the manuscript
and stood
up. I
went to the wall and along
it to
the archway,
not so
much to keep out of sight
as to
surprise the thing
that had
so terrorized
the possessors of those
small frightened feet.
And that was
the first
time I have ever been
able to smile while the hackles
on the
back of my neck were
one great
crawling prickle. For there
was nothing
there at all; nothing to glow in the dark
before I switched on the
overhead light, nothing to show afterward.
But the
little feet scurried away faster—there must have been hundreds
of them—tapping
and scrabbling out a
perfect crescendo of horrified escape.
That was what made my hackles
rise. What made me smile—
The sounds
radiated from my feetl
I stood
there in the archway, my
eyeballs throbbing with the effort to
see this
invisible rout; and from the
threshold, to right and left and
away into the far corners
of the
front room, ran the sounds of
the little
paws and tiny scratching claws. It was as if.
they were being generated under
my soles,
and then fleeing madly.
None ran behind me. There
seemed to be something keeping them
from the living room. I
took a cautious step further into
the front
room, and now they did run
behind me, but only as
far as
the archway.
I could
hear them reach it
and scuttle
off to
the side
walls. You see what made me
smile? -1 was the horror that frightened them so!
The sound gradually
lessened. It was not that
it lessened
in over-all intensity. It was just there
were fewer and fewer creatures running away. It diminished
rapidly, and in about ninety seconds it had reduced
to an
occasional single scampering. One invisible
creature ran around and around
me, as
if all
the unseen holes in
the walls
had been
stopped up and it was
frantically looking for one.
It found
one, too, and was gone.
I laughed then
and went
back to my work. I
remember that I thought quite clearly
after that, for a while.
I remember
writing in a glissando passage that was
a stroke
of genius—
something to drive the
dog-house slapper crazy but guaranteed
to drive the customers
even crazier if it could
be done
at all.
I remember zoom-zooming it off under my
breath, and feeling mightily pleased with
myself over it
And then
the reaction
struck me.
Those little
claws—
What was happening to me?
I thought instantly
of Gloria.
There's some deadly law of
compensation working here, I thought. For every
yellow light, a purple shadow. For
every peal of laughter, a
cry of
anguish somewhere. For the
bliss of Gloria, a touch
of horror
to even
things up.
I licked
my lips,
for they
were wet and my tongue
was dry.
What was happening to
me?
I thought again
of Gloria,
and the
colors and sounds of Gloria, and most of all,
the reality,
the solid
normalcy of Gloria, for all her
exquisite sense of fantasy.
I couldn't
go crazy.
I couldn't! Not now! I'd be—unfit.
Unfit! As terrifying
to me,
then, as the old cry
of "Unclean" was in
the Middle
Ages.
"Gloria,
darling," I'd have to
say, "Honey, we'll just have to call it
quits. You see, I'm off my trolley. Oh, I'm quite serious. Yes indeedy. The
men in the white coats will come around and back up their little wagon to the
door and take me away to the laughing, academy. And we won't see each other any
more. A pity. A great pity. Just give me a hearty little old handshake, now,
and go find yourself another fellow."
"Glorial" I yelled. Gloria was all
those colors, and the lovely sounds, and the fragrance
that clung to my cheek
and came to me when I
moved and held my head
just so.
"Oh, I dunno,"
I moaned.
"I just don't know what
to do!
What is it? What
is it?"
"Syzygy."
"Huh?"
I came
bolt upright, staring around wildly.
Twenty inches over the couch hovered
the seamed
face of my jovial phantom of the street outside
Murphy's. "You! Now I know
I'm off my—hey! What
is syzygy?"
"What's happening
to you."
"Well, what
is happening
to me?"
"Syzygy." The head grinned engagingly. I put my head
in my hands. There is an
emotional pitch—an unemotional pitch, really—at which nothing is surprising,
and I'd
reached it "Please explain,"
I said
dully. "Tell me who you
are, and what you mean by
this sizz-sizz whatever-it-is."
"I'm not
anybody," said the
head, "and syzygy is a
concomitant of parthenogenetic and certain
other low types. I think what's happening is syzygy. If it
isn't—" The head disappeared, a hand with spatulate
fingers appeared and snapped its fingers explosively; the hand
disappeared, the head reappeared and smiled, "—you're a gone goose."
"Don't do that," I said
miserably.
"Don't do
what?"
"That—that piecemeal
business. Why do you do
it?" "Oh—that. Conservation of energy. It works
here too, you know."
"Where is
Tiere'?'*
"That's a little
difficult to explain until you
get the
knack of it. It's the place
where reverse ratios exist. I
mean, if something stacks up
in a
three to five ratio there,
it's a five to three
ratio here. Forces must
balance."
I almost had
it. What
he said
almost made sense. I opened my mouth to question him but
he was
gone.
After that
I just
sat there.
Perhaps I wept
And Gloria
came the next day, too.
That was bad. I did
two wrong things. First,
I kept
information from her, which was inexcusable.
If you
are going
to share
at all,
you must
share the bad things
too. The other thing I
did was
to question
her like a jealous
adolescent.
But what else
could be expected? Everything was changed. Everything
was different.
I opened
the door
to her
and she
brushed past me with
a smile,
and not
a very
warm one at that, leaving me
at the
door all outstretched aims and
large clumsy feet.
She shrugged
out of
her coat
and curled
up on
the couch.
"Leo, play some music."
I felt like
hell and I know I
looked it. Did she notice?
Did she even care? Didn't it
make any difference at all
how I
felt, what I was going through?
I went and
stood in front of her.
"Gloria," I said
sternly, "where have you
been?"
She looked up
at me
and released
a small,
retrospective sigh that turned
me bright
green and sent horns sprouting
out of my scalp. It was
such a happy, satisfied little
sound. I stood there glowering at
her. She waited a moment
more and then got up, switched
on the
amplifier and turntable, dug out
the "Dance of the
Hours," turped the volume up,
added too much bass, and switched
in the
volume expander, which is quite
the wrong thing to use on
that record. I strode across
the room
and turned the volume
down.
"Please, Leo,"
she said
in a
hurt tone. "I like it
that way."
Viciously I turned
it back
up and
sat down
with my elbows on my knees
and my
lower lip stuck out. I
was wild.
This was all wrong.
I
know what I should do, I thought sullenly.
1 ought to yank the plug on
the rig and stand up and tell her off.
How right I
was! But I didn't do
it. How
could I do it? This was
Gloria! Even when
I looked
up at
her and
saw her
staring at me, saw
the sligHt
curl to her lip, I
didn't do it. Well, it was
too late
then. She was watching me,
comparing me with—
Yes, that
was it.
She was
comparing me with somebody. Somebody who was different from
her, someone who rode roughshod over everything delicate and
subtle about her, everything about her
that I liked and shared
with her. And she, of course,
ate it
up.
I took refuge in the
tactic of letting her make
the first
move. I think, then, that she despised me.
And rightly.
A bit of
cockney dialogue I had once
heard danced through my mind:
"D'ye love
us, Alf?"
"Yus."
"Well, knock
us abaht
a bit."
You see?
I knew
the right
things to do, but—
But this
was Gloria.
I couldn't.
The record
finished, and she let the
automatic shut off the turntable. I think she expected
me to
turn it over. I didn't.
She said, "All right, Leo. What
is it?"
tiredly.
I said to
myself, "I'll start with the
worst possible thing that could happen. She'll deny that,
and then
at least
I'll feel better." So I said
to her,
"You've changed. There's somebody else."
She looked up
at the
picture molding and smiled sleepily.
"Yes," she said. "There
certainly is."
"Uff!" I said,
because that caught me right
in the
solar plexus. I sat down abruptly.
"His name's
Arthur," she said dreamily. "He's
a real
man, Leo."
"Oh," I said
bitterly. "I can see it.
Five o'clock shadow and a head
full of white matter. A toupée
on his
chest and a vernacular like a boatswain. Too much shoulders, too little hips, and, to quote Thome Smith,
a voice
as low
as his
intentions. A man who never learned
the distinction
between eating and dining, whose idea
of a
hot time
consists of—"
"Stop it," she
said. She said it quite
casually and very quietly. Because my
voice was raised, it contrasted
enough to have a positively deafening effect. I stood
there with my jaw swinging like the lower gate
of a
steam-shovel as she went on,
"Don't be catty, Leo."
It was a
studied insult for her to
use such
a woman-tt>j
woman phrase, and we
both knew it. I was
suddenly filled with what the French
call ésprit d'éscalier—the wit
of the
staircase; in other words,
the belated
knowledge of the thing you should
have said if you'd only
thought of it iri time,
which you mumble frustratedly to yourself
as you
go down
the stairs
on your way out.
I should
have caught her to me
as she
tried to brush past me when
she arrived,
smothered her with— what was that
corny line? "kisses—naiu
tooth-raking kisses, that broke his lips
and hers
in exquisite,
salty pain." Then I should have
threatened her with pinking scissors—
And then I
thought of the glittering, balanced structure of self-denial I had built with
her, and I could have
cried. . . .
"Why come here
and parade
it in
front of me?" I shouted.
"Why don't you take
your human bulldozer and cross
a couple
of horizons with him?
Why come
here and rub my nose
in it?"
She stood
up, pale,
and lovelier
than I had thought a
human being could be—so beautiful that
I had
to close
my eyes.
"I came because I had to
have something to compare him
with," she said steadily.
"You are everything I have
ever dreamed about, Leo, and my
dreams are . . .
very detailed. . . ."
At last she faltered, and her
eyes were bright. "Arthur is—is—" She shook her head.
Her voice
left her; she had to
whisper. "I know everything
about you, Leo. I know
how you
think, and what you will say,
and what
you like,
and it's
wonderful, wonderful . . .
but Leo,
Arthur is something outside of
me. Don't
you see? Can't you
see? I don't always like
what Arthur does. But I can't tell what he's going to do! You—you share
everything, Leo, Leo darling, but
you don't—take anything!"
"Oh," I said
hoarsely. My. scalp was tight.
I got
up and
started across the room
toward her. My jaws hurt.
"Stop, Leo," she gasped. "Stop it, now. You can
do it,
but you'll be acting. You've never
acted before. It would be
wrong. Don't spoil what's left. No,
Leo—no . . . no
. .
."
She was right.
She was
so right.
She was
always right about me; she knew
me so
well. This kind of melodrama
was away
out of character for me. I
reached her. I took her
arm and
she closed her eyes.
It hurt
when my fingers closed on
her arm. She trembled but she
did not
try to
pull away. I got her
wrist and lifted it.
I turned
her hand
over and put a kiss
on the palm, closing her fingers
on it.
"Keep that," I said. "You
might like to have
it some
time." Then I let her
go.
"Oh Leo, darling,"
she said.
"Darling," she said,
with a curl to her lip.
. .
.
She turned
to go.
And then—
"Arhgh!"
She uttered
a piercing
scream and turned back to
me, all but bowling
me over
in her
haste to get away from
Abernathy. I stood there
holding her tight while she
pressed, crouched, squeezed against
me, and
I burst
into laughter. Maybe it was reaction—I
don't know. But I roared.
Abemathy is
my mouse.
Our acquaintance began shortly after I
took the apartment. I knew the
little son-of-a-gun was there because
I found
evidences of his depredations under the sink where
I stored
my potatoes and vegetables. So I
went out and got a
trap. In those days the kind
of trap
I wanted
was hard
to find;
it took
me four days and
a young
fortune in carfare to run
one of
them down. You see,
I can't
abide the kind of trap
that hurls a wire bar down
on whatever
part of the mouse happens
to be
available, so that the
poor shrieking thing dies in
agony. I wanted—and by heaven. I
got—one of those wirebasket effects made so that
a touch
on the
bait trips a spring which
slams a door on
the occupant.
I caught Abemathy
in the
contraption the very first night.
He was a small gray mouse
with very round ears. They
were like the finest tissue, and
covered with the softest fuzz
in the
world. They were translucent,
and if
you looked
very closely you could see the
most meticulous arrangement of hairline
blood-vessels in them. I
shall always maintain that Abemathy
owed his success in
life to the beauty of
his ears.
No one
with pretensions to a
soul could destroy such divine
tracery.
Well, I let
him alone
until he got over being
frightened and frantic, until he got
hungry and ate all the
bait, and a few hours over.
When I thought he was
good and ready to listen
to reason, I put
the trap
on my
desk and gave him a
really good talking-to.
I explained
very carefully (in simple language,
of course)
that for him to
gnaw and befoul in his
haphazard fashion was downright antisocial. I explained to him
that when I was a
child I was trained
to finish
whatever I started to eat,
and that
I did it to this day,
and I
was a
human being and much bigger
and stronger and smarter
than he was. And whatever
was good enough for me was
at least
good enough for him to
take a crack at. I really
laid down the law to
that mouse. I let him mull
over it for a while
and then
I pushed
cheese through the bars
until his tummy was round
like a ping-pong ball. Then I
let him
go.
There was
no sign
of Abemathy
for a
couple of days after that. Then I caught him
again; but since he had
stolen nothing I let him off
with a word of warning—very
friendly this time; I had been
quite stem at first, of
course—and some more cheese. Inside of
a week
I was
catching him every other night,
and the only trouble
I ever
had with
him was
one time
when I baited the trap and
left it closed. He couldn't
get in
to the
cheese and he just
raised Cain until I woke
up and
let him
in. After that I knew good
relations had been established and I did without the
trap and just left cheese
out for
him. At first he wouldn't take
the cheese
unless it was in the
trap, but he got so he
trusted me and would take
it lying
out on
the floor.
I had long since warned him
about the poisoned food that
the neighbors might leave
out for
him, and I think he
was properly scared. Anyhow, we got
along famously.
So here
was Gloria,
absolutely petrified, and in the
middle of the floor in the
front room was Abernathy, twinkling his nose and rubbing
his hands
together. In the middle of
my bellow of laughter, I had
a severe
qualm of conscience. Abernathy had had no cheese
since the day before yesterday
I Sic semper amoris. I had been fretting so much
over Gloria that I had overlooked
my responsibilities.
"Darling, I'll take
care of him," I said
reassuringly to Gloria. I led her
to an
easy-chair and went after Abernathy.
I have a noise I make
by pressing
my tongue
against my front teeth—a sort of
a squishy-squeaky
noise, which I always made
when I gave cheese to Abernathy.
He ran
right over toward me, saw Gloria,
hesitated, gave a "the hell
with it" flirt with his tail,
turned to me and ran
up'my pants-leg.
The outside,
fortunately.
Then he hugged
himself tight into my palm
while I rummaged in the
icebox with my other hand
for his
cheese. He didn't snatch at it,
either, until he let me
look at his ears again.
You never saw such
beautiful ears in your life.
I gave
him the
cheese, and broke off
another piece for his dessert,
and set
him in the comer by the
sink. Then I went back
to Gloria,
who had been watching me, big-eyed
and trembling.
"Leo—how can
you touch it?"
"Makes nice
touching. Didn't you ever touch
a mouse?"
She shuddered, looking at me as
if I
were Horatio just back from the
bridge. "I can't stand them."
"Mice? Don't tell
me that
you, of all people, really
and truly have the traditional Victorian mouse phobia!"
"Don't laugh at
me," she said weakly. "It
isn't only mice. It's any little
animal—frogs and lizards and even
kittens and puppies. I like big
dogs and cats and horses.
But somehow—"
She trembled again. "If
I hear
anything like little claws running
across the floor, or see
small things scuttling around the
walls, it drives me
crazy."
I goggled. "If
you hear—hey;
it's a good thing you
didn't stay another hour last night,
then."
"Last night?" Then, "Last night. .
. ."
she said,
in a
totally different voice, with
her eyes
looking inward and happy. She
chuckled. "I was telling—Arthur
about that little phobia of
mine last night."
If I had
thought my masterful handling of
the mouse
was going to do any good,
apparently I was mistaken. "You
better shove off," I said bitterly.
"Arthur might be waiting."
"Yes," she said,
without any particular annoyance, "he might. Goodbye,
Leo."
"Goodbye."
Nobody said
anything for a time.
"Well," she
said, "goodbye."
"Yes," I said, "I'll
call you."
"Do that,"
she said,
and went
out. ?
I sat
still on the couch for
a long
time, trying to get used
to it. Wishful thinking was no
good; I knew that. Something
had happened between us. Mostly, its
name was Arthur. The thing
I couldn't understand was how he ever
got a
show, the way things were between
Gloria and me. In all
my life,
in all
my reading, I had never heard
of such
a complete
fusion of individuals. We both
felt it when we met;
it had
had no
chance to get old. Arthur was
up against
some phenomenal competition;
for one
thing that was certain was
that Gloria reciprocated my feelings
perfectly, and one of my
feelings was faith. I could understand—if
I tried
hard—how another man might overcome this
hold, or that hold, which
I had
on her.
There are smarter men
than I, better looking ones,
stronger ones. Any of
several of those items could
go by
the board,
and leave us untouched.
But not faith!
Not that!
It was
too big;
nothing else we had was important
enough to compensate for a
loss of faith.
I got up
to turn
on the
light, and slipped. The floor
was wet.
Not only was it
wet; it was soft, I
floundered to the seven-way lamp and cranked both switches
all the
way around.
The room was
covered with tapioca. Ankle-deep on the floor, inches deep
on the
chairs and the couch.
"She's thinking
about it now," said the
head. Only it wasn't a bead
this time. It was a
flaccid mass of folded tissue.
In it
I could see pulsing blood vessels.
My stomach
squirmed.
"Sorry. I'm out
of focus."
The disgusting
thing—a sectioned brain, apparently—moved closer to me and
became a face.
I lifted
a foot
out of
the gummy
mass, shook it, and put
it back in again. "I'm glad
she's gone," I said hoarsely.
"Are you afraid of
the stuff?"
"No!" I said. "Of
course not!"
"It will go
away," said the head. "Listen;
I'm sorry
to tell
you; it isn't syzygy.
You're done, son."
"What isn't
syzygy?" I demanded. "And what
is syzygy?"
"Arthur. The
whole business with Arthur."
"Go away," I gritted. "Talk sense, or go away.
Preferably— go away."
The head shook
from side to side, and
its expression
was gentle. "Give up," it said.
"Call it quits. Remember what
was good, and fade out."
"You're no good
to me,"
I muttered,
and waded
over to the book case. I
got out
a dictionary,
glowering at the head, which
now was registering a mixture of pity
and amusement
Abruptly, the
tapioca disappeared.
I leafed through
the book.
Sizable, sizar, size, sizzle—"Try S-Y," prompted the
head.
I glared
at it
and went
over to the S-Y*s. Systemize,
systole—
"Here it
is," I said, triumphantly. "The last word in
the S
section." I read from
the book.
" 'Syzygy—either of the points
at which the moon
is most
nearly in line with the
earth and the sun, as when
it is
new or
full.' What are you trying
to tell
me—that I'm caught in
the middle
of some
astrological mumbo-jumbo?"
"Certainly not,"
it snapped.
"I will tell you, however,
that if that's all your dictionary
says, it's not a very
good one." It vanished.
"But—" I said vaguely.
I went
back to the dictionary. That's all it had to
say about
syzygy. Shaking, I replaced it.
Something cat-sized
and furry
hurtled through the air, clawed at my shoulder. I
startled, backed into my record
cabinet and landed with a
crash on the middle of
my back
in the
doorway. The thing leaped
from me to the couch
and sat
up, curling a long wide tail
against its back and regarding
me with
its jewelled eyes. A
squirrel.
"Well, hello!"
I said,
getting to my knees and
then to my feet. "Where on earth did you
come from?"
The squirrel, with
the instantaneous
motion of its kind, dived to the edge of
the couch
and froze
with its four legs wide apart,
head up, tail describing exactly its recent trajectory,
and ready
to take
off instantly
in any
direction including up. I looked at
it with
some puzzlement. "I'll go see
if I
have any walnuts," I told it. I
moved toward the archway, and
as I did so the squirrel
leaped at me. I threw
up a
hand to protect my face. The
squirrel struck my shoulder again
and leaped from it—
And as far
as I
know it leaped into the
fourth dimension or somewhere.
For I
searched under and into every
bed, chair, closet, cupboard
and shelf
in the
house, and could find no
sign of anything that even looked
like a squirrel It was
gone as completely as the masses
of tapioca.
. .
.
Tapioca! What had
the head
said about the tapioca? "She's
thinking about it now."
She—Gloria, of
course. This whole insane business was
tied up with Gloria in
some way.
Gloria not
only disliked tapioca—she was afraid
of it.
I chewed
on that
for a
while, and then looked at
the clock.
Gloria had had time
enough to get to the
hotel. I ran to the
phone, dialled.
"Hotel San
Dragon," said a chewing-gum voice.
"748, please,"
I said
urgently.
A couple
of clicks.
Then, "Hello?"
"Gloria," I said. "Listen;
I—"
"Oh, you. Listen—can
you call
me back
later? I'm very busy."
"I can and
I will,
but tell
me something
quickly: Are you afraid of squirrels?"
Don't tell me
a shudder
can't be transmitted over a telephone wire. One
was that
time, "I hate them. Call
me back
in about—"
"Why do
you hate
them?"
With exaggerated patience, she said carefully,
"When I was a little girl,
I was
feeding some pigeons and a squirrel jumped right up
on my
shoulder and scared me half
to death.
Now, please—"
"Okay, okay," I said. "Ill speak
to you
later." I hung up. She shouldn't
talk to me that way.
She had
no right—
What was
she doing
in that
hotel room, anyway?
I pushed
the ugly
thought down out of sight,
and went
and poured myself a
beer. Gloria is afraid of
tapioca, I thought, and tapioca shows
up here.
She is
afraid of the sound of small
animals' feet, and I hear
them here. She is afraid of
squirrels that jump on people,
and I
get a
squirrel that jumps on people.
That must all
make some sense. Of course,
I could
take the easy way out, and
admit that I was crazy.
But somehow,
I was no longer so ready
to admit
anything like that. Down deep inside,
I made
an agreement
with myself not to admit
that until I had
exhausted every other possibility.
A very foolish
piece of business. See to
it that
you don't
do likewise. It's probably
much smarter not to try
to figure
things out.
There was only
one person
who could
straighten this whole crazy mess out—since
the head
wouldn't—and that was Gloria, I thought
suddenly. I realized, then, why
I had
not called all bets before now.
I had
been afraid to jeopardize the thing that Gloria and
I shared.
Well, let's face it. We
didn't share it any
longer. That admission helped.
I strode
to the
telephone, and dialled the hotel.
"Hotel San
Dragon."
"748, please."
A moment's silence.
Then, "I'm sorry, sir. The
party does not wish to be
disturbed."
I stood
there looking blankly at the
phone, while pain swirled and spiralled
up inside
me. I
think that up to this
moment I had treated
the whole
thing as part sickness, part
dream; this, somehow, brought
it to
a sharp
and agonizing
focus. Nothing that she
could have done could have
been so calculated and so cruel.
I cradled
the receiver
and headed
for the
door. Before I could reach it,
gray mists closed about me.
For a
moment I seemed to be on
some sort of a treadmill;
I was
walking, but I could not reach
anything. Swiftly, then, everything was normal.
"I must
be in
a pretty
bad way,"
I muttered.
I shook
my head. It was incredible. I felt all right,
though a little dizzy. I went
to the
door and out.
The trip to
the hotel
was the
worst kind of a nightmare.
I could only conclude
that there was something strange
and serious wrong with me, completely
aside from my fury and
my hurt at Gloria.
I kept
running into these blind spells,
when everything about me
took on an unreal aspect.
The light
didn't seem right. I
passed people on the street
who weren't
there when I turned
to look
at them.
I heard
voices where there were no people,
and I
saw people
talking but couldn't hear them. I
overcame a powerful impulse to
go back
home. I couldn't go back; I knew it; I knew I had
to face
whatever crazy thing was
happening, and that Gloria had
something to do with it.
I caught
a cab
at last,
though III swear one of
them disappeared just as I
was about
to step
into it. Must have been
another of those blind
spells. After that it was
easier. I slouched quivering in a
corner of the seat with
my eyes
closed.
I paid
off the
driver at the hotel and
stumbled in through the revolving doors.
The hotel
seemed much more solid than
anything else since this
horrible business had started to
happen to me. I started
over to the desk, determined
to give
some mad life-and-death message to the clerk
to break
that torturing "do not
disturb" order. I glanced into
the coffee
room as I passed
it and
stopped dead.
She was in
there, in a booth, with—with
someone else. I couldn't see anything
of the
man but
a glossy
black head of hair and a
thick, ruddy neck. She was
smiling at him, the smile that
I thought
had been
bom and
raised for me.
I stalked over
to them,
trembling. As I reached them,
he half-rose, leaned across the table,
and kissed
her.
"Arthur . . ."
she breathed.
"That," I said firmly,
"will do."
They did
not move.
"Stop it!" I
screamed. They did not move.
Nothing moved, anywhere. It was a
tableau, a picture, a hellish
frozen thing put there to tear
me apart.
"That's all," said a now familiar
voice, gently. "That kiss did it,
son. You're through." It was
the head,
but now
he was a whole man. An
ordinary-looking, middle-sized creature he was, with
a scrawny
frame to match his unimpressive
middle-aged face. He perched on
the edge
of the
table, mercifully between me
and that
torturing kiss.
I ran to
him, grasped his thin shoulders.
"Tell me what it is," I begged him. "Tell
me, if
you know—and
I think
you know. Tell me!" I roared,
sinking my fingers into his
flesh.
He put
his hands
up and
laid them gently on my
wrists, holding them there
until I quieted down a
little. I let him go. "I
am sorry, son,"
he said.
"I hoped you would figure
it all out by yourself."
"I tried," I said. I looked
around me. The grayness was
closing in again, and
through it I could see
the still
figures of the people in the
coffee-shop, all stopped in mid-action.
It was one three-dimensional frame of
some unthinkable movie-film.
I felt
cold sweat all but squirt
from the pores of my
face. "Where am I?"
I shrieked.
"Please," he soothed. "Take it easy,
and I'll
tell you. Come over here and
sit down
and relax.
Close your eyes and don't
try to think. Just listen."
I did as
he asked,
and gradually
I stopped
shaking. He waited until he felt
that I was calm, and
then began talking.
"There is a
world of psychic things—call them living thought, call them
dreams if you like. Now,
you know
that of all animals, only human
beings can reach these psychic
things. It was a
biological accident. There is something
about humans which is tangent to
this psychic world. Humans have
the power to open
a gate
between the two worlds. They
can seldom control the
power;- often they're
not aware
of it.
But when that gate
is opened,
something materializes in the world of
the humans.
Imagination itself is enough to
do it.
If you are hungry, down deep
inside, for a certain kind
of woman, and if you picture
her to
yourself vividly enough, such a gate
might open, and there she'll
be. You
can see
her and touch her; she'll be
little different from a real
one."
"But—there is
a difference?"
"Yes, there is.
She is
not a
separate thing from you. She
is a part of you. She
is your
product. That's what I was
driving at when I mentioned
parthenogenesis. It works
like that."
"Parthenogenesis—let's see. That's the process of
reproducing without fertilization, isn't it?"
"That's right. This
'materialization' of yours
is a
perfect parallel to that.
As I
told you before, however, it
is not
a process with high survival value.
For one
thing, it affords no chance to
cross strains. Unless a living
creature can bring into itself other
characteristics, it must
die out."
"Then why
don't all parthenogenetic creatures die
out?"
"There is a
process used by which the
very simple, one-celled forms of
life take care of that.
Mind you," he broke off
suddenly, "I'm just using
all of
this biological talk as symbolism.
There are basic laws that
work in both worlds, that
work equally on the high forms
of life
and the
low. Do you see?"
"I see. These
are just
examples. But go on about
this process that the parthenogenetic creatures use to mix
their strains."
"It's very simple.
Two of
these organisms let their nuclei
flow together for a
time. Then they separate and
go their
ways again. It isn't
a reproductive
process at all. It's merely
a way in which each may
gain a part of the
other. It's called —syzygy."
"Oh," I said. "That.
But I
still don't—let me see. You
mentioned it first when
that—that—"
"When Gloria met
Arthur," the man finished smoothly.
"I said that if it were
syzygy, you'd be all right.
Well, it wasn't, as you saw
for yourself.
The outside
strain, even though it didn't suit
her as
well as you did, was
too strong.
You got
hurt. Well, in the
workings of really basic laws,
something always gets hurt."
"What about
you? Who are you?"
"I
am somebody
who has
been through it, that's all.
You must understand that my world
is different
from the one you remember. Time itself is different.
Though I started from a
time perhaps thirty years
away, I was able to
open a gate near you. Just
a little
one, of course. I did
it so
that I could try to
make you think this
thing out in time. I
believe that if you could, you would have been
spared all this. You might
even have been able to keep
Gloria."
"What's it to
you?"
"You don't
know, do you? You really
don't know?" I opened my eyes
and looked
at him,
and shook
my head.
"No, I don't. I—like
you, old man."
He chuckled. "That's
odd, you know. I don't
like me."
I craned around and looked
over at Gloria and her
man, still frozen in that strange
kiss. "Will those dream-people stay like that forever?"
"Dream people?"
"I suppose that's
what they are. 'You know,
I'm a
little proud of Gloria. How I
managed to dream up anything
so— so lovely, I'll never know.
I—hey—what's the matter?"
"Didn't you understand
what I was telling you?
Gloria is real. Gloria goes on
living. What you see over
there is the thing that happened
when you were no longer
a part of
her. Leo: she dreamed you!"
I rose to
my feet
and put
my fists
on the
table between us. "That's
a lie,"
1 choked. "I'm—I'm me, damn
you!"
"You're a detailed
dream, Leo, and a splendid
job. You're a piece of
sentient psyche from another world
injection-molded into an ideal
that Gloria dreamed. Don't try
to be
anything else. There aren't
many real humans, Leo. Most
of the
world is populated by the dreams
of a
few of
them; didn't you know, Leo? Why do you suppose
that so few people you
met knew
anything about the world
as a
whole? Why do you suppose
that humans keep their
interests confined and their environments
small? Most of them aren't
humans at all, Leo!"
"I'm me," I said
stubbornly. "Gloria couldn't have thought of all of me! Gloria
can't run a power shovel!
Gloria can't play a guitar! Gloria
doesn't know enything about the
circus foreman who sang,
or the
Finn dynamite boss who was
killed!"
"Of course not.
Gloria only dreamed a kind
of man
who was the product of those
things, or things like them.
Have you run a shovel since
you met
her? You'd find that you
couldn't, if you really
tried. You've played guitar for
no one
but her since you
met her.
You've spent all your time
arranging music that no one
will ever see or play!"
"I'm not anybody's dream!" I shouted.
"I'm not. If I was an
ideal of hers, we would
have stayed together. I failed
with her, old man; don't you
know that? She wanted me
to be
aggressive, and I wasn't."
He looked at
me so
sadly that I thought he
was going
to cry. "She wanted you to
take. You were
a part
of her,
no human can take from himself."
"She was deathly
afraid of some things that
didn't bother me at all. What
about that?"
"The squirrels, and the sound of
all the
little feet? No, Leo; they were
baseless phobias, and she had
the power
to overcome
any of
them. She never tried, but
it was
not difficult
to create you without them."
I stared
at him.
"Do you mean to—Old man,
are there
more like me, really?"
"Many, many,"
he sighed.
"But few who cling to
their nonexistent, ghostly egos as
you are
doing."
"Do the
real people know what they
are doing?"
"Very few
of them.
Very few. The world is
full of people who feel incomplete,
people who have everything they can possibly want and
yet are
unhappy, people who feel alone
in a crowd. The world is
mostly peopled by ghosts."
"But—the war! Roman
history! The new car models!
What about them?"
He shook his
head again. "Some of it's
real, some not. It depends on what the real
humans want from moment to
moment."
I thought a
minute, bitterly. Then I asked
him, "What was that you said
about coming back in world-time,
and looking
through a little gateway
at things
that had happened?"
He sighed. "If
you must hang on to the ego she
gave you," he said wearily, "you'll
stay the way you are
now. But you'll age. It will
take you the equivalent of thirty or so
years to find your way around
in that
strange psychic world, for you
will have to move
and think
like a human. Why do
you want
to do that?"
I said, with
determination, "I am
going back, then, if it
takes me a century.
I'm going
to find
me right
after I met Gloria, and I'm
going to warn me in
such a way that I'll
figure out a way to be
with Gloria for the rest
of her
life."
He put his
hands on my shoulders, and now there really
were tears in his
eyes. "Oh, you poor kid,"
he said.
I stared
at him.
Then, "What's—your name,
old man?"
"My name
is Leo."
"Oh," I said. "Oh."
7he Music
Hospital
. . .
They wouldn't
let me
go, even
when the clatter of dishes
and the meaningless talk and complaining annoyed me. They knew it
annoyed me; they must have.
Starch and boredom and the flat-white
dead smell. They knew it.
They knew I hated it, so
every night was the same.
I could go
out. Not really; not all
the way
out, to the places where people were not dressed
in gray
robes and long itchy flannel. But I could go
outside where I could see
the sky
and smell the river smell and
smoke a cigarette. If I closed the door tight
and moved
all the
way over
to the
rail, and watched and smelled very
carefully, sometimes I could forget
the things inside the building and
those inside me, too.
I liked the
night. I lit my cigarette
and I
looked at the sky. Clotted, it was, and clean
between clouds. The air was
cold and warmed me, and down
on the
river a long golden ribbon was tied to a light
on the
other side, and lay across
the water.
My music came to
me again,
faintly, tuning up. I was
very proud of my music because
it was
mine. It was a thing
that belonged to me, and not
to the
hospital like the itchy flannel
and the gray robe.
The hospital
had old
red buildings
and fences and a great many
nurses who knew briskly of
bedpans, but it had no music
about it, anywhere, anywhere.
A light mist
lay just
above the ground because there
were garbage cans in a battered
row, and the mist was
very clean and would not go
among them. Entrance music played
gently for the cat.
It was
a black
and white
mangy cat It padded out
of the
shadow into the clearing
before the cans and stood
with its head on one side,
waving its tail. It was
lean and moved like a beautiful
thing.
Then there was
the rat,
the fat
little brown bundle with its long
worm of a tail. The
rat glided
out from
between the cans, froze, and dropped
on its
belly. The music fell in
pitch to meet the rise in
volume, and the cat tensed.
There was a pain about me
somewhere and I realized distantly
that my fingernails were biting into
my tongue.
My rat, my cat, my music. The cat sprang, and the
rat drew
first blood and squealed and died
out there
in the
open where it could see
its own
blood. The cat licked its
wound and yowled and tore
at the quivering thing. There was
blood on the rat and
on the
cat and on my
tongue. ^
I turned away,
shaken and exultant, as the
music repeated its death-motif
in echo.
She was
coming out of the building.
Inside she was Miss
Starchy but now she was
a brown
bundle —a little fat brown bundle.
I was
lean and moved like a
beautiful thing . .
. she
smiled at me and turned
to the
steps. I was very happy and
I moved
along beside her, looking down at her soft throat.
We went
out into
the mist
together. In front of the cans
she stopped
and looked
at me
with her eyes very wide.
The cat watched
curiously and then went on
eating. We went on eating and
listening to the music.
Scars
There
is a time when
a thing
in the
mind is a heavy thing
to carry, and then it must
be put
down. But such is its
nature that it cannot be set
on a
rock or shouldered off on
to the
fork of a tree, like a
heavy pack. There is only
one thing
shaped to receive it, and that
is another
human mind. There is only
one time when it can be
done, and that is in
a shared
solitude. It cannot be done when
a man
is alone,
and no
man aloof
in a crowd ever does it.
Riding fence gives
a man
this special solitude until his
throat is full of it. It
will come maybe two or
three weeks out, with the days
full of heat and gnats
and the
thrum of wire under the
stretcher, and the nights
full of stars and silence.
Sometimes in those nights a chunk
will fall in the fire,
or a
wolf will howl, and just then
a man
might realize that his partner
is awake
too, and that a thing in
his mind
is growing
and swelling
and becoming
heavy. If it gets to
be heavy
enough, it is put down
softly, like fine china,
cushioned apart with thick strips
of quiet.
That is
why a
wise foreman pairs his fence
riders carefully. A man will tell
things, sometimes, things grown into
him like
the calluses from his
wire cutters, things as much
a part
of him,
say, as a notched
ear or
bullet scars in his belly;
and his
hearer should be a man who
will not mention them after
sun-up— perhaps not until
his partner
is dead—perhaps
never.
Kellet was a
man who
had calluses
from wire cutters, and a notched ear, and
old bullet
scars low down on his
belly. He's dead now. Powers never
asked to hear about the
scars. Powers was a good fence
man and
a good
partner. They worked in silence, mostly, except for a
grunt when a post-hole was
deep enough, or "Here," when one
of them
handed over a tool. When they
pitched for the night, there
was no
saying "You get the wood," or "Make the coffee."
One or
the other
would just do it. Afterward they
sat and
smoked, and sometimes they talked, and sometimes they did
not, and sometimes what they
said was important to
them, and sometimes it was
not.
Kellet told about
the ear
while he was cooking one
evening. Squatting to windward
of the
fire, he rolled the long-handled
skillet deftly, found himself
looking at it like a
man suddenly
scanning the design of
a ring he
has worn
for years.
"Was in
a fight
one time,"
he said.
Powers said, "Woman."
"Yup," said Kellet.
"Got real sweet on a
dressmaker in Kelso when I was
a bucko
like you. Used to eat
there. Made good mulligan."
They were eating,
some ten minutes later, when
he continued.
" 'Long comes this other
feller, had grease on his
hair. He shore smelt purty."
"Mexican?"
"Easterner."
Powers' silence was
contributory rather than receptive at
this point.
"She said to
come right in. Spoons him
out what
should be my seconds o' stew.
Gets to gigglin' an' fussin'
over him." He paused and chewed,
and when
the nutritious
obstacle was out of the way,
spat vehemently. "Reckon
I cussed
a little.
Couldn't he'p m'self. Next
thing you know, he's a-tellin'
me what language not to use
in front
of a
lady. We went round and round
together and that ended quick.
See this
ear?"
"Pulled a knife on
you."
Kellet shook his
big, seamed head. "Nup. She hit me a
lick with the skillet. Tuk out
part o' my ear. After,
it tuk
me the
better part of an
hour with tar soap to
wash the last o' that
hair grease offen my
knuckles."
One bullet made
the holes
in his
stomach, Kellet told Powers laconically while they were having
a dip
in a
cold stream one afternoon.
"Carried a leetle
pot-belly in them days," said Kellet. "Bullet went in one side and
out t'other.
I figgered
fer a
while they might's well rack me,
stick me, bleed me, and
smoke me fer fall. But I
made it. Shore lost that
pot-belly in th' gov'ment hospital though. They wouldn't feed
me but
custards and like that. My plumbin'
was all
mixed up an' cross-connected.
"Feller in th'
next bed died one night.
They used t'wake us up 'fore
daylight with breakfast. He had
prunes. I shore wanted them prunes.
When I see he don't
need 'em I ate 'em.
Figgered nobody had to
know." He chuckled.
Later, when they
were dressed and mounted and
following the fence, he added,
"They found the prune stones
in m'bandages."
But it was
at night
that Kellet told the other
thing, the thing that grew on
like a callus and went
deeper than bullet scars.
Powers had
been talking, for a change.
Women. "They always got a
out," he complained. He put
an elbow
out of
his sleeping-bag and leaned
on it.
Affecting a gravelly soprano, he
said, "I'd like you
better, George, if you'd ack
like a gentleman."
He pulled in
the elbow
and lay
down with an eloquent thump. "I know what a
gentleman is. It's whatever in
the world you cain't be, not
if you
sprouted wings and wore a
hello. / never seen
one. I mean, I never
seen a man yet where
some woman, some time, couldn't tell
him to
ack like
he was
one."
The fire bumed
bright, and after a time
it burned
low. "I'm one," said
Kellet.
Powers then sensed
that thing, that heavy growth
of memory.
He said
nothing. He was awake, and
he knew
that somehow Kellet knew it.
Kellet said, "Know
the Pushmataha
country? Nuh—you wouldn't. Crick
up there
called Kiamichi. Quit a outfit
up Winding Stair way and was
driftin'. Come up over this
little rise and was well down
t'ord th' crick when I
see somethin'
flash in the water.
It's a woman in there.
I pulled
up pronto.
I was that
startled. She was mother-nekkid.
"Up she goes
on t'other
side 'til she's about knee-deep,
an' shakes back her hair, and
then she sees me. Makes
a dive
fer th' bank, slips, I reckon.
Anyway, down she goes an'
lays still.
"I tell you,
man, I felt real bad.
I don't
like to cause a lady
no upset. I'd as
soon wheeled back and fergot
the whole
thing. But what was I goin'
to do—let
her drown?
Mebbe she was hurt.
"I hightailed right down there. Figured
she'd rather be alive an' embarrassed
than at peace an' dead.
"She was hurt
all right.
Hit her
head. Was a homestead downstream a hundred
yards. Picked her up—she didn't
weigh no more'n a
buffalo calf—an' toted her down
there. Yipped, but there
wasn't no one around. Went
in, found
a bed,
an' put her on
it. Left
her, whistled up my cayuse,
an' got
to me saddlebags. When I got
back she was bleedin' pretty
bad. Found a towel for under
her head.
Washed the cut with whiskey. Four-five inches long under
the edge
of her
hair. She had that hair that's
black, but blue when the
sun's on it."
He was quiet
for a
long time. Powers found his
pipe, filled it, rose, got a
coal from the dying fire,
lit up,
and went
back to his bedroll. He said
nothing.
When he
was ready,
Kellet said, "She was alive,
but out
cold. I didn't know
what the hell to do.
The bleedin'
stopped after a while, but I
didn't know whether to rub
her wrists
or stand on m' head. I
ain't no doctor. Finally I
just set there near her to
wait. Mebbe she'd wake up,
mebbe somebuddy'd come. Mebbe
I'd have
my poke
full o' trouble if somebuddy
did come—I knowed that.
But what
was I
goin' to do—ride off?
"When it got
dark two-three hours later I
got up
an' lit
a tallow-fat lamp an' a fire,
an' made
some coffee. Used my own Arbuckle.
'Bout got it brewed, heard
a funny
kind of squeak from t'other room.
She's settin' bolt upright lookin'
at me through the door, clutchin'
the blanket
to her
so hard
she like to push
it through
to t'other
side, an' makin' her eyes
round's a hitchin' ring.
Went to her an' she
squeaked ag'in an' scrambled away off
into the corner an' tole'
me not
to touch her.
"Said, 'I
won't, ma'am. Yo're hurt. You
better take it easy.'
" 'Who
are you?'
she says.
'What you doin' here?' she
says.
"I toF her
my name,
says, 'Look, now, you're bleedin'
ag'in. Just you lie down, now,
an' let
me fix
it.'
"I don't know
as she
trusted me or she got
faint. Anyway down she went, an'
I put
a cold
cloth on the cut. She
says, 'What happened?'
"Tole her, best
I could.
Up she
comes ag'in. T was bafhin'P
she says. 'I didn't
have no—' and she don't
get no
further'n that, just squeaks
some more.
"I says, straight
out, 'Ma'am, you fell an'
hurt yo're head. I don't recall
a thing
but that.
I couldn't
do nought
but what
I did. Reckon
it was
sort of my fault anyway.
I don't
mean you no harm. Soon's you
git some
help I'll leave. Where's your
menfolks?'
"That quieted her
down. She tole me about
herself. She was homesteadin'. Had pre-emption
rights an' eighteen months left f finish th' term.
Husband killed in a rock-slide.
Swore to him she'd hold th'
land. Didn't know what she'd
do after,
but spang shore she
was a-goin'
to do
that first. Lot o' spunk."
Kellet was quiet
again. The loom of the
moon took black from the sky
and gave
it to
the eastward
ridge. Powers' pipe gurgled suddenly.
"Neighbor fourteen mile
downstream was burned out the
winter before. Feller eight
mile 'tother way gone up
to Winding Stair for a roundup,
taken his wife. Be gone
another two months. This little gal
sweat out corn and peas
for dryin',
had taters put by.
Nobuddy ever come near, almost.
Hot day, she just naturally bathed
in the
crick.
"Asked her what
about drifters like me, but
mebbe gunmen. She reached under
the bed,
drug out a derringer. Says, 'This's for sech trash.'
An' a
letde pointy knife. 'This's for
me,' she says, just
like that. I tol* her
to keep
both of 'em by her. Was
that sorry for her, liked
her grit
so, I
felt half sick with it.
"Was goin' to
turn in outside, by the
shed. After we talked some an' I made her
up some
johnny-cake, she said I c'd
bunk in th' kitchen if I
wanted. Tol' her to lock
her door.
She locked it. Big wooden baV.
I put
down m'roll an' turned in."
The moon was
a bead
on the
hill's haloed brow; a coronet,
then a crown.
Powers put
his pipe
away.
"In the mornin',"
said Kellett, "she couldn't get
up. I
just naturally kicked the
door down when she wouldn't
answer. Had a bad fever. Fast
asleep an' couldn't wake up
but for
a half minute, an' then she'd
slide off ag'in. Set by
her 'most
all day, 'cept where
1 saw to
my hoss
an' fixed
some vittles. Did for her like
you would
for a
kid. Kept washin' her face
with cold water. Never
done nothin' like that before;
didn't know much what to do,
done the best I could.
"Afternoon, she talked
for a
hour or so, real wild.
Mostly to her man, like he
was settin'
there 'stead o' me. He
was a
lucky feller. She said
. .
. '
"Be damned to
you what
she said.
But I
. .
. tuk
to an-swerin'
her oncet
in a
while, just 'Yes, honey,' when
she got
to callin' hard for
him. Man a full year
dead, I don't think she
really believed it, not
all the
way down.
She said
things to him like—like no woman
ever thought to say to
me. Anyway
. .
. when I answered thataway she'd
talk quiet. If I didn't
she'd just call and call, and
git all
roiled up, an' her head
would bleed, so what else you
expect me to do?
"Next day she
was better,
but weak's
a starveling
colt in a blowin' drought. Slept
a lot.
I found
out where
she'd been jerkin' venison, an' finished
it up.
Got some
weeds outen her black-eye peas. Went
back ever' now an' then
to see
she's all right. Remembered some red
haw back
over the ridge, rode over there
and gathered
some, fixed 'em to sun
so's she'd have 'em for dried-apple
pie come
winter.
"Four-five days
went by like that. Got
a deer
one day,
skinned it an' jerked
it. Done
some carpenterin' in th' shed
an' in th' house. Done what
I could.
Time I was fixin' the
door to the kitchen
I'd kicked
down that first mornin', she
lay a-watchin' me an'
when I was done, she
said I was good. 'Yo're good, Kellet,' she said.
Don't sound like much to
tell it. Was a whole lot."
Powers watched the
moon rise and balance itself
on the
ridge, ready to float
free. A single dead tree
on the
summit stood against it like a
black-gloved hand held to a
golden face.
Kellet said,
"Just looka that ol' tree,
so .
. .
strong-lookin' an' ...
so dead."
When the
moon was adrift, Kellet said,
"Fixed that door with a new
beam an' good gudgeons. Man
go to
kick it down now'd have a
job to
do. She—"
Powers waited.
"—she never
did use
it. After
she got
well enough to get up an'
around a bit, even. Just
left it open. Mebbe she
never thought about it. Mebbe she
did, too. Nights, I'd stretch
out in my bedroll, lay there,
and wait.
Pretty soon she'd call out,
'Good night, Kellet. Sleep
good, now.' Thing like that,
that's worth a passel o' farmin'
an' carpenterin'
. .
.
"One night, ten-'leven
days after I got there,
woke up. She was cryin' there
in the
dark in t'other room. I
called out what's the matter. She
didn't say. Just kept a-bawlin'.
Figgered mebbe her head
hurt her. Got up, went
to th'
door. Asked her if she's all
right. She just keeps a-cryin'—not
loud, mind, but cryin' hard. Thing
like that makes a man
feel all tore up.
"Went on in.
Called her name. She patted
the side
o' th'
bed. I set down. Put my
hand on her face to
see if
she was
gettin' the fever ag'in.
Face was cool. Wet, too.
She tuk
my hand in her two an'
held it hard up ag'in
her mouth.
I didn't
know she was so
strong.
"Set there
quiet for two-three minutes. Got
m'hand loose. Says, 'What you bawlin'
for, ma'am?'
"She says,
'It's good to have you
here.'
"I stood up,
says, 'You git back to
yo're rest now, ma'am.' She—"
There were minutes
between the words, but no
change in his voice when he
continued.
"—cried mebbe a
hour. Stopped sudden, and altogether.
Mebbe I slept after
that, mebbe I didn't. Don't
rightly recall.
"Next mornin'
she's up bright an' early,
fixin' chow. First time she's done
it since
she's hurt. Tole her, 'Whoa.
Take it easy, ma'am. You don't
want to tucker yo'reself out.'
"She says, 'I
coulda done this three days
ago.' Sounded mad. Don't rightly know
who she's
mad at.
Fixed a powerful good breakfast.
"That day seemed
the same,
but it
was 'way
differ'nt. Other days we mostly didn't
talk nothin' but business—caterpillars in th' tomato
vines, fix a hole in
th' smoke
shed, an' like that. This day we talked the
same things. Difference was, we
had to try hard to keep
the talk
where it was. An' one
more thing —didn't neither of us
say one
more word 'bout any work
that might have to be done—tomorrow.
"Midday, I gathered
up what
was mine,
an' packed
my saddlebags. Brought my
hoss up to th' shed
an' watered
him an' saddled him. Didn't see
her much,
but knowed
she's watchin' me from
inside th' house.
"All done, went
to pat
m'hoss once on the neck.
Hit him
so hard he shied.
Right surprised m'self.
"She come out
then. She stood a-lookin' at
me. Says,
'Goodbye, Kellet. God bless you.'
"Says good-bye to
her. Then didn't neither of
us move
for a minute. She says, 'You
think I'm a bad woman.'
"Says, 'No sech
a damn
thing, ma'am! You was a
sick one, an' powerful lonesome. You'll
be all
right now.'
"She says, 'I'm
all right.
I'll be all right long
as I
live,' she says, 'thanks to you,
Kellet. Kellet,' she says, 'you
had to
think for both of
us an'
you did.
Yo're a gentleman, Kellet,' she says.
"Mounted, then, an'
rode off. On the rise,
looked back, saw her still by
the shed,
lookin' at me. Waved m'
hat. Rode on."
The night was
a white
night now, since the mood
had shucked its buoyant gold for
its travelling
silver. Powers heard Kellet turn over,
and knew
he could
speak now if he cared to.
Somewhere a mouse screamed briefly
under an owl's silent talons. Distantly,
a.coyote's hungry call built itself
into the echoing loneliness.
Powers said, "So
that's what a gentleman is.
A man
that c'n think for two people
when the time comes for
it?"
"Naw-w," drawled Kellet scornfully.
"That's just what she come to
believe because I never touched
her."
Powers asked
it, straight.
"Why didn't you?"
A man
will tell things, sometimes, things grown into him
106 like the calluses from
his wire-cutters,
things as much a part
of him as, say, a notched
ear or
bullet scars in his belly;
and his hearer should be a
man who
will not mention them after
sun-up—perhaps not until his
partner is dead—perhaps never. Kellet said, "I caint."
Wuffy
Ransome
lay in
the dark
and smiled
to himself,
thinking about his hostess.
Ransome was always in demand
as a
house guest, purely because of his
phenomenal abilities as a raconteur.
Said abilities were entirely due
to his
being so often a house guest,
for it
was the
terse beauty of his word
pictures of people and their opinions
of people
that made him the figure he was. And all
those clipped ironies had to
do with
the people he had
met last
week-end. Staying a while at
the Joneses, he could quietly insinuate
the most
scandalously hilarious things about
the Joneses
when he week-ended with the Browns
the following
fortnight. You think Mr. and
Mrs. Jones resented that? Ah, no.
You should
hear the dirt on the
Brownsl And so it
went, a two-dimensional spiral on
the. social plane.
This wasn't the
Joneses or the Browns, though.
This was Mrs. Benedetto's ménage; and to Ransome's somewhat jaded
sense of humor, the widow
Benedetto was a godsend. She lived in a world
of her
own, which was apparently set about with quasi-important ancestors and relatives exactly
as her living room was cluttered
up with
perfectly unmentionable examples
of Victorian
rococo.
Mrs. Benedetto did
not live
alone. Far from it. Her
very life, to paraphrase the lady
herself, was wound about, was
caught up in, was
owned by and dedicated to
her baby.
Her baby was her beloved, her
little beauty, her too darling
my dear, and—so help me—her boobly
wutsi-wutsikins. In himself
he was
quite a character. He answered
to the
name of Bubbles, which was inaccurate
and offended
his dignity.
He had been christened Fluffy, but
you know
how it
is with
nicknames. He was large
and he
was sleek,
that paragon among animals, a chastened
alley-rabbit.
Wonderful things, cats.
A cat
is the
only animal which can live like
a parasite
and maintain
to the
utmost its ability
to
take care of
itself. You've heard of little
lost dogs, but you never heard
of a
lost cat. Cats don't get
lost, because cats don't belong anywhere.
You wouldn't
get Mrs.
Benedetto to believe that. Mrs. Benedetto
never thought of putting Fluffy's devotion to the test
by declaring
a ten-day
moratorium on the canned salmon.
If she
had, she would have uncovered a sense of honor
comparable with that of a
bedbug.
Knowing this—Ransome pardoned himself the pun—categorically,
Ransome found himself vastly amused.
Mrs. Benedetto's ministrations
to the
phlegmatic Fluffy were positively orgiastic. As he thought
of it
in detail,
he began
to feel that perhaps, after all,
Fluffy was something of a
feline phenomenon. A cat's
ears are sensitive organs; any
living being that could abide Mrs.
Benedetto's constant flow of conversation
from dawn till dark, and
then hear it subside in
sleep only to be
replaced by a nightshift of resounding snores; well, that was phenomenal. And
Fluffy had stood it for
four years. Cats are not renowned
for their
patience. They have, however, a very
fine sense of values. Fluffy
was getting
something out of it—worth considerably
more to him than the
discomforts he endured, too,
for no
cat likes
to break
even.
He lay still,
marvelling at the carrying power
of the
widow's snores. He knew
little of the late Mr.
Benedetto, but he gathered now that
he had
been -either a man of
saintly patience, a masochist
or a
deaf-mute. A noise like that
from just one stringy throat must
be an
impossibility, and yet,
there it was. Ransome
liked to imagine that the
woman had calluses on her palate
and tonsils,
grown there from her conversation, and it was these
rasping together that produced the
curious dry-leather quality of her
snores. He tucked the idea away
for future
reference. He might use it
next week-end. The snores
were hardly the gentlest of
lullabies, but any sound is
soothing if it is repeated
often enough.
There is an
old story
about a lighthouse tender whose
lighthouse was equipped with
an automatic
cannon which fired every fifteen minutes,
day and
night. One night, when the old
man was
asleep, the gun failed to
go off.
Three seconds after its stated time,
the old
fellow was out of his
bed and flailing around
the room,
shouting, "What was that?" And so it was with
Ransome.
He couldn't tell
whether it was an hour
after he had fallen asleep, or whether he had
not fallen
asleep at all. But he
found himself sitting on
the edge
of the
bed, wide awake, straining every nerve
for the
source of the—what was it?—
sound?—that had awakened him.
The old
house was as quiet as a
city morgue after closing time,
and he
could see nothing in the tall,
dark guestroom but the moon-silvered
windows and the thick blacknesses that were drapes. Any
old damn
thing might be hiding
behind those drapes, he thought
comfortingly. He edged
himself back on the bed
and quickly
snatched his feet off
the floor.
Not that
anything was under the bed, but
still—
A white object
puffed along the floor, through
the moonbeams,
toward him. He made no
sound, but tensed himself, ready to attack or defend,
dodge or retreat. Ransome was
by no means an admirable character,
but he
owed his reputation, and therefore
his existence,
to this
particular trait, the ability to poise
himself, invulnerable to surprise. Try
arguing with a man like that
sometime.
The white object
paused to stare at him
out of
its yellow-green
eyes. It was only Fluffy—Fluffy
looking casual and easy-going and not
at all
in a
mood to frighten people. In
fact he looked up
at Ransome's
gradually relaxing bulk and raised a longhaired, quizzical eyebrow,
as if
he rather
enjoyed the man's discomfiture.
Ransome withstood the
cat's gaze with suavity, and
stretched himself out on
the bed
with every bit of Fluffy's
own easy grace. "Well,"
he said
amusedly, "you gave me a
jolt! Weren't you taught
to knock
before you entered a gentleman's
boudoir?"
Fluffy raised a
velvet paw and touched it
pinkly with his tongue. "Do you
take me for a barbarian?"
he asked.
Ransome's lids seemed
to get
heavy, the only sign he
ever gave of being
taken aback. He didn't believe
for a
moment that the cat had
really spoken, but there was
something about the voice
he had
heard that was more than
a little
familiar. This was, of
course, someone's idea of a
joke.
Good God—it
had to
be a
joke!
Well, he had
to hear
that voice again before he
could place it. "You didn't say
anything of course," he told
the cat,
"but if you did,
what was it?"
"You heard me
the first
time," said the cat, and
jumped up on the foot of
his bed.
Ransome inched back from the
animal. "Yes," he said,
"I—thought I did."
Where on earth had he heard
that voice before? "You know,"
he said,
with an attempt at jocularity, "you should, under these
circumstances, have written
me a
note before you knocked."
"I refuse to
be burdened
with the so-called social amenities,"
said Fluffy. His coat was
spotlessly clean, and he looked
like an advertising photograph for eiderdown, but he began to wash
carefully. "I don't like you,
Ransome."
"Thanks," chuckled
Ransome, surprised. "I don't like
you either."
"Why?" asked
Fluffy.
Ransome told
himself silently that he was
damned. He had recognized the cat's
voice, and it was a
credit to his powers of
observation that he had.
It was
his own
voice. He held tight to a
mind that would begin to
reel on slight provocation, and, as usual when bemused,
he flung
out a
smoke-screen of his own variety of
glib chatter.
"Reasons for not
liking you," he said, "are
legion. They are all included in
the one
phrase—'You are a cat!'"
"I have heard
you say
that at least twice before,"
said Fluffy, "except that you have
now substituted
'cat' for 'woman.'"
"Your attitude is
offensive. Is any given truth
any the
less true for having been uttered
more than once?"
"No," said
the cat
with equanimity. "But it is
just that more clichéd."
Ransome laughed. "Quite
aside from the fact that
you can
talk, I find you
most refreshing. No one has
ever criticized my particular
variety of repartee before."
"No one was
ever wise to you before,"
said the cat. "Why don't you like cats?"
A question like
that was, to Ransome, the
pressing of a button which released
ordered phrases. "Cats,"
he said
ora-torically, "are without
doubt the most self-centered, ungrateful, hypocritical
creatures on this or any
other earth. Spawned from a mesalliance
between Lilith and Satan—"
Fluffy's eyes
widened. "Ah! An antiquarian!" he whispered.
"—they have the
worst traits of both. Their
best qualities are their beauty of
form and of motion, and
even these breathe evil. Women are
the ficklest
of bipeds,
but few
women are as fickle
as, by
nature, any cat is. Cats
are not
true. They are impossibilities,
as perfection
is impossible.
No other living creature moves with
utterly perfect grace. Only the dead
can so
perfectly relax. And nothing—simply nothing at all—transcends a cat's incomparable insincerity."
Fluffy purred.
"Pussyl Sit-by-the-fire and sing!" spat Ransome.
"Smiling up all toadying
and yellow-eyed
at the
bearers of liver and salmon and catnip! Soft little
puffball, bundle of joy, playing
with a ball on a string;
making children clap their soft
hands
to see
you, while your mean little
brain is viciously alight with the pictures your play
calls up for you. Bite
it to
make it bleed; hold it till
it all
but throttles;
lay it
down and step about it daintily;
prod it with a gentle
silken paw until it moves again,
and then
pounce. Clasp it in your
talons then, lift it, roll over
with it, sink your cruel
teeth into it while you
pump out its guts
with your hind feet. Ball
on a
string! Playactor!"
Fluffy fawned.
"To quote you, that is
the prettiest
piece of emotional claptrap that these
old ears
have ever heard. A triumph in
studied spontaneity. A symphony in
cynicism. A poem in perception. The unqualified—"
Ransome grunted.
He deeply resented
this flamboyant theft of all
his pet
phrases, but his lip
twitched nevertheless. The cat was
indeed an observant animal.
"—epitome of understatement,"
Fluffy finished smoothly. "To
listen to you, one would
think that you would like
to slaughter earth's felinity."
"I would,"
gritted Ransome.
"It would be
a favor
to us,"
said the cat. "We would
keep ourselves vastly amused,
eluding you and laughing at
the effort it cost you. Humans
lack imagination."
"Superior creature," said Ransome ironically, "why don't you do away
with the human race, if
you find
us a
bore?"
"You think we
couldn't?" responded Fluffy.
"We can out-think, outrun and
outbreed your kind. But why
should we? As long as you
act as
you have
for these
last few thousand years, feeding us,
sheltering us and asking nothing
from us but our presence for
purposes of admiration—why then, you
may remain here."
Ransome guffawed. "Nice
of you!
But listen—stop
your bland discussion of the abstract
and tell
me some
things I want to know; How
can you
talk, and why did you
pick me to talk to?"
Fluffy settled himself.
"I shall answer the question
socrati-cally. Socrates was
a Greek,
and so
I shall
begin with your last questions. What do you do
for a
living?"
"Why I—I have
some investments and a small
capital, and the interest—"
Ransome stopped, for the first
time fumbling for words. Fluffy was
nodding knowingly.
"All right, all
right. Come clean. You can
speak freely." 112
Ransome grinned.
"Well, if you must know—and
you seem
to—I am a practically
permanent house guest. I have
a considerable
fund of stories and a
flair for telling them; I
look presentable and act
as if
I were
a gentleman.
I negotiate,
at times, small loans—"
"A loan," said Fluffy authoritatively, "is something one intends to repay."
"We'll call them
loans," said Ransome airily. "Also,
at one
time and another, I
exact a reasonable fee for
certain services rendered—"
"Blackmail," said
the cat.
"Don't be crude.
All in
all, I find life a comfortable and engrossing thing."
"Q. E. D.,"
said Fluffy triumphantly. "You make
your living being scintilliant,
beautiful to look at. So
do I.
You help
nobody but yourself; you help
yourself to anything you want.
So do I. No one likes
you except
those you bleed; everyone admires and envies you. So
with me. Get the point?"
"I think so.
Cat, you draw a mean
parallel. In other words, you consider my behavior catlike."
"Precisely," said Fluffy through his whiskers.
"And that is both why and
how I
can talk
with you. You're so close
to the
feline in everything you do and think;
your whole basic philosophy is that of a
cat. You have a feline
aura about you so intense
that it contacts mine; hence
we find
each other intelligible."
"I don't
understand that," said Ransome.
"Neither do I,"
returned Fluffy. "But there it
is. Do
you like Mrs. Benedetto?"
"No!" said Ransome
immediately and with considerable emphasis. "She is
absolutely insufferable. She bores me.
She irritates me. She is the
only woman in the world
who can
do both those things to me
at the
same time. She talks too
much. She reads too little. She
thinks not at all. Her
mind is hysterically hidebound. She has a face
like the cover of a
book that no one has ever
wanted to read. She is
built like a pinch-type whiskey bottle that never had
any whiskey
in it.
Her voice
is monotonous and unmusical. Her education
was insufficient.
Her family background is mediocre, she can't
cook, and she doesn't brush her
teeth often enough."
"My, my,"
said the cat, raising both
paws in surprise. "I detect a ring of sincerity
in all
that. It pleases me. That
is
exactly the way
I have
felt for some years. I
have never found fault with her
cooking, though; she buys special
food for me. I am tired
of it.
I am
tired of her. I am
tired of her to an
almost unbelievable extent. Almost
as much
as I
hate you." "Me?"
"Of course. You're
an imitation.
Your'e a phony. Your birth is against you, Ransome.
No animal
that sweats and shaves, that opens doors for women,
that dresses itself in equally
phony imitations of the
skins of animals, can achieve
the status of a cat. You
are presumptuous."
"You're not?"
"I am different.
I am
a cat,
and have
a right
to do
as I
please. I disliked you
so intensely
when I saw you this
evening that I made up my
mind to kill you."
"Why didn't
you? Why—don't you?"
"I couldn't,"
said the cat coolly. "Not
when you sleep like a cat . .
. no,
I thought
of something
far more
amusing." "Oh?"
"Oh yes." Fluffy stretched out a
foreleg, extended his claws. Ransome noticed subconsciously how long
and strong
they seemed. The moon had gone
its way,
and the
room was filling with slate-gray light.
"What woke you,"
said the cat, leaping to
the window-sill,
"just before I came
in?"
"I don't know,"
said Ransome. "Some little noise,
I imagine."
"No indeed," said Fluffy, curling his
tail and grinning through his whiskers.
"It was the stopping of
a noise.
Notice how quiet it is?"
It was indeed.
There wasn't a sound in
the house—oh
yes, now he could hear the
plodding footsteps of the maid
on her
way from the kitchen
to Mrs.
Benedetto's bedroom, and the soft clink
of a
teacup. But otherwise—suddenly he had
it. "The old horse stopped snoring!"
"She did," said the cat. The
door across the hall opened,
there was the murmur
of the
maid's voice, a loud crash,
the most horrible scream Ransome had
ever heard, pounding footsteps
rushing down the hall, a
more distant scream, silence.
Ransome bounced out of bed.
"What the hell—"
"Just the maid,"
said Fluffy, washing between his
toes, but keeping the corners of
his eyes
on Ransome.
"She just found Mrs. Benedetto."
"Found—"
"Yes. I tore
her throat
out." "Good—God! Why?"
Fluffy poised
himself on the window-sill. "So you'd be blamed for
it," he said, and laughing
nastily, he leaped out and disappeared
in the
gray morning.
7be Sex Opposite
Budgie
slid into
the laboratory
without knocking, as usual.
She was flushed
and breathless,
her eyes
bright with speed and eagerness. "Whatcha got, Muley?"
Muhlenberg kicked the
morgue door shut before Budgie
could get in line
with it. "Nothing,"
he said
flady, "and of all the people
I don't
want to see—and at the
moment that means all the people
there are—you head the list.
Go away."
Budgie pulled off
her gloves
and stuffed
them into an oversized shoulder-bag, which she hurled
across the laboratory onto a work-surface.
"Come on, Muley. I saw
the meat-wagon
outside. I know what
it brought,
too. That double murder in
the park. Al told
me."
"Al's jaw is
one that
needs more tying up than
any of
the stiffs he taxis around," said Muhlenberg bitterly. "Well,
you're not getting near this pair."
She came oyer
to him,
stood very close. In spite
of his
annoyance, he couldn't help noticing
how soft
and full
her lips
were just then. Just then—and the
sudden realization added to the annoyance.
He had
known for a long time
that Budgie could turn on mechanisms
that made every one ofi
a man's
ductless glands purse up
its lips
and blow
like a trumpet. Every time he felt it he
hated himself. "Get away from
me," he growled. "It won't work."
"What won't,
Muley?" she murmured.
Muhlenberg looked her
straight in the eye and
said something about his preference
for raw
liver over Budgie-times-twelve.
The softness
went out of her lips,
to be
replaced by no particular hardness. She simply laughed
good-naturedly. "All right, you're immune. I'll try
logic."
"Nothing will work,"
he said.
"You will not get in
there to see those two, and
you'll get no details from
me for
any of
that couche-con-carne stew you
call a newspaper story."
"Okay," she said
surprisingly. She crossed the lab
and picked
up her handbag. She found a
glove and began to pull
it on.
"Sorry I interrupted you, Muley. I do
get the
idea. You want to be alone."
His jaw
was too
slack to enunciate an answer.
He watched
her go out, watched the door
close, watched it open again,
heard her
say in
a very
hurt tone, "But I do
think you could tell me why you won't say
anything about this murder."
He scratched his
head. "As long as you
behave yourself, I guess I do
owe you
that." He thought for a
moment. "It's not your kind of
a story.
That's about the best way
to put
it."
"Not my kind
of a
story? A double murder in
Lover's Lane? The maudlin mystery of
the mugger,
or mayhem
in Maytime?
No kidding, Muley—you're not serious!"
Budgie, this one
isn't for fun. It's ugly.
Very damn ugly. And it's serious. It's mysterious for a number of
other reasons than the ones you
want to siphon into your
readers."
"What other
reasons7"
"Medically. Biologically.
Sociologically."
"My stories
got biology.
Sociology they got likewise; stodgy
truisms about social trends
is the
way I
dish up sex in the
public prints, or didn't
you know?
So—that leaves medical. What's so strange
medically about this case?"
"Good night,
Budgie."
"Come on,
Muley. You can't horrify me."
"That I know.
You've trod more primrose pathology
in your research than Krafft-Ebing plus eleven comic books.
No, Budgie. No more."
"Dr. F.
L. Muhlenberg,
brilliant young biologist and special
medical consultant to the
City and State Police, intimated
that these aspects of the case—the
brutal murder and disfigurement of the embarrassed couple—were superficial
compared with the unspeakable facts behind
them. 'Medically mysterious',
he was
quoted as saying." She twinkled
at him.
"How's that sound?" She looked at her
watch. "And I can make
the early edition, too, with a
head. Something like DOC SHOCKED SPEECHLESS—and a subhead: Lab
Sleuth Suppresses Medical Details of
Double Park Killing. Yeah, and
your picture."
"If you dare
to print
anything of the sort," he raged, "I'll—" "All right, all
right," she said conciliatingly. "I won't I really won't."
"Promise me?" "I
promise, Muley .. . if—"
"Why should I
bargain?" he demanded
suddenly. "Get out of here."
He began to
close the door. "And something
for the
edi-117
torial page,"
she said.
"Is a doctor within his
rights in suppressing information concerning a murderous maniac
and his
methods?" She closed the
door.
Muhlenberg bit his
lower lip so hard he
all but
yelped. He ran to the door
and snatched
it open.
"Waitl"
Budgie was leaning
against the doorpost lighting a
cigarette. "I was waiting," she
said reasonably.
"Come in here,"
he grated.
He snatched
her arm
and whirled her inside, slamming the
door.
"You're a brute,"
she said
rubbing her arm and smiling
dazzlingly.
"The only way
to muzzle
you is
to tell
you the
whole story. Right?"
"Right. If I
get an
exclusive when you're ready to
break the story."
"There's probably
a kicker
in that,
too," he said morosely. He glared at her. Then,
"Sit down," he said. She did.
"I'm all yours."
"Don't change the
subject," he said
with a ghost of his
natural humor. He lit
a thoughtful
cigarette. "What do you know about
this case so far?"
"Too little," she said. "This couple were having a
conversation without words in the
park when some muggers jumped
them and killed them,
a little
more gruesomely than usual. But instead of being delivered
to the
city morgue, they were brought straight to you on
the orders
of the
ambulance interne after one quick look."
"How did you
know about it?"
"Well, if you
must know, I was in
the park.
There's a shortcut over by
the museum,
and I
was about
a hundred
yards down the path when I
. .
."
Muhlenberg waited as
long as tact demanded, and
a little
longer. Her face was
still, her gaze detached. "Go
on."
". . .
when I heard a scream,"
she said
in the
precise tone of voice which she
had been
using. Then she began to
cry.
"Hey," he said.
He knelt
beside her, put a hand
on her
shoulder. She shoved it
away angrily, and covered her
face with a damp towel. When
she took
it down
again she seemed to be laughing.
She was
doing it so badly that
he turned
away in very real embarrassment.
"Sorry," she said in a very
shaken whisper. "It. . .
was that
kind of a scream.
I've never heard anything like
it. It
did
something to me.
It had
more agony in it than
a single
sound should be able to have."
She closed
her eyes.
"Man or
woman?"
She shook
her head.
"So," he
said matter-of-factly, "what
did you
do then?"
"Nothing. Nothing at
all, for I don't know
how long."
She slammed a small fist down
on the
table. "I'm supposed to be a
reporter!" she flared.
"And there I stand like
a dummy,
like a wharf rat in concussion-shock!"
She wet
her lips.
"When I came around I was
standing by a rock wall
with one hand on it." She showed him. "Broke
two perfectly
good fingernails, I was holding on
so tight.
I ran
toward where I'd heard the
sound. Just trampled brush,
nothing else. I heard a
crowd milling around on the avenue.
I went
up there.
The meat-wagon
was there,
Al and
that young sawbones Regal— Ruggles—"
"Regalio."
"Yeah, him. They'd
just put those two bodies
into the ambulance. They were covered
with blankets. I asked what
was up. Regalio waved
a finger
and said
'Not for school-girls' and gave me
a real
death-mask grin. He climbed aboard.
I grabbed Al"and asked him what
was what.
He said
muggers had killed this couple, and
it was
pretty rugged. Said Regalio had told him to bring
them here, even before he
made a police report. They were
both about as upset as
they could get."
"I don't
wonder," said Muhlenberg.
'Then I asked if
I could
ride and they said no
and took
off. I grabbed a cab when
I found
one to
grab, which was all of
fifteen minutes later, and
here I am. Here I
am," she repeated, "getting
a story
out of
you in
the damndest
way yet.
You're asking, I'm answering."
She got
up. "You
write the feature, Muley. I'll go
on into
your icebox and do your
work."
He caught
her arm.
"Nah! No you don't! Like
the man
said —it's not for school-girls."
"Anything you
have in there can't be worse than my imagination!" she snapped.
"Sorry. It's
what you get for barging
in on
me before
I've had a chance to think
something through. You see, this
wasn't exactly two people."
"I know!"
she said
sarcastically. "Siamese twins."
He looked at her
distantly. "Yes. 'Taint funny, kiddo."
119
For once
she had
nothing to say. She put
one hand
slowly up to her mouth and
apparently forgot it, for there
it stayed.
"That's what's so ugly
about this. Those two were
... torn
apart." He closed his
eyes. "I can just see
it. I
wish I couldn't Those thugs drifting
through the park at night,
out for
anything they could get. They
hear something . . .
fall right over them ... I
don't know. Then—"
"All right, all
right," she whispered hoarsely. "I
can hear
you."
"But, damn it,"
he said
angrily, 'Tve been kicking around
this field long enough
to know
every documented case of such
a creature. And I
just can't believe that one
like this could exist without having
been written up in some
medical journal somewhere. Even
if they
were born in Soviet Russia,
some translation of a
report would've appeared somewhere."
"I know Siamese
twins are rare. But surely
such a birth wouldn't make international
headlines!"
"This one would,"
he said
positively. "For one thing, Siamese
twins usually bear more anomalies
than just the fact that
they are attached. They're
frequently fraternal rather than identical twins. More often than
not one's
born more fully developed than the
other. Usually when they're born
at all
they don't live. But
these—"
"What's so
special?"
Muhlenberg spread
his hands.
"They're perfect. They're costally
joined by a surprisingly small tissue-organ complex—"
"Wait, professor,
'Costally'—you mean at
the chest?"
'That's right.
And the
link is—was—not major. I can't
understand why they were
never surgically separated. There may be
a reason,
of course,
but that'll
have to wait on the
autopsy."
"Why wait?"
"It's all I
can do
to wait."
He grinned
suddenly. "You see, you're more of
a help
than you realize, Budge. I'm
dying to get to work on
them, but under the circumstances
I have
to wait until morning. Regalio reported
to the
police, and I know the coroner
isn't going to come around
this time of night, not if
I could
show him quintuplets in a
chain like sausages. In addition, I
don't have identities, I don't
have relatives' releases—you know. So—a superficial examination, a lot of wild
guesses, and a chance to
sound off to you to
keep myself from going nuts."
"You're using me!" "That's bad?"
"Yes—when I don't get
any fun
out of
it." He laughed. "I love those
incendiary statements of yours. I'm just not flammable."
She looked
at him,
up and
a little
sidewise. "Not at all?" "Not now."
She considered that. She looked down
at her
hands, as if they were the
problems of Muhlenberg's susceptibility. She turned the hands over.
"Sometimes," she said,
"I really enjoy it when we
share something else besides twitches
and moans.
Maybe we should be
more inhibited."
"Do tell."
She said,
"We have nothing in common.
I mean,
but nothing. We're different
to the
core, to the bone. You
hunt out facts and so do
I, but
we could
never share that because we don't use facts for
the same
things. You use facts only
to find more facts."
"What do you
use them
for?"
She smiled.
"All sorts of things. A
good reporter doesn't report
just what happens. He reports
what he sees—in many
cases a very different
thing. Any way . .
."
"Wonder how these
biological pressures affected our friends here," he mused, thumbing
over his shoulder at the
morgue.
"About the
same, I'd judge, with certain
important difficulties. But wait—were they
men or
women, or one of each?"
"I didn't tell you,
did I?"
he said
with real startlement.
"No," she said.
He opened his
mouth to answer, but could
not. The reason came.
It came
from downstairs, or outside, or
perhaps from nowhere or everywhere,
or from
a place
without a name. It was
all around them, inside,
behind them in time as
well as space. It was the
echo of their own first
cry when
they lost the first warmth and found loneliness, early, as everyone must.
It was
hurt: some the pain
of impact,
some of fever and delirium,
and some the great
pressure of beauty too beautiful
to bear.
And like pain, it
could not be remembered. It lasted as long
as it was a sound, and
perhaps a little longer, and
the frozen
time after it died
was immeasurable.
Muhlenberg became
increasingly conscious of an ache
in 121 his calves and in the
trapezoid muscles of his back.
They sent him a gradual and
completely intellectualized message
of strain, and very consciously he relieved it and
sat down.
His movement carried Budgie's arm forward,
and he
looked down at her hand, which
was clamped
around his forearm. She moved it
away, opening it slowly, and
he saw
the angry
marks of her fingers,
and knew
they would be bruises in
the morning.
She said, "That
was the
scream. The one I heard.
Wasn't once enough?"
It was only
then that he could look
far enough
out of
himself to see her face.
It was
pasty with shock, and wet,
and her
lips were pale. He
leapt to his feet. "Another
onel Come on!"
He pulled her
up and
through the door. "Don't you understand?" he blazed.
"Another one! It can't be,
but somewhere
out there it's happened
again—"
She pulled back.
"Are you sure it wasn't
. .
." She nodded at the closed
door of the morgue.
"Don't be ridiculous,"
he snorted.
"They couldn't be
alive." He hurried her
to the
stairs.
It was very
dark. Muhlenberg's office was in
an ageing
business building which boasted
twenty-five-watt bulbs on
every other floor. They
hurtled through the murk, past
the deepest doorways of the law
firm, the doll factory, the
import-export firm which imported and
exported nothing but phone calls, and all the other
dim mosaics
of enterprise.
The building
seemed quite deserted, and but
for the
yellow-orange glow of the
landings and the pathetic little
bulbs, there were no lights anywhere.
And it
was as
quiet as it was almost
dark; quiet as late night; quiet
as death.
They burst
out onto
the old
brownstone steps and stopped, afraid to look, wanting to
look. There was nothing. Nothing
but the street, a
lonesome light, a distant horn
and, far up at the corner,
the distinct
clicking of the relays in
a traffic-light
standard as they changed
an ignored
string of emeralds to an
unnoticed ruby rope.
"Go up to
the corner,"
he said,
pointing. "I'll go down the
other way. That noise
wasn't far away—"
"No," she
said. "I'm coming with you."
"Good," he said,
so glad
he was
amazed at himself. They ran north
to the
corner. There was no one
on the
street within two blocks in any
direction. There were cars, mostly
parked, one coming, but none leaving.
"Now what?" she asked.
For a moment
he did
not answer.
She waited
patiently while he listened
to the
small distant noises which made
the night so quiet. Then, "Good
night, Budge."
"Good—what!"
He waved a
hand. "You can go home
now." "But what about
the—"
"I'm tired," he said. "I'm bewildered.
That scream wrung me like a
floor-mop and pulled me down
too many
stairs too fast. There's too much
I don't
know about this and not
enough I can do about it.
So go
home."
"Aw, Muley .
. ."
He sighed.
"I know. Your story. Budgie,
I faithfully
promise you I'll give you
an exclusive
as soon
as I
have facts I can trust."
She looked
carefully at his face in
the dim
light and nodded at what she
saw there.
"All right, Muley. The pressure's
off. Call me?"
"I'll call you."
He stood
watching her walk away. Quite
a gal,
he thought.
He wondered what had
moved her to make that
odd remark
about inhibitions. They'd certainly
never bothered her before. But—perhaps
she had
something there. Sometimes when you take
what is loosely called "everything,"
you have
an odd feeling that you haven't
gotten much. He shrugged and ambled back toward the
laboratory, pondering morphology, teratology, and a case where
monstra per defectum could coexist with
monstra per fabricam
alienam.
Then he saw
the light.
It flickered out
over the street, soft and
warm. He stopped and looked up.
The light
showed in a third-story window. It was orange and
yellow, but with it was
a flaring
blue-white. It was pretty.
It was
also in his laboratory. No—not the laboratory. The morgue.
Muhlenberg groaned. After
that he saved his breath.
He needed it badly by the
time he got back to
the laboratory.
Muhlenberg dove for
the heavy
morgue door and snatched it open. A great pressure
of heat
punted a gout of smoke
into the lab. He slammed the
door, ran to a closet,
snatched out a full-length lab smock,
spun the faucets in the
sink and soaked the smock. From
another cabinet he snatched up
two glass-globe fire extinguishers.
He wrapped
the wet
cloth twice around his face and
let the
rest drop over his chest
and back. Cradling the extinguishers in one bent forearm,
he reached for the side of
the door
and grabbed
the pump-type
extinguisher racked there.
Now, suddenly
not hurrying,
he stepped
up on
the sill
and stood on tiptoe, peering through
a fold
of the
wet cloth.
Then he crouched low and peered
again. Satisfied, he stood up
and, carefully pegged the
two glass
extinguishers, one straight
ahead, one to the
right and down. Then he
disappeared into the smoke, holding the
third extinguisher at the ready.
There was a
rising moan, and the smoke
shook like a solid entity and rushed into the
room and. away. As it
cleared, Muhlenberg, head and
shoulders wrapped in sooty linen,
found himself leaning against
the wall,
gasping, with one hand on a
knife-switch on the wall. A
three-foot exhaust fan in the top
sash of one window was
making quick work of the
smoke.
Racks of chemicals,
sterilizers, and glass cabinets full
of glittering surgeon's tools lined the
left wall. Out on the
floor were four massive tables, on
each of which was a
heavy marble top. The rest of
the room
was taken
up by
a chemist's
bench, sinks, a partitioned-off
darkroom with lightproof curtains, and a massive centrifuge.
On one of
the tables
was a
mass of what looked like
burned meat and melted animal fat.
It smelled
bad—not rotten bad, but acrid and—and
wet, if a smell can
be described
that way. Through it was the
sharp, stinging odor of corrosive
chemicals.
He unwound the
ruined smock from his face
and threw
it into a corner. He walked
to the
table with the mess on
it and
stood looking bleakly at
it for
a time.
Suddenly he put out a hand,
and with
thumb and forefinger pulled out
a length
of bone.
"What a job," he breathed at length.
He walked around
the table,
poked at something slumped there and snatched his hand
away. He went to the
bench and got a pair of
forceps, which he used to
pick up the lump. It
looked like a piece
of lava
or slag.
He turned
on a
hooded lamp and studied it closely.
"Thermite, by
God," he breathed.
He stood
quite still for a moment,
clenching and unclenching his square
jaw. He took a long
slow turn around the seared horror on the morgue
slab, then carefully picked up
the forceps and hurled
them furiously into a corner.
Then he went out to the
lab and
picked up the phone. He
dialled.
"Emergency," he said. "Hello, Sue. Regalio
there? Muhlenberg. Thanks. . .
. Hello,
Doc. Are you sitting down?
All right. Now get this. I'm
fresh out of symmetrical terato-morphs. They're gone. .
. .
Shut up and I'll tell
you I I was out in the
lab talking
to a
reporter when I heard the
damndest scream. We ran
out and
found nothing. I left the
reporter outside and came
back. I couldn't've been out
more'n ten-twelve minutes. But somebody
got in
here, moved both stiffs onto one slab, incised them
from the thorax to the
pubis, crammed them full
of iron
oxide and granulated aluminum— I have lots of that
sort of stuff around here—fused
'em with
a couple of rolls
of magnesium
foil and touched 'em off.
Made a great big messey thermite
bomb out of them. .
. .
No, dammit, of course
there's nothing
left of them! What would
you think eight minutes
at seven
thousand degrees would do? . .
. Oh,
dry up,
Regalio! I don't know who
did it
or why,
and I'm too tired
to think
about it. I'll see you
tomorrow morning. No—what would
be the
use of
sending anyone down here? This wasn't
done to fire the building;
whoever did it just wanted to get rid of
those bodies, and sure did
a job.
. .
. The coroner? I don't know
what I'll tell him. I'm
going to get a drink and
then I'm going to bed.
I just
wanted you to know. Don't tell the press. I'll
head off that reporter who
was here
before. We can do
without this kind of story.
'Mystery arsonist cremates evidence of
double killing in lab of
medical consultant.' A block
from headquarters, yet. . .
. Yeah,
and get your driver to keep
his trap
shut, too. Okay, Regalio. Just
wanted to let you
know. . . . Well,
you're no sorrier'n I am.
We'll just have to
wait another couple hundred years
while something like that
gets bom again, I guess."
Muhlenberg hung up,
sighed, went into the morgue.
He turned off the fan and
lights, locked the morgue door,
washed up at the laboratory sink, and shut the
place up for the night.
It was eleven
blocks to his apartment—an awkward distance most of
the time,
for Muhlenberg
was not
of the
fresh-air and deep-breathing fraternity. Eleven blocks was not
far enough to justify a cab
and not
near enough to make walking
a negligible detail. At
the seventh
block he was aware of
an overwhelming thirst and
a general
sensation that somebody had pulled the
plug out of his energy
barrel. He was drawn as if
by a
vacuum into Rudy's, a Mexican
bar with
Yma Sumac
and Villa-Lobos on the
juke-box.
"Ole, amigo," said Rudy.
"Tonight you don' smile."
Muhlenberg crawled wearily
onto a stool. "Deme una tequila sour, and
skip the cherry," he said
in his
bastard Spanish. "I don't
know what I got to
smile about." He froze, and his eyes bulged. "Come
back here, Rudy."
Rudy put down
the lemon
he was
slicing and came close. "I don't want to point,
but who
is that?"
Rudy glanced at
the girl.
"Ay," he said
rapturously. "Que chuchin."
Muhlenberg remembered vaguely that chuchin was untranslatable,
but that
the closest
English could manage with it was
"cute." He shook
his head.
"That won't do." He held
up his hand. "Don't try to
find me a Spanish word
for it.
There isn't any word for it.
Who is
she?"
Rudy spread
his hands.
"No se."
"She by
herself?"
"Si."
Muhlenberg put his
chin on his hand. "Make
my drink.
I want to
think."
Rudy went, his
mahogany cheeks drawn in and
still in his version of a
smile.
Muhlenberg looked
at the
girl in the booth again
just as her gaze swept past
his face
to the
bartender. "Rudyl" she called
softly, "are you making a
tequila sour?"
"Si,
senorita."
"Make me
one too?"
Rudy beamed.
He did
not turn
his head
toward- Muhlenberg, but his dark
eyes slid over toward him,
and Muhlenberg
knew that he was
intensely amused. Muhlenberg's face grew
hot, and he felt
like an idiot. He had
a wild
fantasy that his ears had turned
forward and snapped shut, and
that the cello-and-velvet sound of
her voice,
captured, was nestling down inside his head like a
warm little animal.
He got
off the
bar stool,
fumbled in his pocket for
change and went to the juke-box.
She was
there before him, slipping a coin in, selecting a
strange and wonderful recording called
Vene a Mi Casa, which was
a borracho version of
"C'mon-a My House."
"I was
just going to play that!"
he said.
He glanced
at the
juke-box. "Do you like
Yma Sumac?"
"Oh, yes!"
"Do you like
lots of Yma
Sumac?" She smiled and, seeing
it, he bit his tongue. He
dropped in a quarter and
punched out six sides of Sumac.
When he looked up Rudy
was standing
by the
booth with a little tray
on which
were two tequila sours. His face
was utterly
impassive and his head was
tilted at the precise angle of
inquiry as to where he
should put Muhlenberg's drink.
Muhlenberg met the girl's eyes,
and whether she nodded ever so
slightly or whether she did
it with
a single movement of
her eyelids,
he did
not know,
but it
meant "yes." He slid
into the booth opposite her.
Music came. Only
some of it was from
the records.
He sat
and listened to it
all. Rudy came with a
second drink before he said anything,
and only
then did he realize how
much time had passed while he
rested there, taking in her
face as if it were quite
a new
painting by a favorite artist.
She did
nothing to draw his attention
or to
reject it. She did not
stare rapturously into his
eyes or avoid them. She
did not
even appear to be waiting, or
expecting anything of him. She
was neither remote nor intimate. She
was close,
and it
was good.
He thought,
in your
most secret dreams you cut
a niche
in yourself, and it is finished
early, and then you wait
for someone
to come
along to fill it—but to
fill it exactly, every cut,
curve, hollow and plane
of it.
And people
do come
along, and one covers up the
niche, and another rattles around
inside it, and another is so
surrounded by fog that for
the longest
time you don't know if she
fits or not; but each
of them
hits you with a tremendous impact. And then one
comes along and slips in so
quietly that you don't know
when it happened, and fits so
well you almost can't feel
anything at all. And that
is it.
"What are
you thinking
about?" she asked him.
He told her,
immediately and fully. She nodded
as if
he had been talking about cats
or cathedrals
or cam-shafts,
or anything else beautiful and complex.
She said,
'That's right. It isn't all there,
of course.
It isn't
even enough. But everything else isn't enough without
it."
"What is
'everything else'?"
"You know,"
she said.
He thought he
did. He wasn't sure. He
put it
aside for later. "Will you come
home with me?"
"Oh, yes."
They got
up. She
stood by the door, her
eyes full of him, while he went to the
bar with
his wallet.
"iu&nto le
debo?"
Rudy's eyes
had a
depth he had never noticed
before. Perhaps it hadn't been
there before. "Nada,"
said Rudy.
"On the house?
Muchissimo gracias,
amigo." He knew, profoundly, that he shouldn't protest.
They went to
his apartment.
While he was pouring brandy
—brandy because, if it's
good brandy, it marries well
with tequila—she asked him
if he
knew of a place called
Shank's, down in the warehouse district.
He thought
he did;
he knew
he could find it.
"I want to meet you
there tomorrow night at eight," she said. "I'll be there," he smiled.
He turned
to put the brandy carafe back,
full of wordless pleasure in
the knowledge that all day tomorrow
he could
look forward to being with her
again.
He played records.
He was
part sheer technician, part delighted child when he could
demonstrate his sound system. He had a copy of
the Confucian
"Analects" in a
sandalwood box. It was
printed on rice-paper and hand-illuminated.
He had a Finnish dagger with
intricate scrollwork which, piece by piece
and as
a whole,
made many pictures. He had
a clock
made of four glass
discs, the inner two each
carrying one hand, and each being
rim-driven from the base so
it seemed
to have no works at all.
She loved all
these things. She sat in
his biggest
chair while he stared out at
the blue
dark hours and she read
aloud to him from "The Crock
of Gold"
and from
Thurber and Shakespeare for laughter, and
from Shakespeare and William Morris for a good sadness.
She sang,
once.
Finally she
said, "It's bedtime. Go and
get ready."
He got up
and went
into the bedroom and undressed.
He showered and rubbed himself pink.
Back in the bedroom, he
could hear the music
she had
put on
the phonograph.
It was
the second movement of
Prokofiev's "Classical" Symphony,
where the orchestra is
asleep and the high strings
tiptoe in. It was the third
time she had played it.
He sat
down to wait until the record
was over,
and when
it was,
-and she didn't come or speak
to him,
he went
to the
living-room door and looked in.
She was
gone.
He stood
absolutely still and looked around
the room.
The whole time she had been
there she had unostentatiously put everything back after they
had looked
at it.
The amplifier
was still on. The
phonograph was off, because it
shut itself off. The record album
of the
Prokofiev, standing edge-up on the floor
by the
amplifier, was waiting to receive
the record
that was still on
the turntable.
He stepped into
the room
and switched
off the
amplifier. He was suddenly conscious that
in doing
so he
had removed
half of what she
had left
there. He looked down at
the record
album; then, without touching
it, he
turned out the lights and
went to bed.
You'll see
her tomorrow,
he thought.
He thought, you
didn't so much as touch
her hand.
If it
weren't for your eyes
and ears,
you'd have no way of
knowing her.
A little later
something deep within him turned
over and sighed luxuriously.
Muhlenberg, it said to him,
do you
realize that not once during that
entire evening did you stop
and think: this is an Occasion,
this is a Great Day?
Not once.
The whole thing was easy as
breathing.
As he
fell asleep he remembered he hadn't even asked
her her name.
He awoke profoundly
rested, and looked with amazement
at his alarm clock. It was
only eight, and after what
he had
been through at the
lab last
night, plus what he had
drunk, plus staying up so late,
this feeling was a bonus
indeed. He dressed quickly and got
down to the lab early.
The phone
was already ringing. He
told the coroner to bring
Regalio and to come right down.
It was all
very easy to explain in
terms of effects; the burned morgue room took care
of that.
They beat causes around for an
hour or so without any
conclusion. Since Muhlenberg was so close
to the
Police Department, though not a member
of it,
they agreed to kill the
story for the time being. If relatives or a
carnival owner or somebody came
along, that would be
different. Meantime, they'd let it
ride. It really wasn't so bad.
They went
away, and Muhlenberg called the
paper.
Budgie had not
come to work or called.
Perhaps she was out on a
story, the switchboard suggested.
The day went
fast. He got the morgue
cleaned up and a lot done
on his
research project He didn't begin
to worry
until the fourth time
he called
the paper—that
was about
five p.m.—and Budgie
still hadn't come or called.
He got
her home phone number and called
it. No;
she wasn't
there. She'd gone out early to
work. Try her at the
paper.
He went home
and bathed
and changed,
looked up the address of Shank's
and took
a cab
there. He was much too
early. It was barely
seven-fifteen.
Shank's was a
corner bar of the old-fashioned
type with plate-glass windows
on its
corner fronts and flyblown wainscoting
behind them. The booths gave
a view
of the
street comer which did the same
for the
booths. Except for the corner blaze of light, the
rest of the place was
in darkness,
punctuated here and there
by the
unreal blues and greens of beer
signs in neon script.
Muhlenberg glanced
at his
watch when he entered, and
was appalled. He knew
now that
he had
been artificially busier and
busier as the day wore
on, and
that it was only a weak
effort to push aside the
thoughts of Budgie and what
might have happened to
her. His busyness had succeeded
in getting him into a spot
where he would have nothing
to do
but sit and wait, and think
his worries
through.
He chose a
booth on the mutual margins
of the
cave-like darkness and the
pallid light, and ordered a
beer.
Somebody—let's be conventional
and call
him Mr.
X—had gone 'way out of his
way to
destroy two bodies in his
morgue. A very thorough operator. Of
course, if Mr. X was
really interested in suppressing
information about the two pathetic
halves of the murdered
monster in the park, he'd
only done part of the job.
Regalio, Al, Budgie and Muhlenberg
knew about it. Regalio and Al
had been
all right
when he had seen them this
morning, and certainly no attempts
had .been
made on him. On the other
hand, he had been in
and around
the precinct station and its immediate
neighborhood all day, and about the
same thing applied to the
ambulance staff.
But Budgie
. .
.
Not only was
she vulnerable,
she wasn't
even likely to be missed for
hours by anyone since she
was so
frequently out on stories. Stories! Why—as
a reporter
she presented
the greatest menace of all to
anyone who wanted to hide
information!
With that thought
came its corollary: Budgie was
missing, and if she had been
taken care of he, Muhlenberg,
was next
on the list. Had to be.
He was
the only
one who
had been
able to take a good long
look at the bodies. He
was the
one who
had given the information
to the
reporter and the one who
still had it to give. In
other words, if Budgie had
been taken care of, he could
expect some sort of attack
too, and quickly.
He looked around
the place
with narrowing eyes. This was
a rugged section of
town. Why was he here?
He had a
lurching sense of shock and
pain. The girl he'd met last
night—that couldn't be a part
of this
thing. It mustn't be. And yet
because of her he found
himself here, like a sitting
duck.
He suddenly
understood his unwillingness to think
about the significance of Budgie's disappearance.
"Oh, no" he said
aloud. Should he run?
Should he—and
perhaps be wrong? He visualized
the girl
coming there, waiting for
him, perhaps getting in some
trouble in this dingy
place, just because he'd gotten
the wind
up over his own
fantasies.
He couldn't leave.
Not until
after eight anyway. What else
then? If they got
him, who would be next?
Regalio, certainly. Then Al. Then the
coroner himself.
Warn Regalio. That
at least
he might
do, before
it was
too late. He jumped up.
There was,
of course,
someone in the phone booth.
A woman. He swore and pulled
the door
open. "Budgie!"
He reached in
almost hysterically, pulled her out.
She spun
limply into his arms,
and for
an awful
split second his thoughts were indescribable. Then she moved.
She squeezed
him, looked up incredulously,
squeezed him again. "MuleyI Oh, Muley, I'm so glad
it's you!"
"Budgie, you
lunkhead—where've you been?"
"Oh, I've
had the
most awful—the most wonderful—"
"Hey, yesterday you
cried. Isn't that your quota
for the
year?"
"Oh, shut up.
Muley, Muley, no one could
get mixed
up more than I've been!"
"Oh," he said
reflectively, "I dunno. Come on
over here. Sit down. Bartender! Two double whiskey sodas!"
Inwardly, he smiled at the difference
in a
man's attitude toward the world when
he has
something to protect. "Tell me." He cupped her chin. "First of all,
where have you been? You
had me
scared half to death."
She looked up
at him,
at each
of his
eyes in turn. There was a
beseeching expression in her whole
pose. "You won't laugh at me,
Muley?"
"Some of
this business is real un-funny."
"Can I really talk to you?
I never
tried." She said, as if
there were no change
of subject,
"You don't know who I
am."
"Talk then,'
so I'll
know."
"Well," she began,
"it was this morning. When
I woke
up. It was such a beautiful
day! I went down to
the corner
to get
the bus. I said
to the
man at
the newsstand,
"Post?" and dropped my nickel in his
cup, and right in chorus
with me was this man .
. ."
"This man,"
he prompted.
"Yes. Well, he
was a
young man, about—oh, I don't
know how old. Just right, anyway.
And the
newsdealer didn't know who to give
the paper
to because
he had
only one left. We looked at
each other, this fellow and
I, and
laughed out loud. The newsy heard
my voice
loudest, I guess, or was
being chivalrous, and he handed
the paper
to me.
The bus
came along then and we got
in, and
the fellow,
the young
one, I mean, he was going
to take
a seat
by himself
but I
said come on— help me read
the paper—you
helped me buy it."
She paused
while the one-eyed bartender brought
the drinks.
"We never did
look at the paper. We
sort of . . .
talked. I never met anyone I
could talk to like that.
Not even
you, Muley, even now when I'm
trying so. The things that
came out ... as if I'd
known him all my—no," she said, shaking her head violently, "not even
like that. I don't know.
I can't
say. It was fine.
"We crossed the
bridge and the bus ran
alongside the meadow, out there between
the park
and the
fairgrounds. The grass was too green
and the
sky was
too blue
and there
was something in me that just
wanted to explode. But good,
I mean, good. I said I
was going
to play
hookey. I didn't say I'd like
to, or
I felt
like it. I said I
was going
to. And
he said
let's, as if I'd
asked him, and I didn't
question that, not one bit. I
don't know where he was
going or what he was
giving up, but we pulled the
cord and the bus stopped
and we
got out and headed cross country."
"What did
you do
all day7"
Muhlenberg asked as she sipped.
"Chased rabbits. Ran.
Lay in
the sun.
Fed ducks.
Laughed a lot. Talked. Talked a
whole lot." Her
eyes came back to the
present, back to Muhlenberg.
"Gosh, I don't know, Muley.
I tried to tell myself all
about it after he left
me. I
couldn't. Not so I'd believe it
if I
listened."
"And all
this wound up in a
crummy telephone booth?"
She sobered instantly.
"I was supposed to meet
him here.
I couldn't just wait
around home. I couldn't stomach
the first
faint thought of the
office. So I just came
here.
"I sat down
to wait.
I don't
know why he asked me
to meet
him in a place 'like—what on earth is the
matter with you?"
"Nothing," choked Muhlenberg. "I was having an
original thought called 'It's
a small
world.' " He waved her
forthcoming questions away. "Don't
let me
interrupt. You first, then me.
There's something weird and
wonderful going on here."
"Where was I?
Oh. Well,
I sat
here waiting and feeling happy, and gradually the feeling
went away and the gloom
began to seep in.
Then I thought about you,
and the
murder in the park, and that
fantastic business at your lab
last night, and I began to
get scared.
I didn't
know what to do. I
was going to run from here,
and then
I had
a reaction,
and wondered
if I
was just
scaring myself. Suppose he came
and I
wasn't here? I couldn't
bear that. Then I got
scared again and —wondered if he
was part
of the
whole thing, the Siamese-twin murder and all. And
I hated
myself for even thinking such a thing. I went
into a real hassle. At
last I squared myself away and figured the only
thing to do was to
call you up. And you weren't
at the
lab. And the coroner didn't
know where you'd gone and—oh-h-h, Muley!"
"It meant
that much?"
She nodded.
"Fickle bitch!
Minutes after leaving your lover-boy—"
She put her hand
over his mouth. "Watch what you say," she said fiercely. "This was no gay escapade,
Muley. This was like—like nothing I've
ever heard of. He didn't
touch me, or act as if
he wanted
to. He
didn't have to; it wasn't
called for. The whole thing was the whole thing, and not a
preliminary to anything else.
It was—it
was—oh, damn this language!"
Muhlenberg thought about
the Prokofiev
album standing upright by his amplifier.
Damn it indeed, he thought.
"What was his name?"
he asked
gently.
"His—" She
snapped her head up, turned
slowly to him. She whispered, "I never asked
him. . . ." and
her eyes
went quite round.
"I thought
not." Why did.I say that7
he asked
himself. I almost know. . . .
He said,
suddenly, "Budgie, do you love
him?"
Her face showed
surprise. "I hadn't thought about
it. Maybe
I don't know what
love is. I thought I
knew. But it was less
than this." She frowned.
"It was more than this,
though, some ways."
"Tell me something.
When he left- you, even
after a day like that, did
you feel
. .
. that
you'd lost something?"
She thought
about it. "Why ... no.
No, I
didn't. I was full up to
here, and what he gave
me he
left with me. That's the
big difference. No love's
like that. Can you beat
that? I didn't lose anything!"
He nodded.
"Neither did I," he said.
"You what?"
But he wasn't
listening. He was rising slowly,
his eyes
on the door.
The girl
was there.
She was-
dressed differently, she looked trim and balanced. Her face
was the
same, though, and her incredible eyes. She wore blue
jeans, loafers, a heavy, rather
loose sweater, and. two
soft-collar points gleamed against her
neck and chin. Her
hair hardly longer than his
own, but beautiful, beautiful. . ..
He looked down,
as he
would have looked away from
a great light.
He saw
his watch.
It was
eight o'clock. And he became aware
of Budgie
looking fixedly at the figure
in the
door, her face radiant.
"Muley, come on. Come on,
Muley. There he is!"
The girl in
the doorway
saw him
then and smiled. She waved
and pointed at the
corner booth, the one with
windows on two streets. Muhlenberg and Budgie went to
her.
She sat down
as they
came to her. "Hello. Sit there. Both of
you."
Side by
side they sat opposite her.
Budgie stared in open admiration. Muhlenberg stared too, and
something in the back of his
mind began to grow, and
grow, and— "No," he said,
incredulously.
"Yes," she
said, directly to him. "It's
true." She looked at Budgie. "She doesn't know yet,
does she?"
Muhlenberg shook
his head.
"I hadn't time to tell
her."
"Perhaps you
shouldn't," said the
girl.
Budgie turned
excitedly to Muhlenberg. "You know
him!"
Muhlenberg said,
with difficulty, "I know .
. .
know—"
The girl
laughed aloud. "You're looking for
a pronoun."
Budgie said,
"Muley, what's he mean? Let
me in
on it."
"An autopsy would
have shown it, wouldn't it?"
he demanded.
The girl
nodded. "Very readily. That was
a close
call."
Budgie looked from
one to
the other.
"Will somebody tell me what in
blazes this is all about?"
Muhlenberg met the
girl's gaze. She nodded. He
put an
arm around Budgie. "Listen,
girl reporter. Our—our friend here's something . . .
something new ,and different"
"Not new," said the girL "We've
been around for thousands of years."
"Have you
now!" He paused to digest
that while Budgie squirmed and protested,
"But—but—but—"
"Shush, you,"
said Muhlenberg, and squeezed her
shoulders gently. "What you spent the afternoon
with isn't a man, Budgie, any more than what
I spent
most of the night with
was a woman. Right?"
"Right," the
girl said.
"And the
Siamese twins weren't Siamese twins,
but two
of our friend's kind who—who—"
"They were
in syzygy."
An inexpressible
sadness was in the smooth, almost contralto, all but
tenor voice. "In what?"
asked Budgie.
Muhlenberg spelled it
for her.
"In some forms of life,"
he started to explain, "well, the microscopic animal called
Paramecium's a good example—reproduction
is accomplished
by fission. The creature
elongates, and so does its
nucleus. Then the nucleus breaks in
two, and one half goes
to each
end of the animal. Then the
rest of the, animal breaks,
and presto—two paramecia."
"But you—he—"
"Shaddup," he said. "I'm lecturing. The only trouble with
reproduction by fission is
that it affords no variation
of strains.
A single line of
Paramecium would continue to reproduce
that way until, by the law
of averages,
its dominant
traits would all be nonsurvival ones, and bang—no more
paramecia. So they have another process
to take
care of that difficulty. One Paramecium rests beside another,
and gradually
their contacting side walls begin
to fuse.
The nuclei
gravitate toward that point. The side
walls then break down, so
that the nuclei then have access
to one
another. The nuclei flow together,
mix and mingle, and after a
time they separate and half
goes into each animal. Then the
side walls close the opening,
break away from one another, and
each animal goes its way.
"That is syzygy.
It is
in no
sense a sexual process, because
paramecia have no sex.
It has
no direct
bearing on reproduction either—that can happen with or
without syzygy." He turned
to their
companion. "But I'd never hear
of syzygy
in the higher forms."
The faintest of
smiles. "It's unique with us,
on this
planet anyway."
"What's the
rest of it?" he demanded.
"Our reproduction?
We're parthenogenetic females."
"Y-you're a female?" breathed Budgie.
"A term of
convenience," said Muhlenberg.
"Each individual has both kinds
of sex
organs. They're self-fertilizing."
"That's a—a what
do you
call it?—a hermaphrodite,"
said Budgie. "Excuse me," she added
in a
small voice.
Muhlenberg and the
girl laughed uproariously; and the
magic of that creature
was that
the laughter
couldn't hurt. "It's a very different
thing," said Muhlenberg. "Hermaphrodites are human.
She—our friend there—isn't."
"You're the humanest
thing I ever met in
my whole
life," said Budgie ardently.
The girl reached
across the table and touched
Budgie's arm. Muhlenberg suspected
that that was the very
first physical contact either
he or
Budgie had yet received from
the creature,
and that it was
a rare
thing and a great compliment.
"Thank you," the girl said softly.
"Thank you very much for saying
that." She nodded to Muhlenberg.
"Go on."
"Technically—though I know of no case
where it has actually been
possible—hermaphrodites can have
contact with either sex. But parthenogenetic
females won't, can't, and wouldn't. They don't need to.
Humans cross strains along with
the reproductive process. Parthenogenesis
separates the two acts completely." He turned to the
girl. "Tell me, how often
do you reproduce?"
"As often as
we wish
to." "And syzygy?"
"As often as
we must.
Then—we must." "And that
is—"
"It's difficult. It's like the paramecia's,
essentially, but it's infinitely more complex.
There's cell meeting and interflow,
but in tens and then dozens,
hundreds, then thousands of millions of cells. The join
begins here—" she put her
hand at the approximate location of
the human
heart—"and extends. But you saw it in
those whom I burned. You
are one
of the
few human beings who ever have."
"That isn't what
I saw,"
he reminded
her gently.
She nodded, and
again there was that deep
sadness. "That murder was such a
stupid, incredible, unexpected thing!"
"Why were they
in the
park?" he asked, his voice
thick with pity. "Why, out there,
in the
open, where some such human
slugs could find them?"
"They took a
chance, because it was important
to them,"
she said wearily. She
looked up, and her eyes
were luminous. "We love
the outdoors.
We love
the earth,
the feel
and smell
of it, what lives from it
and in
it. Especially
then. It was such a deep
thicket, such an isolated pocket.
It was
the merest
accident that those—those men found
them there. They couldn't move. They were—well, medically you
could call it unconscious. Actually, there—there never was
a consciousness
like the one which comes with
syzygy."
"Can you describe
it?"
She shook her
head slowly, and it was
no violation
of her
complete frankness. "Do you
know, you couldn't describe sexuality to me so that
I could
understand it? I have no—no
comparison, no analogies. It—" she looked from
one to
the other—"it amazes me.
In some
ways I envy it. I
know it is a strife, which we avoid, for we
are very
gentle. But you have a capacity for enjoying
strife, and all the pain,
all the
misery and* poverty and cruelty which
you suffer,
is the
cornerstone of everything you build. And you
build more than anyone or
anything in the known
universe."
Budgie was wide-eyed.
"You envy us.
You?"
She smiled. "Don't
you think
the things
you admire
me for
are rather commonplace among my own kind?
It's just that they're rare in
humans."
Muhlenberg said slowly,
"Just what is your relationship
to humanity?"
"It's symbiotic,
of course."
"Symbiotic? You
live with us, and us
with you, like the cellulose-digesting microbes in
a termite?
Like the yucca moth, which can eat only nectar
from the yucca cactus, which
can spread its pollen only through
the yucca
moth?"
She nodded. "It's
purely symbiotic. But it isn't
easy to explain. We live
on that
part of humans which makes
them different from animals."
"And in
turn—"
"We cultivate
it in
humans."
"I don't
understand that," said Budgie flatly.
"Look into
your legends. We're mentioned often
enough there. Who were the sexless
angels? Who is the streamlined
fat boy on your
Valentine's Day cards? Where does
inspiration come from? Who knows
three notes of a composer's
new symphony, and whistles the next
phrase as he walks by
the composer's house? And—most
important to you two—who really understands that part of
love between humans which is
not sexual—because we can
understand no other kind? Read
your history, and you'll
see where
we've been. And in exchange
we get
the building—bridges,
yes, and aircraft and soon, now,
space-ships. But other kinds of
building too. Songs and poetry and
this new thing, this increasing
sense of the oneness of all
your species. And now it
is fumbling
toward a United Nations, and later
it will
grope for the stars; and
where it builds, we thrive."
"Can you name
this thing you get from
us—this thing that is the difference
between men and the rest
of the
animals?"
"No. But call
it a
sense of achievement. Where you
feel that most, you feed us
most. And you feel it
most when others of your kind
enjoy what you build."
"Why do you
keep yourselves hidden?"
Budgie suddenly asked. "Why?"
She wrung
her hands
on the
edge of the table. "You're so beautiful!"
"We have
to hide,"
the other
said gently. "You still kill
anything that's . . .
different."
Muhlenberg looked at
that open, lovely face and
felt a sickness, and he could
have cried. He said, "Don't
you ever
kill anything?" and then
hung his head, because it
sounded like a defense for the
murdering part of humanity. Because
it was.
"Yes," she said
very softly, "we do." "You can hate
something?"
It isn't
hate. Anyone who hates, hates
himself as well as the object
of his
hate. There's another emotion called
righteous anger. That makes
us kill."
"I can't
conceive of such a thing."
"What time
is it?"
"Almost eight-forty."
She raised
herself from her booth and
looked out to the corner. It was dark now,
and the
usual crowd of youths had
gathered under the street-lights.
"I made appointments
with three more people this
evening," she said.
"They are murderers. Just watch."
Her eyes
seemed to blaze.
Under the
light, two of the youths
were arguing. The crowd, but for a prodding yelp
or two,
had fallen
silent and was beginning to form a ring.
Inside the ring, but apart
from the two who were arguing,
was a
third—smaller, heavier and,
compared with the sharp-creased, bright-tied arguers, much more
poorly dressed, in an
Eisenhower jacket with one sleeve
tattered up to the elbow.
What happened
then happened with frightening speed. One of the arguers
smashed the other across the
mouth. Spitting blood, the other staggered
back, made a lightning move
into his coat pocket. The blade
looked for all the world
like a golden fan as it
moved in the cyclic pulsations
of the
street-lamp. There was a bubbling
scream, a deep animal grunt,
and two bodies lay tangled and
twitching on the sidewalk while
blood gouted and seeped
and defied
the sharpness
of creases
and the colors of
ties.
Far up the
block a man shouted and
a whistle
shrilled. Then the street corner seemed
to become
a great
repulsing pole for humans. People ran
outward, rayed outward, until, from
above, they must have looked like
a great
splash in mud, reaching out
and out until the
growing ring broke and the
particles scattered and were gone. And
then there were only the
bleeding bodies and the third one,
the one
with the tattered jacket, who
hovered and stepped and waited and
did not
know which way to go.
There was the sound
of a
single pair of running feet,
after the others had all run
off to
silence, and these feet belonged
to a
man who ran fast
and ran
closer and breathed heavily through
a shrieking police whistle.
The youth in
the jacket
finally turned and ran away,
and the policeman shouted once around
his whistle,
and then
there were two sharp reports and
the youth,
running hard, threw up his hands
and fell
without trying to turn his
face away, and skidded on it
and lay
still with one foot turned
in and
the other
turned out.
The girl
in the
dark sweater and blue jeans
turned away from the windows and
sank back into her seat,
looking levelly into the drawn faces
across the table. "Those were the men who
killed those two in
the park,"
she said
in a
low voice,
"and that is how we kill."
"A little like
us," said Muhlenberg weakly. He
found his handkerchief and wiped off
his upper
lip. "Three of them for two
of you."
"Oh, you don't
understand," she said,
and there
was pity
in her voice."It wasn't because they
killed those two. It was
because they pulled them
apart."
Gradually, the
meaning of this crept into
Muhlenberg's awed mind, and
the awe
grew with it. For here
was a
race which separated insemination from the
mixing of strains, and apart from
them, in clean-lined definition, was a third component,
a psychic
interflow. Just a touch of
it had
given him a magic night and
Budgie an enchanted day; hours
without strife, without mixed
motives or misinterpretations.
If a human,
with all his grossly efficient
combination of functions, could be
led to
appreciate one light touch to
that degree, what must it mean
to have
that third component, pure and in
essence, torn apart in its
fullest flow? This was worse than
any crime
could be to a human;
and yet,
where humans can claim clear consciences
while jailing a man for
a year for stealing a pair
of shoes,
these people repay the crudest sacrilege of all with
a quick
clean blow. It was removal,
not punishment.
Punishment was alien and inconceivable
to them.
He slowly
raised his face to the
calm, candid eyes of the
girl. "Why have you
shown us all this?"
"You needed
me," she said simply.
"But you came
up to
destroy those bodies so no
one would
know—"
"And I found you
two, each needing what the
other had, and blind to it
No, not
blind. I remember you said
that if you ever could really
share something, you could be
very close." She laughed.
"Remember your niche,
the one
that's finished early and
never exactly filled? I told
you at
the time
that it wouldn't be
enough by itself if it
were filled, and
anyone completely without it wouldn't
have enough either. And you—" She smiled at Budgie.
"You never made any secret
about what you wanted.
And there
the two
of you
were, each taking what you already
had, and ignoring what you
needed."
"Headline!" said
Budgie, "Common Share Takes Stock."
"Subhead!" grinned Muhlenberg, "Man With A Niche
Meets Girl With An
Itch."
The girl
slid out of the booth.
"You'll do," she said.
"Wait! You're not
going to leave us! Aren't
we ever
going to see you again?"
"Not knowingly.
You won't
remember me, or any of
this."
"How can
you take
away—"
"Shush, Muley.
You know
she can."
"Yes, I guess
she—wait though—wait! You give us
ah\this knowledge just so
we'll understand—and then you take
it all
away again. What good
will that do us?"
She turned toward
them. It may have been
because they were still seated and
she was
standing, but she seemed to
tower over them. In a split
second of fugue, he had
the feeling
that he was looking at a
great light on a mountain.
"Why, you poor
things—didn't you know? Knowledge and
understanding aren't props for
one another.
Knowledge is a pile of bricks,
and understanding
is a
way of
building. Build for me!"
They were
in a
joint called Shank's. After the
triple killing, and the wild scramble
to get
the story
phoned in, they started home.
"Muley," she
asked suddenly, "what's syzygy?" "What on earth
made you ask me that?"
"It just popped into
my head.
What is it?" "A non-sexual interflow between the nuclei
of two
animals."
"I never tried that," she said
thoughtfully. "Well, don't until
we're married," he said. They
began to hold hands while they
walked.
"Die, Maestro, Die I
I finally killed Lutch
Crawford with a pair of
bolt-cutters. And there was
Lutch—all of him, all his
music, his jump, his public and his pride, in
the palm
of my
hand. Literally in the palm of
my hand—three
pinkish slugs with horn at
one end and blood at the
other. I tossed 'em, caught
'em, put 'em in my pocket
and walked
off whistling
Daboo Dabay, which had been
Lutch's theme. It was the
first time in eight years
I had heard that music and
enjoyed it. Sometimes it takes
a long while to kill a
man.
I'd tried
it twice
before. I tried it smart,
and failed.
I tried
it sneak, and failed.
Now it's
done.
Whistling it, I
can hear
the whole
band—the brass background: "Hoo Ha
Hoo Ha"
(how he used to stage
that on the stand, the skunk—Lutch,
I mean,
with the sliphorns and trumpets turning in their chairs,
blowing the "hoo" to the
right with cap-mutes, swinging around, blowing the
"ha" at the left,
open) and then Lutch's clarinet
a third
above Skid Portly's gimmicked-up
guitar: "Daboo, dabay, dabay daboo
. . ." You know, Spotlights
on Lutch,
a bright
overflow of light on Skid and
his guitar,
light bronzing and scything from the swinging bells of
the trombones
here and the trumpets over
there . . . the
customers ate it up, they
loved it, they loved him, the
bubbleheaded bunch of bastiches .
. .
and Fawn at the piano, white
glow from the spot running
to her,
gold flashes lighting up
her face
when the brasses swung, lighting up the way she
cocked her head to one
side, half smiling at Lutch, stroking
the keyboard
as if
it was
his face,
loving him more than
anybody there.
And up in
back, in the dark, out
of sight
but altogether
needed, like a heart,
there was always Crispin, crouching
over the skins, his
bass a thing you felt
with your belly rather than heard, but the real
beat coming through his hands,
pushing out one crushed ruff
for each
beat, shifting from center to edge—not
much—matching the "hoo ha" of
the brass.
You couldn't see Crispin, but you
could feel what he made.
They loved it. He made love
with the skins. He was
loving Fawn with the pedal, with
the sticks,
there in the dark.
And I'd be
out front,
off to
one side,
seeing it all, and I
can see it now, just whistling
the theme.
It was
all there—Lutch,
everything about Lutch, everything
that Lutch was. There was the
swinging brass, and Crispin loving
Fawn, and Fawn loving Lutch, and
Lutch giving theme solo to
Skid's guitar, taking the foolish obbligato
for himself.
And there
was Fluke,
and that's me. Sure,
in the
dark. Always keep Fluke in
the dark; don't show them Fluke's
face. Fluke has a face
that kept him out of the
United States Army, didn't you
know? Fluke has a mouth only
as big
as your
two thumbnails,
and all his teeth are pointed.
I was as
much a part of it
as any
of them,
but I
didn't make anything. i just worked
there. I was the guy
who waited
for ten bars of theme, and
then came in with the
beat, holding the microphone just off
my cheek
like a whisper-singer, saying "Lutch
is here,
Lutch is gone, man, gone."
Lutch used to say old Fluke
had a
voice like an alto-horn with
a split
reed. He called it
a dirty
voice. It was a compliment.
"Gone, man, gone," I'd say, and then
talk up: "Top o' the
morn from the top o' the
heap, Kizd. This is the
Fluke, the fin of the
fish, the tail of
the whale,
bringin' you much of Lutch
and such . . . Lutch
Crawford and his Gone Geese,
ladies and gentlemen, from the Ruby
Room of the Hotel Halpem
in . . ." (or the
Rainbow, or the Angel, or
wherever). That was me, Fluke. i hadn't wanted
the buildup,
all that
jive about "fin and the fish."
That was Lutch's idea. That
was Lutch, like giving his theme
solo to Skid's guitar instead
of taking it himself. He even
hauled me into his recording
dates— you know that. That was
the thing
about that band; it was
a machine; and some will drive
a machine,
and some
will ride it, and Lutch, he
rode.
I had to kill him.
I'll tell
you about
the time
I tried
it smart.
Five years ago,
it was.
We had
an ivory
man who
was pretty good. Name was Hinkle.
He arranged
a lot—he
was the one who styled the
band the way you know
it. You
can forget him; he was killed.
Went down to a dance pitch in the South Side to
hear a bass-player who was
getting famous, and some drunk started
an argument
and pulled
a gun
and missed the cat he aimed
at and
hit Hinkle.
It was
none of Hinkle's argument—he
didn't even know anybody there.
Anyway, he got iced
and we
had to
play a date without a
piano. We got along,
strictly ho-hum.
Then about eleven
o'clock this baby shuffles up
to the
stand, all big eyes
and timidity.
She pulled
Lutch's swallowtail between numbers, dropped
it like
it was
hot, and stood there blushing like
a radish.
She was
only about seventeen, cute-fat,
with long black hair and
pink lips like your kid
sister. It took her
three tries to lay out
what she wanted, but the idea
was she
played a little piano and
thought she might fill out a
number for us.
Lutch was always
an easy
fall for anyone who looked
like he wanted something real hard.
He didn't
think five seconds. He waved her
over to the ivory, and
called for "Blue Prelude," which had enough reed,
soon enough, that we could
cover the piano if
it soured.
We didn't cover
up a
thing. The kid played Hinkle,
perfect, pure and easy; close
your eyes and Hinkle was
there, walking bass and
third-runs, large as life.
The rest of
the date
turned over to the kid,
far as
the band was concerned. She pulled
out a
bag of
tricks that I'll never forget. She
had style,
and good
wrists. She read like lightning and memorized better, and
she had
a touch.
Hell, I don't have to tell
you about
Fawn Amory . . .
anyhow, we had a powwow, and
Lutch had dinner with her
folks. Fawn had every disk Lutch
Crawford had ever waxed—that was how she knew Hinkle's
style—and she'd been playing piano
since she was a
pup. Lutch hired her with
her daddy's
blessing, and we had us
a piano
again.
We began to
get big
about then. It wasn't so
much Fawn's playing—she wasn't
brilliant, she was just terrific—but
it was
what she was to
the band.
The music
business is full of round-heels
and thrushes
who feed
on seed;
this kid was from fresh
air. She made the
band worth staying with. Turnover
just stopped, except for a couple
of times
when a side-man would carry too much altitude and
make a pass. That never
happened more than once per
man. Then one or the
other of us would happily pull
the wolf's
teeth. Once Skid busted a
four hundred dollar guitar over a
guy's head for that. (A
good thing in the long run;
he went
into electrics seriously after that; but the electric guitar
comes later.) And once I
gave a spare lip to a
trumpet man, pushing three teeth
out under
his nose, when his
right hand forgot what his
left was hired for.
She had
this wide-eyed yen for Lutch
when she .joined us, and it
was there
for anyone
to see.
But clean,
dig me?
Lutch, he treated her like the
rest of the sides. He
kept it just like it was,
and we
went places. I don't think
I was
the only
one who lost sleep. As long
as no
one made
a move, everything
stayed the same and
the band
as a whole jatoed. We rose,
Jack.
It was Fawn
who made
the break.
Looking back, I guess it could've
been expected. We were all
pretty wise; we did what we
did because
we thought
it out.
But she
was just
a kid. She'd
been eating her heart out
for too
long, I guess, and she had
no muscles
for a
pitch like that. We were
in Boulder
City that night, taking
fifteen about two in the
morning at a roadhouse. There
was all
kinds of moon. I was
in a
wild hassle with myself. Fawn was
under my skin clear down
to the marrow by then. I
went into the bar and
slurped up a boilermaker—they always
make me sick, and I*
wanted a small trouble to concentrate
on. I
left the rest of the
sides jaw-jamming around a
table and walked outside. There
was a gravel path, the kind
that gives a dry belch
under your feet I stayed off
it. I
walked on the grass and
looked at the moon, which was bad for me,
and felt
the boilermaker
seething under my low
ribs, and felt but rugged.
You know.
It wasn't only
Fawn. I realized that. It
was something
to do with Lutch. He was
so—sure of himself. Hell. I
never could be that. Never until
now, when I've got what
was coming to me. Now I'm
damn sure where I'm going,
and I
did it with my own hands.
Not everybody
can say
that. But Lutch, he could. He
had talent,
see—big talent. He was a
real musician. But he
didn't use it, only to
guide with his fingertips. He styled Hinkle still,
and another
man soloed
his theme. He was like that.
He was
so sure
of himself
that he didn't have to hog
anything. He didn't even have
to reach
out and pick up
anything that he knew he
could have. Now me, I never
could know till I tried.
There shouldn't be guys like Lutch
Crawford, guys that never have
to wonder
or worry. Them as has, gits,
they say. There can't be
any honest
competition with a guy
like that. He'll win out,
or you
will. If he does, he'll do
it easy
as breathing.
If you
do, it's
only because he let you. Guys
like that shouldn't be born.
If they
are, they ought to
be killed.
Things are tough enough with
an even break. Lutch,
he had
a pet
name for the band. He
called it the unit.
That doesn't sound like a pet name but
it was. Fluke was his barker,
and part
of the
unit ... it didn't matter that the band would
be just
as good
without me. Any one of us
could be dropped or replaced,
and it
would still be Lutch Crawford's Gone Geese. But Fluke
was in,
and Skid,
and Crispin
and the
rest, and that's the way
he wanted
it to stay. I was in
the bucks,
with a future—thanks to him.
Thank you very much
to him
for every
damn thing.
So I was standing on the
grass looking at the moon
and feeling all this, when I
heard Fawn sob. Just once.
I went
that way, walking on
the grass,
sliding my feet so that
left shoe wouldn't squeak.
She was standing
at the
corner of the building with
Lutch. She was facing the moon.
She was
crying without making any more noise
and without
covering her face. It was
wet and
sort of pulled down
and sidewards
as if
I saw
it through
a wavy glass.
She said,
"I can't help it, Lutch,
I love
you."
And he said,
"I love you too. I
love everybody. It's nothing to get sick over."
"It isn't .
. ."
The way
she said
that, it was a question
and a whole flood of detail
about how sick you can
get. "Let me kiss you, Lutch,"
she whispered.
"I won't ever ask you
again. Let me this
once. Once, I got to,
Lutch, I got to, I
can't go on much longer like
this ..."
Now, I hated
him, and I think I
hated her a little, for
a second, but you know, I'd
of kicked
him clear
to Pensacola
if he hadn't done what she
said. I never had a
feeling like that before. Never. I'don't
want it again.
Well, he did.
Then he went back inside
and got
his clarinet
and hit a blue
lick or two to call
us back
in, the
same as always. He left
her out
there, and me too, though
he didn't
know I was there. Difference was, he left me
alone . . .
We finished the
date somehow, Crispin and his
heartbeat drums, and Skid
throwing that famous gliss all
over the finger-board—he could
really glissando with that new
guitar, that Crispin helped him design,
but I'm
coming to that—and the horns and
Fluke. Yeak, Fluke, real smooth:
"Sweet Sue now, kizd, the sweetest
Sue we
ever blew, featuring Fawn Amory, the breeze on keys
. .
." And Fawn ripples into
the intro, and I give her
a board-fade
on the
p.a. system, and sigh in with,
"Oh kizd, ain't we got
Fawn . . ." and
cut back
to full volume on
the piano
mike. And I kept spooning
that corn back and back to
myself, "Ain't we got Fawn,
ain't we got—"
Crispin was a
big blond
guy who
was a
graduate electrical 146 engineer. He
earned his way through school
playing drums, and after he graduated
went right on playing. If
he'd gone into electronics the way
he'd planned, he'd of kept
on playing
drums. By the same token
nothing could keep him from
messing with electronics while he was a
trap man. He was forever rehashing our p.a. system,
and Skid's
git-box was like peanuts to him;
he kept
coming back for more. Skid
was amplified
when he started with us—a
guitar's pretty nowhere without a pickup
in a
band nowadays—but all he had
was a
simple magnetic pickup clamped
onto a regular concert guitar. He had a few
gimmicks too—a pedal volume control
and a tone-switch on the box
that gave him a snarl
when he wanted it. Trouble was,
at high
volumes that pickup picked up everything—the
note and the scratch of
the plectrum
and the peculiar squeak of Skid's
calloused left fingers when he
slid them on the
wound strings, so that a
guitar solo always had a background
of pops
and crackles
and a
bunch of guys whistling for taxicabs.
Crispin, he fixed
that. He was a big,
good-natured cat that everybody liked on
sight, and sometimes when we
went into a new town Crispin
would go down to Radio
Row and
talk some repairman into the use
of his
shop for a couple days.
Crispin would drag in
Skid's guitar amplifier and haul
its guts out and attach tone
generators and oscilloscopes and all
like that, and after
that would spend good sleeping
time telling Skid how to run
the thing.
After a couple of years
Skid had an instrument
that would sit up and
typewrite. He had a warble-vibrato on it, and a
trick tailpiece that he operated with his elbow that
would raise a six-string chord a halftone while he
held it, and some jazz
called an attenuator that let
him hit
a note
that wouldn't fade, just like
it was blown out of an
organ. Skid had a panel
beside him with more buttons, switches,
and controls
on it
than a custom-built accordion has
stops. He used to say
that the instrument was earning his
keep—any three-chord man from a
hill-billy band could take
his spot
if he
got that
instrument. I thought he was right.
For years
I thought
he was
right when he said that.
It was
before rehearsal the next day,
that time in Boulder City, that Crispin came to
me and
talked like with my mouth.
I was in the sunporch thinking
about that moon last night
and all that went
with it, about Lutch and
the way
everything came so easy to
him, he never had to
make up his mind. Crispin lounged up next to
me and
said,
"Fluke, did you
ever see the time when
Lutch couldn't make up his mind?"
I said,
"Brother," and he
knew I meant no.
He looked at
his thumb,
threw it out of joint.
"Cat gets everything he wants without
asking for it. Never has
to think
of asking for it."
"You're so
right," I said. I didn't
feel like talking.
He said,
"He rates it. I'm glad."
He was,
too.
I said, "I'm
glad too." I wasn't. "What brings up all this
jive, Crispin7"
He waited a long time. "Well, he just asked
me something.
He was all— all— ah, he
was like
a square at
the Savoy,
shuffling his feet and blushing."
"Lutch?" I demanded. Lutch
usually came on like coke,
all steam, no smoke.
"What was it?"
"It was
about Fawn," he said.
I felt something
the size
and weight
of a
cueball drop into my stomach. "What's
with Fawn?"
"He wanted to
know what the sides would
think if he and Fawn got
married."
"What'd you
tell him?"
"What could I
tell him? I said it
would be fine. I said
it didn't have to make any
difference. It might even be
better."
"Better," I said. "Sure."
Much better. Even if it
was out
of your reach, at
least you could dream. You
could hope for some break, some
way. Lutch and Fawn .
. .
they wouldn't fool around with this
marriage kick, now. They'd do
it up
right.
"I knew you'd
think the same way," he said. He sounded
as if there was a load
off his
mind. He slapped my back—I
hate that—and walked off
whistling Daboo Dabay.
That was when
I made
up my
mind to kill Lutch. Not
for Fawn. She was just part
of it—the
biggest part, yes; but I couldn't stand this
one more
trip his way of the
silver platter. I remember once when
I was
a kid
hitch-hiking. It was cold and I'd
been at a crossroads near Mineola for a
long time. I began to wish
real hard, hard like praying.
A long
time later I remembered what it
was I
wished for so hard. Not
for a ride. Not for some
guy with
a heater
in his
car to
stop. What I wished for was
a whole bunch
of cars
to come
along so I could thumb them.
Dig me?
The biggest
break I ever wanted was to
have the odds raised for
me, so
I could
make my own way easier. That's
all anyone
should have. Lutch, born talented, good-looking,
walking through life picking up
gold pieces . .
. people
like that shouldn't live. Every
minute they live, a guy like
us gets
his nose
rubbed in it.
For a second
there I thought I'd quit,
walk off, get clear. And then I remembered the radio, the jukes,
people humming in front of elevator
doors—and I knew I'd never
get away
from him. If he
was dead
it would
be different;
I could
be glad when I heard that
jive. No, I had to
kill him.
But I'd
play it smart.
For a couple of
days I thought about it.
I didn't
think about much else. I thought
of all
the ways
I'd ever
heard about, and all the tricks
they use in the whodunits
to catch
up on all the ways. I
had about
decided on an auto accident
—he was all the
time driving, either with the
band or on quick trips for mail or spare
reeds or music and all
like that, and the law of
averages was in my favor;
he never
had accidents.
I was actually out casing the
roads around there in Lutch's
car when I had
one of
those fantastically unexpected
pieces of luck that you dream
about if you've got a
good imagination.
I'd just
turned into the highway from
the Shinnebago
side road when I heard sirens.
I pulled
over right away. A maroon
Town-and-Country came roaring around
the bend
of the
highway at about eighty.
There were bullet holes in
the windshield and the
driver was hunched low. There
were two cats in the back
blasting away with automatics. Behind them came a State
Police car, gaining. I didn't
wait and watch; I was out
and under
before I knew what I
was doing.
Peering around the rear of
my machine.
I looked
up just
as one of the men in
the Town-and-Country
straightened up, holding his right forearm.
Just then the driver hauled
the car into the road I'd
just left. It couldn't be
done at that speed but he
did it,
the tires
screaming from Dizzy Gillespie; and the man who was
hit went
sling-shotting out of
the car.
First he bounced and
then he slid. I thought
he'd never stop sliding. About the
time he hit the road,
the police
car flashed
by me with the right front
tire flat. It was crabbing
left and crabbing right, and this
time the tires were from
Stan Kenton.
The important thing
is that
that cat's gun flew straight
up in the air when he
was hit
and landed
in the
weeds not twenty feet from me.
I had
it before
those cops got their car
stopped.
They never
saw me.
They were busy, then with
the car,
afterward with the stiff. I
walked down there and talked
to them.
Seems these characters had been robbing gas
stations and motorists. They'd already killed
two. One of the cops
growled about these war souvenir guns,
and he'd
be glad
when all that foreign ammo was
used up. They said they'd
get the
guys who'd gotten away soon enough;
just a matter of time.
I said
sure. Then I got
back in Lutch's machine and
drove away, real thoughtful. I knew
I'd never
have another chance like this.
The next afternoon
I told
Lutch I'd go in town
with him. He was picking up
the mail
and I
said I had to go
to the
drug store. He didn't think anything
about it. I went and
got the
gun and stuck it
into the sleeve of my
jacket, under my armpit. It
stayed there fine. It was
a big
Belgian automatic. It had four shots
left in it.
I felt all
right. I thought I was
doing okay until Lutch looked over at me—he was
driving—and asked me if I
felt all right. Then I realized
I had
sweat on my upper lip.
I looked
in the rear view mirror. I
could see maybe two miles—we
were out on the
flats—and there wasn't a car
in sight.
I looked
ahead. There was a
truck. It passed. Then the
road" was clear.
I said,
"Pull over to the side,
Lutch. I want to talk
to you."
He looked at me,
surprised. "I can listen and
drive, Fluke. Shoot."
Shoot, he said.
I almost
laughed. "Pull over, Lutch." I meant to sound normal
but it
came out as a hoarse
whisper.
"Don't be silly,"
he said.
He had
that big easy open-handed way about him, Lutch had.
"Go on, Fluke, get it
off your
chest."
I took out
the gun
and kicked
off the
safeties and poked it into his
ribs. "Pull over to the
side, Lutch."
He pulled up
his arm
and looked
down under it at the
gun. "Why, sure," he said, and pulled
over and stopped. He switched off, leaned back into
the angle
of the
seat and the door so he
half faced me, and said,
"Lay it on me, Fluke.
You fixing to kill me with
that?" He didn't sound scared,
and that
was because he wasn't.
He really
wasn't. Nothing like this had ever
happened to him, so nothing
ever could. He wasn't prodding me, either. He was
talking to me like at
rehearsal. Lutch was a
very relaxed cat.
"Yes, I am," I
told him.
He looked
at it
curiously. "Where'd you get it?"
I told him
that too. If he'd only
started to sweat and cry,
I'd have shot him
then. I hated him too
much to just shoot him easy.
I told
him all
about it. "They haven't caught
those jokers yet," I said. "The
cops'll dig one of these
slugs out of you and it'll
be the
same as the ones in
those other killings. They'll
think those hoods did it."
'They will?
What about you?"
"I'll have one
of the
slugs too. In the arm.
It'll be worth it. Anything else you want to
know?"
"Yes. Why? Fluke,
why? Is it—Fawn?"
"That's right."
He sort of
shook his head. "I hate
to say
this, Fluke, but I don't think
killing me will help your
chances any. I mean, even if she never finds
out."
I said,
"I know that, Lutch. But
I'll have an even break;
that's all I ever
want. I can't get it
with you around."
His face
was sorry
for me,
and that's
absolutely all. "Go on, then," he told me.
I pulled the
trigger. The gun bucked in
my hand.
I saw
him spin, and then
everything went black, like I
was under
a baby spot and the fuse
blew.
When I came to
my eyes
wouldn't straighten out. The whole world
was full
of dazzly
black speckles and something globular was growing out of
the back
of my
head.
I was still
in the
front seat of the car.
Something was scratching and chafing at
my wrist.
I pulled
it away
and put
my head in my
hands and groaned.
"How you doing?"
Lutch said. He bent forward,
peering anxiously into my
face.
I got my
handkerchief out and put it
behind my head and looked at it. There was
blood—just a speck. "What happened, Lutch?"
He grinned.
It was
a little
puckered, but still a grin.
"You'll never make a
gunman, Fluke. I've seen you
twice with the gang in shooting
galleries. You're afraid of guns."
"How did
you know
that?"
"You always close
your eyes real tight, screw
'em down,
before you pull a
trigger. I was half-turned toward you as it was,
and it
was easy
to twist
aside. Turning made the gun
ride around
and slip
back under my arm. Then
I hit
you with my shoulder and ran
your head back against the
door post. Does it hurt much?"
"I didn't shoot
you."
"You tore hell
out of
my shirt."
"God damn you,
Lutch," I said quietly.
He sat back
with the arms folded, watching
me, for
a long
time, until I asked,
"What are we waiting for?"
"For you to
feel well enough to drive."
"Then what?"
"Back to the
club."
"Come on, Lutch;
lay it
on me.
What are you going to
do?"
"Think," said Lutch. He opened the
door and got out and
walked around the car.
"Shove over," he said. He
was carrying
the gun.
He wasn't
pointing it, but he was
holding it ready to use. I
shoved over.
I drove slowly.
Lutch wouldn't talk. I didn't
dig him
at all.
He was doing just what he
said—thinking. Once I
took a hand off the wheel.
His eyes
were on me immediately. I just felt the lump
on my
head and put the hand
back. For the time being I
was hogtied.
When we stopped
in front
of the
club he said, "Go on
up to my room." (We had
quarters over the hall.) "I'll
be right
behind you with the
gun in
my side
pocket. If anyone stops you don't
stall. Shake 'em naturally and
go on
up. I'm
not afraid of guns and I'll
shoot you if you don't
do what
I say.
Do I mean it?"
I looked at
his face.
He meant
it. "Well,
all reet,"
I said,
and got out.
No one stopped
us. When
we were
in his
room he said, "Get in that
closet."
I opened my
mouth to say something but
decided not to. I got in
the closet
and closed
and locked
the door.
It was
dark.
"Can you hear
me?" he said. "Yup."
In a much softer
voice he said, "Can you
hear me now?" "I can hear
you."
"Then get this.
I want
you to
listen to every word that
is said out here until I
open the door again. If
you make
a noise
I'll kill you. Understand?"
"You're in, Jack,"
I said.
My head
hurt.
A long
time—maybe two or three minutes—passed.
From 152 far away I heard him
calling, but couldn't make out
what he was saying. I think
he was
on the
stair landing. I heard him come
in and
shut the door. He was
whistling between his teeth. Daboo, Dabay. Then there
was a light knock on the door.
"Come in!"
It was Fawn.
"What's cookin', good-lookin'?"
she sang.
"Sit down, chicken."
The chair was
wicker. I could hear it plain.
Lutch Crawford always
talked straight to the point.
That's how he got so much
work done. "Fawn, about the
other night, with all that moon.
How do
you feel
now?"
"I feel the
same way," she said tightly.
Lutch had a
little habit of catching his
lower lip with his teeth and
letting it go when he
was thinking
hard. There was a pause about
long enough to do this.
Then he said, "You been hearing rumors around about
you and
me?"
"Well I—" She
caught her breath. "Oh, Lutch—"I
heard the wicker, sharp and crisp,
as she
came up out of it.
"Hold on!" Lutch
snapped. "There's nothing to it,
Fawn. Forget it."
I heard the
wicker again, slow, the front
part, the back part. She didn't
say anything.
"There's some things
too big
for one
or two
people to fool with, honey," he said gently. "This
band's one of 'em. For
whatever it's worth, it's
bigger than you and me.
It's going good and it'll go
better. It's about as perfect
as a group can get. It's a
unit. Tight. So tight that
one wrong
move'll blow out all its seams.
You and
me, now—that'd
be a
wrong move."
"How do you
know? What do you mean?"
"Call it a
hunch. Mostly, I know that
things have been swell up to
now, and I know that
if you—we—anyway,
we can't risk a change in
the good
old status
quo."
"But—what about
me?" she wailed.
"Tough on you?"
I'd known
Lutch a long time, and this was the first
time his voice didn't come
full and easy. "Fawn, there's fourteen cats in this
aggregation and they all feel
the same way about you as
you do
about me. You have no
monopoly. Things are tough
all over.
Think of that next time
you feel spring fever
coming on." I think he
bit at
his lower
lip again. In a
voice soft like Skid's guitar
with the bass stop, he said,
I'm sorry,
kid."
"Don't call me
kid!" she blazed.
"You better go
practice your scales," he said
thickly. The door slammed.
After a bit
he let
me out.
He went
and sat
by the
window, looking out.
"Now what did
you do
that for?" I wanted to
know.
"For the unit,".he
said, still looking out the
window.
"You're crazy. Don't
you want
her?"
What I could
see of
his face
answered that question. I don't think
I'd realized
before how much he wanted
her. I don't think I'd thought
about it. He said, "I
don't want her so badly I'd
commit murder for an even
chance at her. You do. If
anyone wants her worse than
I do,
I don't
want her enough. That's the way
I see
it."
I could of
told him then that it
wasn't only him and Fawn
that bothered me; that
that was just part of
it. Somehow
it didn't seem to make no
never mind just then. If
he wanted
to play the square
he was
welcome to it. "I'll go pack," I said.
He jumped Up.
"You'll do no such a
damn thing!" he roared. "Listen, hipster; you've
seen how far I'll go
to keep
this unit the way it is.
You taught
me something
today, the hard way, and by
the Lord
you're not going to kick
over this group just when you've
taught it to me!" He
walked over and stood close; I had to crease
the back
of my
neck to see his face.
He jabbed his fingers at my
nose. "If you walk out
on the
unit now, so help me, I'll
track you down and hound
you to
death. Now get out of here."
"All right," I told him. "But
listen. I'll take a raincheck
on that last. You're riding a
high riff right now. Think
it over
quiet, and tell me
tonight if you want me
to stay.
I'll do what you say."
He grinned the
old grin
again. "Good, Fluke. See ya."
It's hard to hate
a joe
like that. But if you
can make
it, you
can do a job. I made it.
So. That
was the
time I tried it smart.
Next time I tried it
sneaky.
We played
the Coast,
up and
back. We did two rushes
in feature pictures and thirteen shorts.
We guested
on some
of the biggest radio shows going.
We came
back East after a lick at
Chicago, where there was a
regular Old Home Week with Fawn's
folks, and we got three
consecutive weeks at the Paramount. We played 'em sleek,
and had
the old
folks smiling into each others' eyes.
We played
'em frantic,
and blew the roof. You know.
And every dollar
that fell into our laps,
and every
roar of applause, and every line
of print
in the
colyums that drooled over us, I
hated, and there was plenty
to hate.
The Geese
played so many different
kinds of music there was
no getting
away from it anywhere.
I once
saw a
juke-box with seven Crawford plates in
it at
oncel There was Lutch with
the world throwing itself at his
head because he was a
nice guy. And here I was
in the
gravy because he was good
to me.
And the whole world was full
of the
skunk and his music, and
there'd never be any
rest from it anywhere. (Did
you hear
the Hot Club of
France's recording of Daboo Dabay?) A great big
silk-lined prison for old Fluke;
a padded
cell. Lutch Crawford built a padded
cell and was keeping old
Fluke in it.
Fawn got a
little haggard, after that time
in Boulder
City, but she gradually pulled up
out of
it. She
was learning,
the way the rest of us
had learned,
to feel
one way
and act
another. Well, isn't that the
rock-bottom starting point for anyone
in show
business? She was the better
for it
. .
.
We started West
again, and South, and the
time I tried it sneaky was
in Baton
Rouge.
It was a
road club again, real razzle,
with curved glass and acoustic ceilings and all that
jazz. I can't say that
anything particular keyed me
off—it was just that I'd
made up my mind a long
time ago how I was
going to do it and
I needed
a spot
near running water. Baton
Rouge has a fair-sized creek running past its
front door, and Old Man
River, he don't say nothin'.
It was very
simple—it's surprising how simple some
things can be, even things you've
been eating your heart out
over for years, when they get
fixed up at last .
. .
Lutch got a letter. The
hat-check girl at the club
turned away to hang up
a coat and when she turned
back the letter was there
by the
tip-plate. There were plenty of
people in and out through
the lobby. I was, myself. The
powder-room was downstairs; I was sick
that night. Everyone knew about
it; they
were laughing at old Fluke. I
am allergic
to shrimps,
and here
I had to go and gulp
up a
pound or more of New
Orleans fried shrimp and rice: I
had hives
that grease-paint would barely cover, and could just about
navigate, and I had to
take a trip down below every
twenty minutes or so. Sometimes
I stayed
a long while . . .
Lutch got
the letter.
It was
sealed, addressed with a typewriter.
No return
address. The hat-check girl gave
it to
the head-waiter who gave
it to
Lutch. Lutch read it, told
Crispin and Fawn he'd be back,
he didn't
know when, put on his
hat and left. I don't know
what he thought about on
the way.
The letter, I guess.
It said
Dear Lutch,
First,
don't show this to anyone or tell anyone about it yet. Make sure no one is
looking over your shoulder or anything like that.
Lutch,
I'm half out of my mind over something I've heard. I think a serious danger
threatens my daughter Fawn, and I must talk to you. I am in Baton Rouge. I
don't want Fawn to know it yet.
Maybe
there is nothing in this business but it is best to play it safe. I am waiting
for you near a warehouse above Morrero—that is just down-river from Baton
Rouge. The warehouse has LE CLERC ET FILS painted on the street side. I am in
the office out near the end of the. wharf. I think you might be followed. Take
a cab to the depot at Morrero and walk to the river. You can't miss it. But
watch for a shadow, you can't be too careful. I hope all this turns out to be
for nothing.
Bring this with you. If what I fear is true
it would not be safe even to burn it at the club. Please hurry.
Anxiously,
John
Amory.
I'm proud
of that
letter. Fawn's pop and Lutch
were real buddy-buddy, and the old
man would
never ask a favor unless
it was important. The letter was
the only
evidence there was, and Lutch brought
it with
him. A nice job, if
I do
say so
myself.
No one
saw Lutch.
The cab-driver
didn't know who he was,
or if he did he never
mentioned it later. Lutch came
as soon
as he could, knocked at the
door of the office. There
was a
dim light inside. No
one answered.
He came
in and
closed the door behind him. He
called out, softly, "Mr. Amory!"
I whispered,
from inside the warehouse, "In here."
Lutch went
to the
inner door, stepped into the
warehouse, 156 and stopped, with
the light
from the office showing up
the strip
of skin between his
collar and his hair just
fine. I hit him there
with a piece of pipe. He
never made a sound. This
time I wasn't going to talk
it over
with him.
I caught him
before he hit the floor
and carried
him over
to the long table beside the
sink. The sink was already
full of water, and I had
seen to it that it
was river
water, just in case. I put
the pipe
where I could reach it
in case
I had
to hit him again, and spread
him out
on the
table with his head over the
sink. Then I dunked it,
and held
it under.
Like I thought,
it revived
him and
he began
to kick
and squirm. The burlap sacks I
had laid
on the
table muffled that all right, and
I had
him pretty
firmly around the shoulders, with my elbow at the
back of his neck forcing
his head
under. I had one leg hooked
under the sink support. He.
didn't have a chance, though it
was hard
work for a few minutes.
When he was
quiet again, and with five
minutes or so over for good
measure, I got the small-boat
anchor chain—an old rusty one it
was—and wound it around him
secure but careless-like; it could
be by
accident. I got the letter
out of
his pocket
and burned it, grinding
all the
ashes down on a small
piece of roofing tin which I
dropped into the river. I
rolled Lutch in after it. There
was quite
a current
running—he started downstream almost before
he was
under the surface. I said,
"So long, superman," straightened
myself, locked up the warehouse
after turning the light
out, emptying the sink and
all like
that, and, picking up the car
I'd parked
two blocks
away, drove back to the club.
It was
easy to climb in the
basement window into the stall of
the men's
room I'd left locked, and
to come
back upstairs without being noticed. The
whole thing had taken just
forty-three minutes.
I was happy
about the whole thing. The
chain would hold him under, that
and the
mud, and the catfish would
make quick work of him. But
if, by
some fluke, the body should
be found,
well, the chain could
be an
accident, and he certainly died
of drowning. In river
water. The bump on the
back of his neck—that was nothing.
But Lutch
Crawford was hard to kilL
I don't
have to tell you about
the next
month or so, with the headlines
and all
that jive that went on.
The band
went right ahead; Lutch's hand was
always so light on it
that his absence made almost no
difference. The sides worried some
about him,
but it
took them three days to
get really
panicked. By that time my mind
was easy.
No amount
of police
work and private detective shenanigans could do a thing
about it. The whole band alibied
me, and
the hat-check
girl too, with my hives. Matter
of fact,
no one
even thought to ask me
any questions, specially. No one remembered exactly what time Lutch left the club; there
had been
nothing to call it to
anyone's attention. A clean job.
The next
thing I wanted to do
was to
get clear
of the
whole aggregation and go
live by myself. I was
careful, though, and made no move
until someone else did it
first.
It came to
a head
six weeks
after Lutch disappeared. We'd moved on to Fort Worth,
Texas. Fawn and Crispin hadn't
wanted to leave Baton
Rouge, but finally decided that
Lutch, wherever he was,
knew our schedule as well
as we
did and
would come back when
he was
ready to.
We had
a big
powwow in Fort Worth. Crispin
took the floor. Everyone was there.
Fawn still looked
bad. She'd lost a lot
of weight
Skid Portly looked five years older.
Crispin came
to the
point as quick as Lutch
used to.
"Gang," he
said, "don't get your hops
up; I
didn't call you because I have
any new
ideas about Lutch or where
he might
be. There's no word.
"What brings this
up is
that after two weeks at
Brownsville and a week
at Santa
Monica, this tour is over.
We have
our pick of several offers—I'll go over them with
you later—and
we've got to decide
right now what we're going
to do.
Lutch isn't here and there's no
way of
knowing when he will show.
We can either take a vacation
after the Santa Monica date,
and hang up the
fiddle until Lutch shows up,
or we
can go
on. What do you say?"
"I could
use a
rest," I said.
"We could all
use a
rest," said Crispin. "But what
has us
tuckered out is this
business of Lutch. If it
wasn't for that we wouldn't think of a break
until next summer."
Fawn said,
"What would Lutch want us
to do?"
Moff—Lew Moffatt, that
was, the reed man—said, "I
don't reckon there's any doubt about
that."
There was a
general numble of agreement. Lutch would have gone on.
"Then we
go on?"
Everybody said yes
but me.
I didn't
say. No One noticed. 158
Crispin nodded. "That
leaves a big question. As far
as performances
are concerned,
we can
get along.
But someone
has to take over booking, contracts,
a lot
of the
arranging, hotel accommodations, and so on."
"What do you
mean someone?" asked Skid, "Lutch
did four
men's work."
"I know," said Crispin. "Well, do you think we
can make
it? How about the
arrangements? Skid, you and Fawn
used lo help him the most."
Skid nodded.
Fawn said, "We can do
it."
Crispin said, "I'll
handle the business, if it's
okay with you." It was. "Now,
how about
billing? We can't phony it
up; Lutch's dis—uh—absence has had a flock of publicity,
and if
Lutch doesn't come back
before we start, we can't
bill him. The customers wouldn't like
it."
They chewed that
over. Finally Skid said. "Why'n't
you take it, Crisp?"
"Me? I don't want
it."
The rest of
them all started talking at
once. Lutch and Crispin had worked
very close together. The general
idea was that they wanted him
to do
it
Crispin had been
lounging back against a long table. Now he stood
up straight.
He said,
"All right, all
right. But listen. This band
is Lutch
Crawford's Gone Geese, and if
it's all the same to
you it'll
stay that way. We can bill
as Don
Crispin and Lutch Crawford's Gone Geese if you like;
but I
want it so that wherever
Lutch is, he'll know that it's
still his band. That means,
too, that any new arrangement or novelty or what
have you, is going to
be done the way
Lutch would do it, to
the very
best of our ability. If any
one of
you hears
something in the band that
doesn't sound like Lutch,
speak up. I want it
so that
when Lutch comes back—damn it, I
won't say if—when Lutch comes back he can pick
up the
baton in the middle of
a number and
take over from there. Are
you with
it?"
They were. After
the fuss
had died
down Koko deCamp, (he hot trumpet
man, spoke up sort of
timid. "Crispin," he said,
"I don't want to cause
any hard
feelings, but I have a
standing offer with the
King combo. My contract with
Lutch is up at the end
of this
tour, and I think I
could do myself more good with
the King.
That's only—" he added quickly,
"if Lutch don't come
back."
Crispin frowned
and scratched
his head.
He looked
over at 159
Fawn. She
said again. "What would Lutch
want him to do?"
Crispin said, 'There
it is.
Lutch would let you do
whatever you thought you wanted. He
never stopped anyone who wanted
to leave."
I could
of told
him. I didn't
Crispin went on,
"There's the code word, kizd,
'What would Lutch want?' Start from
there. Anyone else want out?
There'll be no hard feelings."
The bass man—we'd
only had him a couple
of months—said
he thought he'd go.
Then I spoke up.
Fawn said,
"Oh, no!"
"Why, Fluke?"
asked Crispin. They all stared
at me.
I spread
my hands.
"I want out, that's all.
Do I
have to fill out a questionnaire?"
"There won't be
any 'Gone
Geese' without Fluke," said Skid.
He was
so right.
The way
they billed it was "Don
Crispin
and the Lutch Crawford
Orchestra." Crispin and
Fawn did
their best to make
me stay
with it, but no. Oh
no. I
was over,
out and clear. I
think Fawn figured it that
it hurt
me to
stay
close to the band,
after Lutch had been so
good to me. HelL
I wanted to laugh,
that was all, and I
couldn't do that where
the band could see
me. /
We broke up
at Santa
Monica after the date there.
I thought I'd take it easy
for a
year or so and look
around, but what should drop into
my lap
but a
gold-plated offer from a radio station
in Seattle,
for a
night record-jockey stand. That was made
to order.
My voice
and delivery
and savvy
of the
sharps and the flats
were perfect for it, and
best of all, I could work
where people didn't have to
look at my face. Sometimes I think if I
had been
in radio
from the start, I wouldn't of—I might not have
become the kind of cat
who— ah, that's useless chatter now.
I got twenty-six
weeks with options and could
have upped the ante if I'd
wanted to argue, which I
didn't. Crispin and the rest of
Lutch's sidemen went all out
for me,
sending me telegrams during my show,
giving me personal appearances, and plugging me in their
clubs. Seemed like, dead or
alive, Lutch kept on being kind.
I didn't
let it
get me.
I'd lived
long enough to know you can't
break clean from any close
contact with a human being. Quit
a job,
get a
divorce, leave a home town, it drags on in
shreds and tatters that haunt
you. I held tight to laughing.
Lutch was dead.
Then one
night I got that advance
shipment of Mecca records. Six
sides of Crispin-Crawford.
I gave it
a big
hello in the old Fluke
style: "Aha, lil kizd—a clump of jump
for bacon
to crisp-in;
Crispin and Crawford, and six new
plates for gates. Just like
old times
for Fluke
the Juke. . . . This
spinner's a winner: old Deep Purple in the Crispin crunchy style."
I played
it off.
I hadn't
heard any of these plates
yet, though they were cleared for
broadcast; they'd been delivered just before air time. Deep Purple was the
old bandstand
arrangement that Lutch had done
himself. Moff was playing Lutch's clarinet, and there wasn't
enough difference to matter. In the double-time ride in
the third
chorus, Skid slipped in a
lick on guitar that
I hadn't
heard before, but it was
well inside the Crawford tradition.
The other
platters showed up the same way;
Crispin took a long drum
solo in Lady
Be Good that was new,
but strictly
Crawford. I held out the
two new
ones until last
I mean
new. There was a blow-top
novelty called One
Foot in the Groove that I had
never heard; the by-line was
Moff and Skid Portly. The other
one was
an arrangement
of Tuxedo Junction. We'd always
used a stock arrangement for that one; this was
something totally new. In the
first place it let in
some bop sequences, and in the second
place it really exploited an echo chamber—the first time that had
been done on a Crawford record.
I listened
to it
bug-eyed.
It was good.
It was
very good. But
the thing
that tore me all apart was
that it was Lutch Crawford,
through and through. Lutch had never
used an echo before. But
he would
—he would,
because it
was a
new trend.
Just like the be-bop continuities. I could
imagine the powwow before the
recording session, and Fawn saying
"What would Lutch want?"
Listening to
it, I
saw Lutch,
wide shoulders, long hands, pushing the brass this way,
that way, reaching up and
over to haul the sound of
the drums
up and
then crush them down, down to a whispering cymbal. I could see
him hold
it down
there with his right
hand flat in the air
in front
of him
as if
he had it on a table,
long enough for him to
catch his lower lip between his teeth and pull
it loose,
and suddenly,
then, like a flash-bulb going off,
dazzle the people with an
explosion of scream-trumpet and high volume
guitar.
The turntable beside
me went
quietly about its work, with
the sound-head pulsing a little like a blood-pressure gauge.
It hypnotized
me, I
guess. Next thing I knew
my engineer
was waving frantically at me through the
plateglass, giving me a 'dead-air' sign, and I realized
that the record had been
finished for seconds. I
drew a thick rattling breath
and said
the only thing in
the world
that there was—a thing bigger
than me, clearer than
my scriptsheets
or the
mike in front of me or
anything else. I said stupidly,
"That was Lutch. That was Lutch
Crawford. He isn't dead. He isn't dead . . ."
Something in front
of my
eyes began bobbing up and
down. It was the engineer again,
signalling. I had been staring
straight at him without
seeing him. I was seeing
Lutch. The engineer pointed downward, waggled
his finger
round and round. That meant play
a record.
I nodded
and put
on a Crosby plate, and sat
back as if I'd been
lanced in the gut with a
vaulting pole.
My phone light
flashed. I took calls on
the show;
the phones
were equipped with lights
instead of bells so they
wouldn't crowd the mike.
I picked
up the
receiver, saying automatically, "Fluke the Juke."
"One moment please."
An operator.
Then, "Fluke? Oh, Fluke . .
." Fawn. It was Fawn
Amory.
"Fluke," she said, her Words tumbling
over each other the way notes
did on
her keyboard,
"Oh Fluke, darling, we heard
you, we all heard
you. We're- in Denver. We
cut a
date to catch your show. Fluke
honey, you said it, Fluke,
you said
itl"
"Fawn—"
"You said he
isn't dead. We know that,
Fluke—we all do. But the way
you said
it; you
don't know how much that
means to us! We did it,
you see7
Tuxedo Junction—we worked
and worked—something that would
be new
and would
be Lutch
too. Lutch can't die
as long
as we
can do
that, don't you see?"
"But I—"
"We're going to
do more,
Fluke. More Lutch, more real
Lutch Crawford. Will you
come back, Fluke? We want
to do
more 'Gone Geese' records
and we
can't without you. Won't you please,
Fluke? We need
you!" There
was a
murmuring in her background. Then,
"Fluke? This
is Crispin.
I want
to double
that, boy. Come on back."
"Not me,
Crispin. I'm done," I managed
to say.
"I know how
you feel,"
said Crispin quickly. He knew
I was about to hang up
on him.
"I won't push you, hipster.
But think it over, will you?
We're going to keep on,
whatever happens, and wherever Lutch
is, alive
or—wherever he is, he'll have a band, and as
long as he has a
band, he's here." "You're
doing fine," I croaked.
"Just think
it over.
We can
do twice
as well
if you'll
come back. Keep in touch. Here's
Fawn again." I hung up.
I'll never know
how I
got through
that show. I know why
I did. I did because I
was going
to make
my own
way. That was why I had
wanted to kill Lutch. Come
sick, come ca, as the man
said, this was my kick—making
my own
way without
Lutch Crawford.
Six o'clock was
closing time for me, and
I imagine
I got
through the routines all
right; no one said anything
to me
about it. And if
I didn't
answer the phone, and ignored
requests, and played all the
long stuff I could get
my hands
on so I wouldn't have to
talk, well, they took it
the way
any outfit will take guff from
a guy
they pay too highly.
I walked, I
don't know where. I suppose
I frightened
a lot
of kids on their
way to
school with that face of
mine, and got a lot of
queer looks from women scrubbing
their porch steps. I wouldn't know.
Lutch isn't dead was the
only thing that made. I can't
tell you all the things
I went
through; there was a time of
fear, when I thought Lutch
was after
me for
what I'd done, and a time
of calm,
when I thought it couldn't
matter less—I could just go
on minding
my own
business and let Lutch die altogether,
the way
everybody has to. And there
was a time of cold fury,
when I heard that new
Tuxedo Junction with the
echoing guitar, and knew that
Crispin would keep turning new Lutch
out—real Lutch, that no one
else in the music business could
imitate. Lutch, he was talented
like three or four people, and
there happened to be three
or four
people with just those
talents in his band. Anyway,
it's all a haze.
About ten
o'clock it all clicked into
the clear.
I found
myself on Elliott Avenue away
out near
Kinnear Park—I must've walked miles—and everything
was squared
away. / hate
Lutch Crawford—I was left
with that, the old familiar
feeling. And I still had to
do something
about it because Lutch wasn't
dead.
I walked
into a telegraph office and
wired Crispin.
They started
by giving
me something
I didn't
want—but wasn't that the
whole trouble? This time it
was a
sort of surprise party and
testimonial dinner. I guess I
was a
little sour.
They didn't
understand. Crispin, he tried to
make me feel better by
guaranteeing that he'd see to
it I
was paid
twice over for breaking my radio
contract. Fawn—well, Fawn shouldn't have been so sweet to
me. That
was a
huge mistake. Anyway, there was a
dinner and some drinks and
Crispin and Skid and Moff and
them got up one by
one and
said what a fine cat
I was. Then they all sat
around playing "remember when" and passing side remarks to
the empty
chair at the head of
the table where Lutch's clarinet was.
It was
a fine
party.
After that I
went to work. What they
saw me
doing was "Is coming up a
sizzle-swizzle for Rum and Coca Cola, featuring the Id-kid, Skid, and his
supercharged git-fiddle, so look out!" And "We got a dream-scheme, kizd, all
soft and lofty, smooth, forsooth, but
full of nerve-verve. Hey Moff,
stroke these quiet cats with Velvet Paws . . ." So—I
helped them.
What I was
doing was trying to find
Lutch so's I could kill
him. You should have
been a fly on the
wall to hear those slave-sessions. Take a
tune, find old Lutch, mix
'em up,
make 'em be something new that's
styled like something they wouldn't let be dead. So—they
helped me.
I could have
killed Lutch by killing the
lot of
them. I never did discard that idea.
But maybe
I'm lazy.
Somewhere in that aggregation was the
essence of what was Lutch.
If I
could smoke that out and kill
it, he'd
be dead.
I knew
that. It was just a matter of finding out what it
was. It shouldn't have been much
trouble. Hell, I knew that
outfit inside out—performers,
arrangements, even what they liked
to eat.
I told
you—there was damn little
turnover there. And in the
music business people show
up real
soon for what they are.
But it
wasn't easy.
That outfit was
like a machine made for
a very
special purpose—but made all out
of standard
parts you could buy on
the open market. That
isn't to say that some
of the
parts weren't strictly upper-bracket;
all of
them were machined to a millionth. But I
couldn't believe that what Lutch
called "unit" was the
thing that made that group
an individual,
great one. If Lutch had been
around, you could've said that
Lutch made the difference between a
good machine and something alive. But Lutch wasn't around,
and the
thing still lived. Lutch had put
the life
in it,
by choosing
the right
pieces and giving them the right
push. After that the thing
ran under
its own power—the power of life—and
Lutch Crawford wouldn't be dead until
that life was gone. It
was going
to be
him or
me.
So I helped them.
We had
club and hotel dates, and
we made records, and in keeping
Lutch alive, I helped them.
And they helped
me. Every
time a new tune started
climbing the top ten, every
time someone came up with
a number
that looked like a
winner, we'd arrange it for
the band;
and in those sessions the band
and the
workings of every least part
were torn down and
inspected and argued over. I
never missed a word of this,
so—they helped me.
It was hell
for me.
If you've
got guts
enough to kill a man,
you've got to finish
the job.
Lutch was alive. It was
bad away
from the band, with
every radio and juke-box in
the whole
world blasting out Crawford
creations. It was bad with
the band—sometimes you could
see himl
Theme time at
a club,
and the
lights the way they always
were, and the band
the same,
except that now Crispin's luggage
was front
and center.
The swinging
bells of the brass and their
"hoo ha" and then Skid's
solo Daboo, Dabay with Moff taking
the obbligato
on the
clarinet. Moff never stood out front
to play,
though. He was out of
sight like Crispin used to be.
Crispin, crushing the beat, whisper-drumming,
stared up and out
the way
he used
to when
he was
in the
blackness, and Skid was
no different,
watching his fingers . .
. all the books say a
good guitarist never watches his
fingers but I guess Skid never
read them . . .
but you
could see he was following someone, and it
wasn't Crispin, from under his
pulled-down eyebrows. But Lutch
was there
most of all for Fawn, Fawn
with the flickering golden light
touching and leaving her face, and
her head
tilted to one side so
the heavy
hair swung forward past
her round
bare shoulder; and on her
face that look, that
half-smile, half-hungry look—hungry
like Lutch was there looking at
her, not like he was
away.
Daboo
dabay ... it
hypnotized those cats. We always
opened with it, and
sometimes we had as many
as three
half-hour network spots, and that
meant theme opening and closing.
It was
always the same. I often
wondered if the customers who faithfully spattered out
their applause at the drop
of a hoo ha had any idea that this was
different, this was a—a resurrection, maybe eight times a
night.
First I was
sure it was the brass—the
low brass,
where that peculiar vitality came from.
You see,
that was my protection —Lutch was strong in everything
we did,
but you
couldn't see him in anything but the theme.
When we did the theme
I concentrated on what
I heard,
not on
what it meant. Anyway, night after night I waited
for the
theme, and cut out everything
but that
low brass
as I
listened. It wasn't notes I
was listening for, but tone—style—Lutch. After a week or so I
pinned it down to
the second
trumpet and a trombone. I
was sure I was right; the
Crawford quality was somewhere down
there where the tone
was low
and full.
I got a
break on it. So did
Karpis and Heintz, the sliphom
and trumpet men I'd
singled out. See, they roomed
together in a hotel we used
during Convention Week in Spokane.
So one
night they didn't get
to the
club in time to open.
The hotel
was an old firetrap—no escapes. The
only way out of their
room was through the door. No
phone. Small transom, and that
jammed and painted over.
Locking the door from outside,
putting a twist of
coat-hanger wire in the key
so it
couldn't turn, that was
easy. It was forty minutes
before a bellhop let them out.
I heard the
theme twice without those two
sides. Crispin put it in a
nutshell when I asked him
about it later. 'Thin," he said, "but it's still
Lutch." That was what I
thought.
No one found
out who
had locked
those boys in, of course.
I don't operate so
I can
be found
out. No one knew who
was responsible when two
trumpets and a reed man
got left
miles behind us when we went
to St.
Louis. We'd hired a bus
and a
couple of cars—we had
a'quartet and two vocalists by
then. And one of the cars
just quit back there in
the fog.
Who watered the gasoline7 Some shmoe
at a
gas station,
and let's
forget it.
The theme wasn't
the theme
on that
date. I hadn't knocked out the thing that was
Lutch—I'd knocked out the orchestra
by pulling those men;
we were
just nothing. That was no
answer. I had to
find the heart of Lutch,
and stop
it, stop
it so it could never beat
again.
Somebody slugged Stormy,
the bass,
while he was asleep the second afternoon in St.
Louis. He went to the
hospital and they got another man
quick. He wasn't Stormy, but
he was good. You could hear
that the bass was different—but
the orchestra was still
Lutch
How long can
you keep
it up?
Sometimes I thought I'd go
crazy. Actually. Sometimes I
wanted to run out into
the tables
and smash the customers
around, because I thought maybe
they knew what I
was looking
for. I was so close
to it.
That thing that was Lutch could
cut in
and cut
out during
a number,
and I'd
never notice it, being so
busy listening to one instrument
or combo.
Someone out there could know,
right in the same room with
me, and
I wouldn't
Sometimes I thought I was going
out of
my mind.
I even got
us a
new piano
player for a night. I
had to
come out in the open for
that, but it was safe.
I hung
around the conservatory until I latched
on to
a kid
who was
all starry-eyed
about Lutch Crawford. I made
like a talent scout The
kid was good-looking, with pimples. A jack-rabbit
right hand, like Art Tatum, or
it would
be in
a few
years. I told Fawn about the boy, and said
he was
pining away. I laid it
on. You
know. You know how
old Fluke.
And Fawn,
her and
her soft
heart! she not only
agreed to let the kid
in, but
persuaded Crispin to let
him take
a one-night
stand!
He did. He
was good.
He read
like crazy, and he played
every note that was
on the
paper and played 'em right;
and he played a lot more
he dreamed
up, and
they were right too. But he
wasn't for the Geese. Now,
here's a funny thing. It's
aside from the business
of killing
Lutch. This kid was wrong
for us, but so
good Crispin spoke to Forway,
the tour
manager, and today that kid's
making records that sell three
quarters of a million each.
All because
of the
break I got him by
way of getting Fawn off the
ivory for a night Now
what do you think of that?
I found out
that night, though, that Fawn
wasn't the "Lutch" thing
that I was hunting. The
band sounded like Lutch Crawford with
the wrong
piano, that's all. It wasn't
wrong enough to keep
Lutch from being there, somewhere
in the sharps and flats. I
wanted to run up to
the stand
and rip
the music apart with
my hands
and yell,
"Come out of there, you yellow skunk! Come out
and let
me get
to youl"
I was glad
it wasn't
Fawn. I'd have stopped her,
if it
was, but I wouldn't have liked
doing it much . .
.
And I found him. I found him!
He had been
right there all the time,
looking at me, me looking at him, and I
hadn't wits enough to see
him.
Virus X and
I found
him. Virus X is something
like flu, and something like dysentery,
and it's
no fun.
It swept
through us like a strong wind.
I got
it first
and it
only lasted a couple of
days. Moff, now, he
was out
two weeks.
We only
had to
close for two nights, though. We
made it the rest of
the time,
sometimes with
something like a full band,
sometimes with a skeleton. One
of the
short-timers was the guy who
played guitar—Skid Portly.
Skid always said
that any hill-billy could do
what he did, given his guitar.
I believed
him. Why not? I'd diddled
around with the instrument myself. Put
your finger behind a fret,
pluck the string. With
a pedal
you could
make it louder or softer. With push-buttons you could
make it warble or snarl
or whuff!
out with
a velvet
sound. With a switch you
could make it sound exactly like
a harpsichord
or an
organ. With a lever under
your arm you could make
all six
strings rise in pitch like six
fire sirens rising together, to
almost a full tone. You didn't play
it. You
operated it.
Skid came down
with Virus X, and we
called in a character called Sylviro Giondonato, a glossy-haired,
olive-skinned cat from East St. Louis.
He was
bugeyed at the chance, like
the pianist I'd found. He played
a whole
mess of guitar, and when he
got his
hands on Skid's instrument I thought he was
going to cry. He
spent ten hours in Skid's
hotel room learning the gimmicks on
that box, with Skid, who
was feeling
rotten, coaching him every
step of the way. I
know he did things on
that guitar that Skid
wouldn't dare to do. Giondonato
had one of those crazy ears
like Rheinhardt or Eddie South—not
that Eddie plays guitar.
The band
played that night without Lutch.
Gionni—Johnny, we called
him—was a star. The customers
all but
clawed down the ceiling-beams. A big hit. But
it wasn't Lutch.
Crispin ripped off
a momma-daddy
on the
torn after a while, our
signal to take fifteen. I
don't think I heard it.
I was
crouching at the comer
of the
stand thinking over and over,
No Lutch! No Lutch! and trying
not to
laugh. It had been a long time.
When Crispin touched
my shoulder
I almost
jumped out from behind my teeth.
"No Lutch!" I said. I
couldn't help it.
"Hey," said Crispin.
"Level off, Fluke. So you
noticed it too?"
"Brother."
"You wouldn't
think one man's work would
make that much difference, would you?"
"I don't get
it," I said. I meant
that. "Johnny's a hell of
a guitar player.
Man, I think he's better than Skid."
"He is,"
Crispin said. "But—I think I
know why Lutch 168 doesn't show when
he plays.
Johnny plays terrific guitar. Skid
plays terrific electric guitar.
Dig me?
The two
are played
pretty much the same—and
so are
a cello
and a
viola. But the attack is 'way
different. Johnny exploits guitar as
good as I've heard it anywhere
so far.
But Skid
plays that instrument out there."
"What's that to
do with
Lutch?"
'Think back, Fluke.
When Skid came with us,
he was
amplified, period. Look what
he's got now—and look where
we are now. You know how
much we've depended on him."
"I thought we
were depending on his guitar."
Crispin shook his
big, straight-nosed head. "It's Skid. I don't think
I realized
it myself
until now."
"Thanks," I told him.
He looked at
me curiously.
"For what?"
I threw up
my hands.
"For—well, I feel
better now, that's all."
"You're a large charge
of strange
change, Fluke," he said. I said, "Everybody knows that."
Three nights
later I slugged Skid Portly
from behind. I killed Lutch
Crawford with a pair of
bolt-cutters. And there was Lutch—all of
him, all his music, all
his jump,
his public
and his pride, in
the palm
of my
hand. Literally in the palm
of my hand—three pinkish slugs with
hom at
one end
and blood at the other. I
tossed 'em, caught 'em, put
'em in
my pocket and walked off whistling
Daboo Dabay. It was
the first time in eight years
I had
heard that music and enjoyed
it-Sometimes it takes a long
time to kill a man.
Rehearsal next day
was pretty
dismal.
Crispin had everything
set up.
When we were all there,
sort of milling around,
he got
up on
the lower
tier of the stand. Everyone shut
up, except
me, but
then, I wasn't laughing out
loud.
Crispin's mouth was
tight. "I asked Fawn what
to do,"
he said abruptly, "just like Lutch
used to. She said, 'What
would Lutch do?' I think Lutch
would first see if we
could make it the way we
are—find out how bad we're
hurt. Right?"
Everybody uh-huhed. That's
what Lutch would do. Someone
said, "How's Skid?"
Crispin barked, "You
play trumpet. How'd you feel
if someone sliced off your Up?"
Then he said, "I'm sorry,
Riff."
Riff said,
"Gosh, that's okay."
They took
their places. Fawn looked like
the first
week after Baton Rouge. Giondonato started for the guitar.
Crispin waved him back. "Stand by, Johnny." He glanced
at the
guitar. It was ready
to go,
resting neck upward on the
seat of Skid's chair. Crispin touched
it, straightened
it up
a bit,
lovingly. He bent and
shifted the speaker outward a
little. Then he went to his
luggage. "Theme," he said. He
looked over at me. I picked
up my
mike, puffed into it, adjusted
the gain.
Crispin gave
a silent
one-two. Fawn stroked a chord.
The brasses swung right: Hoo And left: Ha
Fawn crowded the
beat with her chord. I
looked at her. For the very
first time she wasn't looking
at that
spot on the floor in front
of the
band. She was looking at
Crispin. Hoo Ha
Moff raised
his clarinet,
tongued it, laid his lips
around the mouthpiece, filliped
the stops
nervously, and then blew.
And with the
first note of the clarinet,
shockingly, came the full, vibrato voice
of Skid's
guitar: Daboo, Dabay, Dabay, Daboo . . .
And right
on top
of it
there was a thunderous, animal, coughing gasp, and a
great voice screaming, screaming, sobbing like peals of laughter.
The sound
was huge,
and crazy, and it dwindled to
an echoing,
"He isn't dead, he isn't
dead . . ."
And then I
had to
breathe, and I realized that
the sounds
had come from me,
that I was standing frozen,
staring at Skid's glittering guitar, with
the mike
pressed close to my cheek. I
began to cry. I couldn't
help it. I threw down
the microphone—it made a
noise like thunder—and I took
the rolled-up handkerchief out of my
pocket and hurled it at
the guitar, which was
playing on and on and
on, Lutch's
theme, the way Lutch
wanted it played, by somebody
else. The handkerchief opened in the
air. Two of them hit
the instrument and made
it thrum.
One stuck
to the
cloth and went cometing under the
chair.
Moff ran over
there. I was screaming, "Use these, damn you!" Moff bent as if
to pick
something up, drew back. "Crispin—it's the—the fingers
. .
." and then he folded
up and slumped down between the
chairs.
Crispin made
a noise
almost like the first one
I had
blown 170 into the mike.
Then he rushed me. He
caught me by the front of
the coat
and the
belt and lifted me high
in the
air. I heard Fawn scream, "Don!" and then
he threw
me on
the floor. I screamed louder than
Fawn did.
I must have
blacked out for a moment.
When I opened my eyes I
was lying
on the
floor. My left arm had
two elbows.
I couldn't feel it
yet. Crispin was standing over
me, one
foot on each side. He was
shoving the rest of them
back. They were growling like dogs.
Crispin looked a mile high.
"Why did
you do
that to Skid?" Crispin asked.
His voice
was quiet; his eyes
were not. I said, "My
arm .
. ."
and Crispin kicked me.
"Don! Don,
let me—"
and people
began to jostle and push,
and Fawn broke through.
She went
to her
knees beside me. "Hello,
Fluke," she said, surprisingly.
I began
to cry
again. "The poor thing's out
of his
mind," she said.
'The poor thing?"
roared Stormy. "Why, he—" "Fluke, why did
you do
it?" "He wouldn't die,"
I said.
"Who wouldn't, Fluke? Skid?"
They made
me sore.
They were so dumb. "Lutch,"
I said.
"He wouldn't be dead."
"What do
you know
about Lutch?" gritted Crispin.
"Leave him
alone," she blazed. "Go on,
Fluke."
"Lutch was living
in Skid's
guitar," I said patiently, "and I had to let
him out"
Crispin swore. I
really didn't know he ever
did that
My arm began to hurt then.
Fawn got up slowly. "Don
. .
."
Crispin grunted. Fawn
said, "Don, Lutch used to
worry all the time about Fluke.
He always
wanted Fluke to know he
was wanted for himself.
Fluke had something that no
one else had, but he wouldn't
believe it. He always thought
Lutch and the rest of us
were sorry for him."
The guitar was
still playing. It rose in
crescendo. I twitched. "Skid—"
I yelled.
"Moff, turn that
thing off," said Crispin. A
second later the guitar stopped. "I
knew it would trap somebody,"
he said
to me, "but I never thought
it would
be you.
That's a recording played through the
guitar amplifier. I made hundreds
of 'em
when I was running tests on
Skid's guitar. I've been worried
for a long time about the
luck we've been having—a choir
missing this night, a
side missing that night, a
combo out the next night. The
more I thought of it the more it
took a pattern. Someone was doing
it, and
when that happened to Skid, I
had an
idea that someone'd give himself
away, if only for a second,
when that guitar began to
play. I never expected this!"
"Leave him
alone," said Fawn tiredly. "He
can't understand you." She was
crying.
Crispin turned on
her. "What do you want
to do
with him? Kiss and make up?"
"I want to
kill him!" she shrieked back
at him.
She held
out her polished nails,
crooked, like claws. "With these! Don't you know that?"
Crispin stepped
back, stunned.
"But that doesn't
matter," she went on in
a low
voice. "We can't stop saying it
now, of all times— What
would Lutch want?"
It got
very quiet in there.
"Do you
know why he was rejected
from the army during the war?" she asked. Nobody said anything.
Fawn said, "Extreme
ugliness of face. That was
a ground
for deferment. Look it
up if
you don't
believe me." She shook her head
slowly and looked at me.
"Lutch was always so careful of his feelings, and
so were
we all.
Lutch wanted him to have his
face made over, but he
didn't know how to suggest
it to Fluke—Fluke was psychopathically sensitive about it. Well, he
waited too long, and I
waited too long, and now
look. I say let's have it
done now, and save what
little is left of the—
creature."
Stormy said,
"This good-for-evil kick can go
just so far." The rest of
them growled.
Fawn raised her
hands and let them fall.
"What would Lutch do?"
"I killed
Lutch," I said.
"Shut up, you,"
said Crispin. "All right, Fawn.
But listen.
After he gets out
of the
hospital, I don't care if
he looks
like Hedy Lamarr—he stays out of
my way
or by
God I'll
strap him down and take him
apart with a blunt nailfile."
At long,
long last I blacked out.
There was a
time of lying still and
watching the white, curve-edged ceiling stream
past, and a time of
peeping through holes in
the bandages.
I never
said another word, and very little
was said
to me.
The world
was full
of strangers
who knew what they
were doing, and that was
okay with me.
They took the
bandage off this morning and
gave me a mirror. I didn't
say anything.
They went away. I looked
myself over.
I'm no bargain.
But by
the Lord
I can
cite you hundreds of people now
who are
uglier than I am. That's
a change
from not knowing a
single one.
So I killed Lutch
Crawford?
Who was the
downy-clown, the wise-eyes, the smarty-party,
the gook
with a book and his
jaws full of saws, who
said, 'The evil that
men do
lives after them . .
."? He didn't know Lutch Crawford.
Lutch did good.
Look at
the guy
in the
mirror. Lutch did that.
Lutch isn't
dead. I never killed anybody.
I told you
and told
you and
told you that I want
to make
my own damn way! I don't
want this face! And now
that I have this all written
down I'm going out. You
couldn't make me a big guy
too, could you, Lutch? I'm
going out through the top sash.
I can
get through.
And then
six floors,
face first.
Fawn—
Cellmate
They
say, "Ever
been in jail?" and people
laugh. People make jokes about jail.
It's bad, being in jail.
Particularly if you're in for something
you didn't
do. It's
worse if you did do
it; makes you feel like such
a damn
fool for getting caught. It's
still worse if you
have a cellmate like Crawley.
Jail's a place for keeping cons
out of
the way
a while.
A guy
isn't supposed to go nuts in
one.
Crawley was his
name and crawly he was.
A middle-sized
guy with a brown
face. Spindly arms and legs.
Stringy neck. But the biggest chest
I ever
did see
on a
man his
size. I don't care what kind
of a
shirt they put on him.
The bigger
it was,
the farther the cuffs
hung past his hands and
the tighter
it was over his chest. I
never seen anything like it.
He was
the kind of a
lookin' thing that stops traffic
wherever he goes. Sort of a
humpback with the hump in
front. I'm not in the
cell two weeks when I get
this freak for a jail
buddy. I'm a lucky guy. I'm the kind of
lug that
slips and breaks his neck
on the way up to collect
a jackpot
playing Screeno in the movies.
I find hundred-dollar bills on the
street and the man with
the net scoops me up for
passing counterfeits. I get human
spiders like Crawley for cellmates.
He talked like
a man
having his toenails pulled out.
He breathed all the time so
you could
hear it. He made you
wish he'd stop it. He made
you feel
like stopping it. It whistled.
Two guards
brought him in. One guard
was enough
for most cons, but I guess
that chest scared them. No
telling what a man built like
that might be able to
do. Matter
of fact he was so weak
he couldn't
lift a bar of soap
even. Hadn't, anyway, from the looks
of him.
A man
couldn't get that crummy in a
nice clean jail like ours
without leaving soap alone right from
the time
they deloused him when they
booked him in. So
I said,
"What'smatter, bull, I
ain't lonely," and the guard said,
"Shut the face. This thing's
got his
rent paid in advance an' a
reservation here," and he pushed
the freak into the cell. I
said, "Upper bunk, friend," and turned my face to
the wall.
The guards
went away and for a
long time nothing happened.
After a while
I heard
him scratching
himself. That was all right in
itself but I never heard
a man
scratch himself before so it echoed.
I mean
inside him; it was as
if that
huge chest was a box and
sounding board. I rolled over
and looked
at him. He'd stripped off the
shirt and was burrowing his
fingers into his chest. As soon
as he
caught my eye he stopped,
and in spite of his swarthy
skin, I could see him
blush.
"What the
hell are you doing?" I asked.
He grinned and
shook his head. His teeth
were very clean and strong. He
looked very stupid. I said,
"Cut it out, then."
It was about
eight o'clock, and the radio
in the
area below the tiers of cell-blocks
was blaring
out a
soap opera about a woman's trials
and tribs
with her second marriage. I
didn't like it, but the guard
did, so we heard it
every night. You get used to
things like that and after
a week
or so
begin to follow them. So I
rolled out of the bunk
and went
to the
gratings to listen. Crawley was a
hulk over in the corner;
he'd been here about twenty minutes
now and
still had nothing to say,
which was all right with me.
The radio
play dragged on and wound
up as
usual with another crisis in the
life of the heroine, and
who the
hell really cared, but you'd tune
in tomorrow
night just to see if
it would really be
as dopey
as you
figured. Anyway, that was 8:45, and
the lights
would go out at nine.
I moved
back to my bunk, laid out
a blanket,
and began
washing my face at the little
sink by the door. At
ten minutes
to, I
was ready
to turn in, and Crawley still
hadn't moved. I said:
"Figurin' to
stay up all night?"
He started. "I—I—no,
but I
couldn't possibly get into that
upper bunk."
I looked him
over. His toothpick arms and
legs looked too spindly to support
a sparrow's
weight, let alone the tremendous
barrel of a chest. The
chest looked powerful enough to push
the rest
of him
through a twenty-foot wall. I
just didn't know.
"You mean
you can't
climb up?"
He shook his
head. So did I. I
turned in. "What are you
going to do? The
guard'll look in in a
minute. If you ain't in your
bunk you'll get solitary. I
been there, fella. You wouldn't like it. All by
yourself. Dark. Stinks. No radio;
no one to talk to; no
nothin'. Better try to get
into that bunk." I turned over.
A minute later
he said,
without moving, "No use trying.
I couldn't make it
anyway."
Nothing happened
until three minutes to nine
when the lights blinked. I said
"Hell!" and swung
into the upper bunk, being careful to put my
lucky bone elephant under the
mattress first. Without saying a
word—and "thanks" was noticeably the word he didn't
say—he got into the lower
just as we heard footsteps of
the guard
coming along our deck. I
went to sleep wondering why I
ever did a thing like
that for a homely looking thing
like Crawley.
The bell in
the morning
didn't wake him; I had
to. Sure,
I should've let him
sleep. What was he to
me? Why
not let
the guard pitch icewater
on him
and massage
his feet
with a night-stick? Well, that's me. Sucker. I
broke a man's cheekbone once for kicking a
cur-dog. The dog turned around
and bit me afterwards. Anyway, I
hopped out of my bunk—almost
killed myself; forgot for
a minute
it was
an upper—and,
seeing Crawley lying there
whistling away out of his
lungs, I put out a hand to shake
him. But the hand stopped
cold. I saw something.
His chest was
open a little. No, not
cut. Open, like it was
hinged—open like a clam
in a
fish market. Like a clam,
too, it closed while I watched,
a little
more with each breath he
took. I saw a
man pulled
out of
the river
one time
in the
fall. He'd drowned in the summer.
That was awful. This was
worse. I was shaking
all over.
I was
sweating. I wiped my upper lip
with my wrist and moved
down and grabbed his feet and
twisted them so he rolled
off the
bunk and fell on the floor.
He squeaked
and I
said, "Hear that bell? That
means you're through sleeping;
remember?" Then I
went and stuck my head under
the faucet.
That made me feel better. I saw I'd been
afraid of this Crawley feller
for a minute. I was just sore now.
I just
didn't like him.
He got up
off the
floor very slowly, working hard
to get
his feet under him.
He always
moved like that, like a
man with nothing in his stomach
and two
hundred pounds on his back. He
had to
sort of coil his legs
under him and then hand-over-hand up the bunk supports.
He was
weak as a duck. He wheezed
for a
minute and then sat down
to put
on his pants. A man has
to be
sick or lazy to do
that. I stood drying my face
and looking
at him
through the rag towel.
"You sick?"
He looked
up and
said no.
"What's the
matter with you?"
"Nothing. I told
you that
last night. What do you
care, anyway?"
"Mind your
mouth, cellmate. They used to
call me Killer back home. I
tore a guy's arm off
one time
and beat
him over
the head with the
bloody end of it. He
was a
little freak like you. He didn't
excuse himself when he walked
in front
of me."
Crawley took all
this noise calmly enough. He
just sat there looking up at
me with
muddy eyes and didn't say
anything. It made me
sore. I said, "I don't
think I like you. See that
crack on the floor? That
one there.
You stay
on this
side of it. Cross
that line and I pop
you. See?"
Now that
was a
dirty trick; the running water
was on
"my" side of the
line, and so was the
cell door, where he'd have
to go to get his eats.
So was
the bunk.
He got
up off
the bunk
clumsy-like, and crossed over
to the
window and stood with his back
to it,
looking at me. He didn't
look scared and he didn't look
sore and he didn't look
sorry. He just watched me,
quiet, obedient like a
hound-dog, but all patient and
hatred inside like a fat tabby-cat.
I snorted
and turned
my back
to him, grasping the
grating, waiting for chow. Prison
rules were that if a man
didn't want to eat he
didn't have to. If he
didn't want to eat
he wouldn't
show up at the grating
when the mess wagon came along
his deck.
If he
was sick,
there was a sick-call at ten
o'clock. That was none of
the trusty's
business, the guy who
pushed the wagon. He fed
whoever was reaching through the bars
with his square messkit and
his tin cup and
spoon.
So I hung
out there,
and Crawley
was backed
up against
the other wall and
I could
feel his eyes on my
back. My mind was clicking right
along. Funny, though. Like—well, like this:
"I oughta get
paid for having to bunk
with a sideshow. By God I
will get paid, too. I
got two
messkits, his and mine. I can feel them eyes. Here's one
time I get four prunes
and four pieces of bread and
by golly
enough prune-juice to really sweeten that lousy coffee. Hot
dam—tomorrow's Wednesday. Two eggs instead of one!
I'll starve the — until
he gets
so weak an' sick they'll ship
him out
of here.
Oh, boy—wait'll
Sunday! Wait'll that misshapen
cockroach has to watch me
eatin' two lumps of
ice cream!
An' if
he squeals
I'll break his neck an' stuff
it under
his belt.
/ can feel—two sets of eyes!"
The wagon came.
I stuck
out one
kit. A spoon of oatmeal
and a dribble of watered, canned
milk in one side; two
prunes and juice in the other.
Coffee in the cup. Two
hunks of bread on the cup.
I quickly
stuck out the other kit.
The trusty
didn't even look. He filled up
again and moved on. I
backed away with a kit in
each fist. I was afraid
to turn
around. There was one guy behind
me and
I could
feel two pairs of eyes
on my
back. I spilled a
couple of drops of coffee
from my left hand and saw
I was
shaking. I stood there like
a damn
fool because I was afraid to
turn around.
I said to
myself, what the hell, he
could not pull his finger
out of a tub of lard
and he's
got you
on the
run. Put down the grub and
walk on him. If you
don't like his eyes, close
'em. Close all—I gulped—four of them.
Aw, this was
silly. I went over to
him and
said, "Here," and gave
him his
messkit. I spooned a little
oatmeal into his dish. I told
him to
go and
sit on
his bunk
and eat.
I showed
him how to sweeten
his coffee
with prune-juice. I don't know
why I did it. I don't
know why I never reminded
him again
about the line. He
didn't say a damn thing.
Not even
thanks.
I ate and
washed my kit before he
was half
through. He chewed enough for two
people. I guess I knew
from the start that there was
more to him than just
one guy.
When he was done he sat
there looking at me again.
He put
his kit
on the
floor beside him and
then went and stood by
the window.
I was
going to say something
to him
about it, but I figured
I'd let
him be.
It was raining,
gloomy outside. That was lousy.
On a clear day they let us in the
yard for an hour in
the afternoon.
Rainy days we had a half-hour in the area under the
cell-blocks. If you had money you
could get candy and smokes
and magazines.
If you
didn't have money you did
without. I still had twenty cents. I was rolling
my own,
stretching it. Wasn't nobody going
to bring
me cash
money. I was doing a
little sixty-day stretch for something
that doesn't matter very much,
and if
I watched it I
could keep smoking until I
was done
here.
Well, anyway, on
rainy days there's not much
to do.
You make your bunk. If you
have a break, you can
usually drag up something interesting to talk about with
your cellmate. As long as your
cell is halfway clean looking,
it's okay, but they're all scrubbed bone-white and chrome-shiny
because that's all there is to
do. After
I'd sat
for an
hour and a half smoking
more than I could
afford and trying to find
something new to think about, I
grabbed the bucket and brush
and began
to polish the floor. I made
up my
mind to do just half
of it.
That was a bright idea. When
the guards
came around inspecting for dirty cells
at ten-thirty,
one-half of this one would
look crummy because the other half
would be really scrubbed. That
and Crawley's dirty messkit
would get him into a
nice jam. The guards knew by
this time how I kept
my cell.
Feeling almost happy
at the
idea, I turned to and
began wearing out my knees and
knuckles. I really bore down.
When I came to the middle
of the
cell I went back and
started over. i worked right
up to
Crawley's messkit. I stopped there.
I picked it up and washed
it and
put it
away. Crawley moved over to the
clean half. I finished washing
the floor.
It certainly
looked well. All over.
Ah, don't
ask me
why.
I put the
gear away and sat down
for a
while. I tried to kid
myself that I felt
good because I'd shown that
lazy monstrosity up. Then I realized
I didn't
feel good at all. What
was he
doing; pushing me around?
I looked
up and
glared at him. He didn't say
anything. I went on sitting.
Hell with him. This was
the pay-off. Why, I
wouldn't even talk to him.
Let him
sit there
and rot, the worthless
accident.
After a while
I said,
"What's the rap?"
He looked up
at me
inquiringly. "What are you in
for?" I asked again.
"Vag."
"No visible
means of support, or no
address?" "Visible."
"What'd the man
in black
soak you?"
"I ain't seen
him. I don't know how
much it's good for."
"Oh; waiting trial,
huh?"
"Yeah. Friday noon.
I got
to get
out of
here before that." I laughed. "Got
a lawyer?"
He shook his head.
"Listen," I told him, "you're not in here on
somebody's complaint, you know. The
county put you here and
the county'U
prosecute. They won't retract
the charge
to spring
you. What's your bail?"
"Three hundred."
"Have you got
it?" I asked. He shook
his head.
"Can you get it?"
"Not a chance."
"An' you 'got
to get
out of
here'." "I will."
"Not before
Friday."
"Uh-huh. Before Friday.
Tomorrow. Stick around; you'll see."
I looked at him, his toothpick arms
and legs.
"Nobody ever broke this jail and
it's forty-two years old. I'm
six foot
three an' two-twenty soaking wet, an'
I wouldn't
try it.
What chance you got?"
He said
again, "Stick around."
I sat and
thought about that for a
while. I could hardly believe it. The man couldn't
lift his own weight off
the floor.
He had no more punch than
a bedbug,
and a
lot less
courage. And he was going to
break this jail, with its
twelve-foot walls and its case-hardened steel bars I Sure,
I'd stick
around.
"You're as dumb
as you
look," I said. "In the
first place, it's dumb to even
dream about cracking this bastille.
In the
second place, it's dumb not to
wait for your trial, take
your rap—it won't be more than
sixty—and then you get out
of here
clean."
"You're wrong," he said. There was
an urgency
about his strange, groaning voice. "I'm
waiting trial. They haven't mugged me or printed me
or given
me an
examination. If they convict me—and they
will if I ever go
to court—they'll
give me a physical.
Any doc—even
a prison
doc—would give his eyeteeth to X-ray
me." He tapped his monstrous
chest. "I'll never get
away from them if they
see the
plates."
"What's your
trouble?"
"It's no
trouble. It's the way I
am."
"How are
you?"
"Fine. How
are you?'*-
Okay, so it
was none
of my
business. I shut up. But I was astonished at
that long spiel of his.
I didn't
know he could talk that much.
Lunch came
and went,
and he
got his
share, in spite of myself, a little more. Nothing
much was said; Crawley just
didn't seem to be
interested in anything that went
on around
him. You'd think a
guy whose
trial is coming up would
worry about it. You'd think a
guy who
was planning
a jail-break
would worry about it.
Not Crawley.
He just
sat and
waited for the time to come.
Damn if I didn't do
all his
fretting for him!
At two
o'clock the bolts shot back.
I said,
"Come on, Crawley. We got
a chance
to stretch
our legs
in the
area. If you got any money
you can
buy something
to read
or smoke."
Crawley said,
"I'm okay here. Besides, I
got no
money. They sell candy?"
"Yeah."
"You got
money?"
"Yep. Twenty cents.
Tobacco for me for another
two weeks at the rate of
two or
three home-made cigarettes per day. There
ain't one penny for anyone
or anything
else."
"Hell with that.
Bring back four candy bars.
Two marsh-mallow,
one coconut,
one fudge."
I laughed in his face and went
out, thinking that here was
one time when I'd
have a story to tell
the rest
of the
boys that would keep a lifer
laughing. But somehow I never
did get
a chance to say anything to
anybody about Crawley. I couldn't
tell you how it
happened. I started to talk
to one
fellow and the guard called him
over. I said howdy to
another and he told me to
dry up,
he had
some blues he wanted to
soak in. It just didn't work
out. Once I really thought
I had
a start—
one of the stoolies, this time;
but just
as I
said, "Hey, you ought to get
a load
of my
cellmate," the bell
rang for us to get back
in the
cells. I just had time
to get
to the
prison store before the shutter banged
down over the counter. I
went back up to my deck
and into
my cell.
I pitched
Crawley his candy bars. He took
them without saying aye, yes,
or no—or
thanks.
Hardly a word
passed between us until long
after supper. He wanted to know
how to
fix one
blanket so it felt like
two. I showed him. Then I
hopped into the upper bunk
and said:
'Try sleepin'
tonight"
He said,
"What's the matter with you?"
"You was
talking in your sleep last
night."
"I wasn't
talking to myself," he said
defensively.
"You sure
wasn't talking to me."
"I was talking
to—my brother," said Crawley, and
he laughed. My God, what a
laugh that was. It was
sort of dragged out of him,
and it
was grating
and high-pitched
and muffled
and it went on and on.
I looked
over the edge of the
bunk, thinking maybe he
wasn't laughing, maybe he was
having a fit. His face was
strained, his eyes were screwed
shut. All right, but his mouth
was shut.
His lips
were clamped tight together. His mouth was shut and he
went on laughingl He was
laughing from inside somewhere, from his
chest, some way I never
even heard of before.
I couldn't
stand it. If that laughing
didn't stop right away
I'd have
to stop
breathing. My heart would stop breathing.
My life
was squirting
out through
my pores, turning to sweat. The
laughter went higher and higher,
just as loud, just
as shrill,
and I
knew I could hear it
and
Crawley could,
but no
one else.
It went
up and
up until
I stopped hearing it, but even
then I knew it was
still going on and up, and
though I couldn't hear it
any more,
I knew
when it stopped. My back teeth
ached from the way my
jaws had driven them into the
gums. I think I passed
out, and then slept afterward. I don't remember the
lights going out at nine,
or the guards checking up.
I been slugged
before, many a time, and
I know
what it's like to come to
after being knocked out. But
when I came out of this
it was
more like waking up, so
I must
have slept. Anyway, it wasn't morning.
Must have been about three
or four, before the sun came
up. There
was a
weak moon hanging around outside the
old walls,
poking a gray finger in
at us,
me and Crawley. I didn't move
for a
few minutes,
and I
heard Crawley talking. And
I heard
someone else answering.
Crawley was
saying something about money. "We
got to
get money, Bub. This
is a
hell of a jam. We
thought we didn't need it. We
could get anything we wanted
without it. See what happened? Just because I'm no
beauty winner a cop asks
us questions. They stick us in
here. Now we've got to
break it Oh, we can do
it; but
if we
get some
money it don't have to
happen again. You can
figure something, can't you, Bub?"
And then came
the answering
voice. It was the grating
one that had been laughing before.
That wasn't Crawley's voice 1 That belonged to somebody
else. Aw, that was foolish.
Two men to a cell. One
man to
a bunk.
But here
were two men talking, and I
wasn't saying anything. I suddenly
had a
feeling my brains were bubbling like
an egg
frying in too much grease.
The voice shrilled,
"Oh, sure. Money's no trouble
to get.
Not the way we
work, Crawley! He, he!" They
laughed together. My blood felt
so cold
I was
afraid to move in case
my veins broke. The
voice went on. "About this break; you know just
what we're going to do?"
"Yeh," said Crawley.
"Gee, Bub, I'd sure be
wuthless without you. Man, what
a brain,
what a brain!"
The voice said,
"You don't have to do
without me! Heh! Just you try
and get
rid of
me!"
I took a
deep, quiet breath and slowly
raised up and hung my head
over the edge of the
bunk so I could see.
I couldn't
be scared any more.
I couldn't
be shocked
any more.
After seeing that, I was through.
A guy
lives all his life for
a certain
moment Like that little
old doc
that delivered the quints.
He never
did anything
like it before. He never
did again.
From then on he
was through.
Like a detective in a
book solving a crime. It all
leads up to one thing—who
done it? When the dick finds
that out, he's through. The
book's finished. Like me; I was
finished when I saw Crawley's
brother. That was the high point.
Yeah, it was
his brother.
Crawley was twins. Like them
Siamese twins, but one
was big
and the
other was small. Like a baby.
There was only the top
part of him, and he
was growing
out of
Crawley's chest. But that oversize
chest was just built for the
little one to hide in.
It folded
around the little one. It was
hinged like I said before,
something like a clamshell. My God!
I said it
was like
a baby.
I meant
just small like that. It
wasn't baby stuff, aside
from that The head was
shaggy, tight-curled. The face was
long and lean with smooth,
heavy eyebrows. The skin was
very dark, and there was
little crooked fangs on each side
of the
mouth, two up, two down.
The ears
were~just a little pointed.
That thing had sense of
its own,
and it was bad clear through.
I mean
really bad. That thing was
all Crawley's crime-brains. Crawley was just a
smart mule to that thing. He
carried it around with him
and he
did what
it wanted him to do. Crawley
obeyed that brother of his—and
so did everybody else! I did.
My tobacco
money; cleaning the cell; seeing that
Crawley got fed—that was all
the little
twin's doing, all of it. It
wasn't my fault. Nobody ever pushed me around like that
before!
Then it saw
me. It
had thrown
its hideous
little head back to laugh, and
it flung
up a
withered arm and piped, "You!
Go to
sleep! Now!"
So—I did.
I don't
know how it happened. If
I'd slept
all that
time the bulls would have taken
me to
the ward.
But so
help me, from that time until
two o'clock
I don't
know what happened. The Crawley twins kept me fogged,
I guess.
But I
must have gotten dressed and washed;
I must
have eaten, and I'll guarantee
that the Crawleys didn't wash
no messkits.
Anyhow, the next thing I remember
is the
bolt shooting back on the
cell door. Crawley came
up behind
me as
I stood
there looking at it, and
I felt
his eyes
on my
back. Four eyes. He said:
"Go on.
What are you waiting for?"
I said:
"You've done something to me.
What is it?"
He just
said, "Get going."
We walked out
together, out along the deck
and down
two 183 long flights of iron stairs
to the
area. We took maybe fifteen,
maybe twenty steps, and
then Crawley whispered, "Now!"
I was loaded
with H. E. I was
primed and capped, and the
firing pin of his
voice stung me. I went
off like
that. There were two guards in
front of me. I took
them by their necks and cracked
their heads together so powerfully
that their skulls seemed soft. I
screamed and turned and bounded
up the stairs, laughing and shouting.
Prisoners scattered. A guard grabbed at
me on~
the first
landing. I picked him up
and threw him over
my shoulder
and ran
upward! A gun blammed twice, and
each bullet went thuck! as it bored into the body of
the bull
I carried.
He snatched
at the
railing as I ran and I
heard the bones in his
wrist crackle. I pitched him over the rail and
he landed
on another
guard down there in the area.
The other
guard was drawing a bead
on me
and when the body struck him
his gun
went off. The slug ricocheted
from the steps and flew
into the mouth of a
prisoner on the second deck. I
was screaming
much louder than he was.
I reached the third
deck and ran around the
cell-block chattering and giggling. I
slid to a stop and
threw my legs over the railing
and sat
there swinging my feet. Two
cops opened fire on me. Their
aim was
lousy because only three out
of the twelve bullets hit me.
I stood
on the
lower rail and leaned my calves
against the upper one and
spread out my arms and shouted
at them,
cursing them with my mouth
full of blood. The prisoners were
being herded six and eight
to a cell, down on the
area level. The guards in
the area
suddenly stood aside, making way
like courtiers for the royalty
of a man with a submachine
gun. The gun began singing
to me. It was a serenade
to a
giant on a balcony, by
a grizzled
troubadour with a deep-toned
instrument. I couldn't resist that music for more than
a moment,
so I
came down to the area, turning
over and over in the
air, laughing and coughing' and sobbing as I fell.
You watched
me, didn't
you, you flatfooted blockheads? You got out your guns
and ran
from the doors, from the
series of searching rooms, booking rooms,
desk rooms, bull-pens? You left the
doors open when you ran?
Crawley's out in the street now. No hurry for
Crawley. Crawley gives the orders
wherever he is. There'll
be others—like
me.
I've done
work for Crawley. See me
now? And—Crawley didn't even
say, "Thanks." /
A "Way of thinking
I'll
have to
start with an anecdote or
two that
you may
have heard from me before, but
they'll bear repeating, since it's
Kelley we're talking about.
I shipped out
with Kelley when I was
a kid.
Tankships, mostly coastwise: load somewhere in the
oil country—New
Orleans, Aransas Pass, Port
Arthur, or some such—and unload
at ports
north of Hatteras. Eight days
out, eighteen hours in, give or
take a day or six
hours. Kelley was ordinary seaman on my watch, which
was a
laugh; he knew more about the sea than anyone
aft of
the galley.
But he
never ribbed me, stumbling around the
place with my blue A.B.
ticket. He had a
sense of humor in his
peculiar quiet way, but he never
gratified it by proofs of
the obvious—that
he was
twice the seaman I
could ever be.
There were a
lot of
unsual things about Kelley, the
way he looked, the way he
moved; but most unusual was
the way
he thought. He was
like one of those extra-terrestrials
you read about, who can think
as well
as a
human being but not like a human being.
Just for example,
there was that night in
Port Arthur. I was sitting in a honkytonk up
over a bar with a
red-headed girl called Red, trying to
mind my own business while
watching a chick known as Boots,
who sat
alone over by the juke-box.
This girl Boots was
watching the door and grinding
her teeth,
and I knew why, and I
was worried.
See, Kelley had been seeing her pretty regularly, but this trip he'd
made the break and word was
around that he was romancing
a girl
in Pete's
place—-a very unpopular kind
of rumor
for Boots
to be
chewing on. I also knew
that Kelley would be along
any minute
because he'd promised to
meet me here.
And in he
came, running up that long
straight flight of steps easy as a cat, and
when he got in the
door everybody just hushed, except the
juke-box, and it sounded scared.
Now, just above
Boots' shoulder on a little
shelf was an electric fan. It
had sixteen-inch
blades and no guard. The
very second Kelley's face
showed in the doorway Boots
rose up like a snake out
of a
basket, reached behind her, snatched
that fan off the
shelf and threw it.
It might
as well
have been done with a
slow-motion camera 185 as far as Kelley
was concerned.
He didn't
move his feet at all.
He bent sideways, just
a little,
from the waist, and turned
his wide shoulders. Very clearly I
heard three of those whining
blade-tips touch a button
on his
shirt bip-bip-bip! and then the
fan hit
the doorpost.
Even the juke-box
shut up then. It was
so quiet. Kelley
didn't say anything and
neither did anyone else.
Now, if you
believe in do-as-you-get-done-to,
and someone
heaves an infernal machine
at you,
you'll pick it right up
and heave it back. But Kelley
doesn't think like you: He
didn't look at the fan. He
just watched Boots, and she
was white
and crazed-looking, waiting for
whatever he might have in
mind.
He went across
the room
to her,
fast but not really hurrying,
and he
picked her out from behind
that table, and he threw her.
He
threw her at the fan.
She hit the
floor and slid, sweeping up
the fan
where it lay, hitting the doorjamb
with her head, spinning out
into the stairway. Kelley walked after
her, stepped over her, went
on downstairs and back to the
ship.
And there was
the time
we shipped
a new
main spur gear for the starboard
winch. The deck engineer used
up the
whole morning watch trying
to get
the old
gear-wheel off its shaft. He heated
the hub.
He pounded
it. He
put in
wedges. He hooked on with a
handybilly—that's a four-sheave
block-and-tackle to you—and
all he
did with
that was break a U-bolt.
Then Kelley came
on deck,
rubbing sleep out of his
eyes, and took one brief look.
He walked
over to the winch, snatched up a crescent wrench,
and relieved
the.four bolts that held the housing
tight around the shaft. He
then picked up a twelve-pound maul, hefted it, and
swung it just once. The maul
hit the
end of
the shaft
and the
shaft shot out of the other
side of the machine like
a torpedo
out of
its tube.
The gearwheel fell down
on the
deck. Kelley went forward to take the helm and
thought no more about it,
while the deck crew stared after
him, wall-eyed. You see what
I mean?
Problem: Get a wheel
off a
shaft. But in Kelly's book
it's: Get the shaft out of
the wheel.
I kibitzed him
at poker
one time
and saw
him discard
two pair and draw a winning
straight flush. Why that discard?
Because he'd
just realized the deck was
stacked. Why the flush? God knows.
All Kelley
did was
pick up the pot—a big
one—grin at the sharper,
and leave.
I have plenty
more yarns like that, but
you get
the idea.
The guy had a special way of
thinking, that's all, and it
never failed him.
I lost
track of Kelley. I came
to regret
that now and then; he made
a huge
impression on me, and sometimes
I used
to think about him when I
had a
tough problem to solve. What
would Kelley do? And
sometimes it helped, and sometimes
it didn't; and when it didn't,
I guess
it was
because I'm not Kelley.
I came
ashore and got married and
did all
sorts of other things, and the
years went by, and a
war came
and went,
and one warm spring evening I
went into a place I
know on West 48th St. because
I felt
like drinking tequila
and I can always
get it there. And who should
be sitting
in a booth finishing up a big Mexican dinner
but—no, not Kelley.
It was
Milton. He looks like a
college sophomore with money. His suits
are always
cut just
so, but
quiet; and when he's relaxed he
looks as if he's just
been tagged for a fraternity
and it matters to him, and
when he's worried you want
to ask
him has he been
cutting classes again. It happens
he's a damn good doctor.
He was worried,
but he
gave me a good hello
and waved
me into the booth
while he finished up. We
had small
talk and I tried to buy him a drink.
He looked
real wistful and then shook his
head. "Patient in ten minutes,"
he said,
looking at his watch.
"Then it's
nearby. Come back afterward."
"Better yet," he said, getting up,
"come with me. This might
interest you, come to
think of it."
He got his
hat and
paid Rudy, and I said,
"Luego," and Rudy grinned
and slapped
the tequila bottle. Nice
place, Rudy's.
"What about the
patient?" I asked
as we
turned up the avenue. I thought
for a
while he hadn't heard me,
but at
last he said, "Four
busted ribs and a compound
femoral. Minor internal hemorrhage
which might or might not
be a ruptured spleen. Necrosis of
the oral
frenum—or was while there was any
frenum left."
"What's a frenum?"
"That little
strip of tissue under your
tongue."
"Ongk," I said,
trying to reach it with
the tip
of my
tongue. "What a healthy
fellow."
"Pulmonary adhesions," Milton ruminated. "Not serious,
certainly not tubercular. But they hurt and
they bleed and I don't like
'em. And acne rosacea."
"That's the
nose like a stop light,
isn't it?"
"It isn't
as funny
as that
to the
guy that
has it."
I was
quelled. "What was it—a goon-squad?"
He shook
his head.
"A truck?"
"No."
"He fell
off something."
Milton stopped and
turned and looked me straight
in the
eye. "No," he said.
"Nothing like anything. Nothing," he said, walking again, "at
all."
I said
nothing to that because there
was nothing
to say.
"He just went
to bed,"
said Milton thoughtfully, "because he felt off his oats.
And one
by one
these things happened to him."
"In bed?"
"Well," said Milton,
in a
to-be-absolutely-accurate tone, "when the ribs broke he
was on
his way
back from the bathroom."
"You're kidding."
"No I'm
not."
"He's lying."
Milton said,
"I believe him."
I know Milton.
There's no doubt that he
believed the man. I said, "I
keep reading things about psychosomatic
disorders. But a broken—what
did you
say it
was?"
"Femur. Thigh, that
is. Compound.
Oh, it's
rare; all right. But it can
happen, has happened. These muscles
are pretty
powerful, you know. They
deliver two-fifty, three hundred pound thrusts every time you
walk up stairs. In certain
spastic hysteriae, they'll break
bones easily enough."
"What about
all those
other things?"
"Functional disorders,
every one of 'em. No
germ disease."
"Now this
boy," I said, "really has something
on his
mind."
"Yes, he
has."
But I didn't
ask what.
I could
hear the discussion closing as
if it had a spring latch
on it.
We went into
a door
tucked between store fronts and
188 climbed three flights. Milton
put out
Ms hand
to a
bell-push and then dropped it without
ringing. There was a paper
tacked to the door.
DOC I WENT FOR
SHOTS COME ON IN.
It was
unsigned. Milton turned the knob
and we
went in.
The first thing
that hit me was the
smell. Not too strong, but not the kind of
thing you ever forget if
you ever
had to
dig a slit trench through last
week's burial pit. "That's the necrosis," muttered
Milton. "Damn it." He gestured.
"Hang your hat over
there. Sit down. I'll be
out soon."
He went
into an inner room,
saying, "Hi, Hal," at the
doorway. From inside came an answering
rumble, and something twisted in
my throat to hear
it, for
no voice
which is that tired should
sound that cheerful.
I sat watching
the wallpaper
and laboriously
un-listening those clinical grunts
and the
gay-weary responses in the other
room. The wall-paper was awful. I remember
a night-club
act where Reginald Gardiner
used to give sound-effect renditions of wallpaper designs.
This one, I decided, would
run "Body to weep . . . yawp,
yawp; body to weep .
. .
yawp, yawp," very faintly,
with the final syllable a
straining retch. I had just reached
a particularly
clumsy join where the paper
utterly demolished its own
rhythm and went "Yawp yawp body to weep" when the
outer door opened and I
leaped to my feet with the
rush of utter guilt one
feels when caught in an
unlikely place with no curt
and lucid
explanation.
He was two
long strides into the room,
tall and soft-footed, his face and
long green eyes quite at
rest, when he saw me.
He stopped as if
on leaf
springs and shock absorbers, not suddenly, completely
controlled, and asked, "Who are
you?"
"I'll be
damned," I answered. "Kelley!"
He peered at
me with
precisely the expression I had
seen so many times when he
watched the little square windows
on the one-arm bandits we used
to play
together. I could almost hear the
tumblers, see the drums; not
lemon . . . cherry .
. .
cherry . . . and
click! this time
but tankship
. . . Texas . .
. him
I .
. .
and click! "I be goddam," he drawled,
to indicate
that he was even more
surprised than I was. He transferred
the small
package he carried from his
right hand to his
left and shook hands. His
hand went once and a half
times around mine with enough
left over to tie a
half-hitch/"Where in time
you been
keepin' yourse'f? How'd you smoke me
out?"
"I never,"
I said.
(Saying it, I was aware
that I always fell into the
idiom of people who impressed
me, to
the exact
degree of that impression.
So I
always found myself talking more like Kelley than Kelley's
shaving mirror.) I was grinning
so wide my face
hurt. "I'm glad to see
you." I shook hands with him again, foolishly. "I came with the
doctor."
"You a doctor
now?" he said, his tone
prepared for wonders.
"I'm a writer," I said deprecatingly.
"Yeah, I heard,"
he reminded
himself. His eyes narrowed; as of old, it had
the effect
of sharp-focussing
a searchlight
beam. "I heard!" he
repeated, with deeper interest. "Stories.
Gremlins and flyin' saucers
an' all
like that." I nodded. He
said, without insult, "Hell
of a
way to
make a living."
"What about
you?"
"Ships. Some drydock.
Tank cleaning. Compass 'djustin'. For a while had a-job
holdin' a insurance inspector's head. You know."
I glanced
at the
big hands
that could weld or steer
or compute certainly with the excellence
I used
to know,
and marvelled that,, he found himself
so unremarkable.
I pulled
myself back to here
and now
and nodded
toward the inner room. "I'm holding
you up."
"No you ain't.
Milton, he knows what he's
doin'. He wants me, he'll holler."
"Who's sick?"
His face
darkened like the sea in
scud-weather, abruptly and deep down. "My
brother." He looked
at me
searchingly. "He's . .
." Then he seemed to
check himself. "He's sick," he said unnecessarily, and added
quickly, "He's going to be
all right, though."
"Sure," I said quickly.
1 had the
feeling that we were both
lying and that neither of us knew why.
Milton came
out, laughing a laugh that
cut off
as soon
as he was out of range
of the
sick man. Kelley turned to
him slowly, as if slowness were
the only
alternative to leaping on the doctor,
pounding the news out of
him. "Hello, Kelley. Heard
you come
in."
"How is
he, Doc?"
Milton looked up
quickly, his bright round eyes
clashing with Kelley's slitted fierce ones.
"You got to take it
easy, Kelley. What'll happen to him
if you
crack up?"
"Nobody's cracking
up. What
do you
want me to do7"
Milton saw the
package on the table. He
picked it up and opened it. There was a
leather case and two phials.
"Ever use one of
these before?"
"He was
a pre-med
before he went to sea,"
I said
suddenly.
Milton stared
at me.
"You two know each other?"
I looked
at Kelley.
"Sometimes I think
I invented
him."
Kelley snorted and
thumped my shoulder. Happily I
had one hand on a built-in
china shelf. His big hand
continued the motion and took the
hypodermic case from the doctor.
"Sterilize the shaft and
needle," he said sleepily, as
if reading.
"Assemble without touching
needle with fingers. To fill,
puncture diaphragm and withdraw
plunger. Squirt upward to remove air
an' prevent
embolism. Locate major vein in—"
Milton laughed. "Okay,
okay. But forget the vein.
Any place will do—it's subcutaneous, that's all. I've written
the exact amounts to be used
for exactly
the symptoms
you can
expect. Don't jump the
gun, Kelley. And remember how
you salt your stew.
Just because a little is
good, it doesn't figure that a
lot has
to be
better."
Kelley was wearing
that sleeply inattention which, I
remembered, meant only that he
was taking
in every
single word like a tape recorder.
He tossed
the leather
case gently, caught it. "Now?" he said.
"Not now," the doctor said positively.
"Only when you have to."
Kelley seemed frustrated.
I suddenly
understood that he wanted to do
something, build something, fight something.
Anything but sit and
wait for therapy to bring
results. I said, "Kelley, any brother
of yours
is a—well,
you know.
I'd like
to say hello, if it's all—"
Immediately and together
Kelley and the doctor said
loudly, "Sure, when he's
on his
feet," and "Better not just
now, I've just given
him a
sedat—" And together they stopped
awkwardly.
"Let's go get
that drink," I said before
they could flounder any more.
"Now you're
talking. You too, Kelley. It'll
do you
good." "Not me," said
Kelley. "Hal—"
"I knocked him
out," said the doctor bluntly.
"You'll cluck around scratching
for worms
and looking
for hawks
till you wake him up, and
he needs
his sleep.
Come on."
Painfully I had to
add to
my many
mental images of Kel-191
ley the
very first one in which
he was
indecisive. I hated it "Well," said Kelley,
"let me go see."
He disappeared. I looked at Milton's
face, and turned quickly away. I
was sure
he wouldn't
want me to see that
expression of sick pity
and bafflement.
Kelley came out
moving silently as always. "Yeah,
asleep," he said. "For
how long?"
"I'd say
four hours at least."
"Well all right."
From the old-fashioned clothes tree
he took a battered black engineer's
cap with
a shiny,
crazed patent leather visor. I laughed.
Both men turned to me,
with annoyance, I thought.
On the
landing outside I explained. "The hat" I said.
"Remember? Tampico?"
"Oh," he
grunted. He thwacked it against
his forearm.
"He left it
on the
bar of
this ginmill," I told Milton.
"We got back to the gangplank
and he
missed it. Nothing would do but
he has
to go
back for it so I
went with him."
"You was wearin'
a tequila label on
your face," Kelley said. "Kept tryin' to tell the
taxi man you was a
bottle."
"He didn't
speak English."
Kelley flashed
something like his old grin.
"He got the idea."
"Anyway," I told Milton, "the place
was closed
when we got there. We tried
the front
door and the side doors
and they were locked like Alcatraz.
We made
so much
racket I guess if anyone was
inside they were afraid to
open up. We could see Kelley's
hat in
there on the bar. Nobody's
about to steal that
hat."
"It's a good hat,"
he said
in an
injured tone.
"Kelley goes into
action," I said. "Kelley don't think like other people, you know, Milt.
He squints
through the window at the other
wall, goes around the building,
sets one foot against the corner
stud, gets his. fingers under
the edge
of that corrugated iron siding they
use. 'I'll pry this out
a bit*
he says. 'You slide
in and
get my
hat.'"
"Corrugated was
only nailed on one-by-twos," said Kelley.
"He gives
one almighty
pull," I chuckled, "and the
whole damn side falls out of
the building,
I mean
the second
floor too. You never heard such
a clap-o'-thunder
in your
life."
"I got my
hat," said Kelley. He uttered
two syllables
of a
laugh. "Whole second floor
was a
cathouse, an' the one single
stairway come out with
the wall."
"Taxi driver
just took off. But he
left his taxi. Kelley drove
back. I couldn't. I
was laughing."
"You was drunk." "Well, some," I said.
We walked together
quietly, happily. Out of Kelley's
sight, Milton thumped me gently on
the ribs.
It was
eloquent and it pleased me. It
said that it was a
long time since Kelley had
laughed. It was a
long time since he had
thought about anything but Hal.
I guess we
felt it equally when, with
no trace
of humor
. .
. more as if he had
let my
episode just blow itself out
until he could be heard .
. .
Kelley said, "Doc, what's with
the hand?"
"It'll be
all right,"
Milton said.
"You put
splints."
Milton sighed. "All
right, all right. Three fractures.
Two on the middle finger and
one on
the ring."
Kelley said,
"I saw they were swollen."
I looked at
Kelley's face and I looked
at Milton's,
and I
didn't like either, and
I wished
to God
I were
somewhere else, in a uranium mine
maybe, or making out my
income tax. I said, "Here we are. Ever been
to Rudy's,
Kelley?"
He looked
up at
the little
yellow-and-red marquee. "No."
"Come on,"
I said.
"Tequila."
We went in
and got
a booth.
Kelley ordered beer. I got
mad then and started
to call
him some
things I'd picked up on waterfronts
from here to Tierra del
Fuego. Milton stared wall-eyed
at me
and Kelley
stared at his hands. After
a while
Milton began to jot
some of it down on
a prescription
pad he
took from his pocket.
I was
pretty proud.
Kelley gradually got
the idea.
If I
wanted to pick up the
tab and he wouldn't let me,
his habits
were those of uno puneto sin cojones (which a Spanish dictionary
will reliably misinform you means "a
weakling without eggs"), and his
affections for his forebears were powerful
but irreverent.
I won,
and soon
he was lapping up a huge
combination plate of beef tostadas, chicken enchiladas, and pork
tacos. He endeared
himself to Rudy by demanding salt
and lemon
with his tequila
and
dispatching same with
flawless ritual: hold the lemon
between left thumb and forefinger, lick the back of
the left
hand, sprinkle salt on the
wet spot,
lift the tequila
with the
right, lick the salt, drink the
tequila, bite the
lemon. Soon he was imitating
the German
second mate we shipped out
of Puerto
Barrios one night, who ate fourteen
green bananas and lost them
and all his teeth over the
side, in gummed gutturals which
had us
roaring.
But after
that question about fractured fingers
back there in the street, Milton
and I
weren't fooled any more, and
though everyone tried hard
and it
was a
fine try, none of the
laughter -went deep enough
or stayed
long enough, and I wanted
to cry.
We all had
a huge
hunk of the nesselrode pie made by Rudy's beautiful
blond wife—pie you can blow
off your
plate by flapping a napkin .
. .
sweet smoke with calories. And
then Kelley demanded to
know what time it was
and cussed
and stood up.
"It's only
been two hours," Milton said.
"I just as
soon head home all the
same," said Kelley.
"Thanks."
"Wait," I said.
I got
a scrap
of paper
out of
my wallet
and wrote on it. "Here's my phone. I want
to see
you some
more. I'm working for myself these
days; my time's my own.
I don't sleep
much, so call me any
time you feel like it."
He took the
paper. "You're no good," he said. "You never
were no good." The way he said
it, I
felt fine.
"On the corner
is a
newsstand," I told
him. "There's a magazine
called Amazing with one
of my
lousy stories in it."
"They print it
on a
Toll?" he demanded.
He waved
at us,
nodded to Rudy, and
went out.
I swept up
some spilled sugar on the
table top and pushed it around
until it was a perfect
square. After a while I
shoved in the sides until it
was a
lozenge. Milton didn't say anything
either. Rudy, as is
his way,
had sense
enough to stay away from us.
"Well, that
did him
some good," Milton said after
a while.
"You know
better than that," I said
bitterly.
Milton said patiently.
"Kelley thinks we think it
did him
some good. And thinking
that does him good."
I had to
smile at that contortion, and after that it
was easier to talk. "The kid
going to live?"
Milton waited, as
if some
other answer might spring from
somewhere, but it didn't.
He said,
"No."
"Fine doctor."
"Don't kid like
that!" he snapped. He looked
up at
me. "Look, if this
was one
of those—well,
say pleurisy
cases on the critical list, without
the will
to live,
why I'd
know what to do. Usually those
depressed cases have such a
violent desire to be reassured,
down deep, that you can
snap 'em right out of it
if only
you can
think of the right thing
to say.
And you usually can. But Hal's
not one
of those.
He wants
to live.
If he didn't want so much
to live
he'd've been dead three weeks ago. What's killing him
is sheer
somatic trauma—one broken bone after another,
one failing
or inflamed
internal organ after another."
"Who's doing it?"
"Damn it, nobody's
doing it!" He caught me
biting my lip. "If either one
of us
should say Kelley's doing it,
the other
one will punch him in the
mouth. Right?"
"Right."
"Just so
that doesn't have to happen,"
said Milton carefully, "I'll
tell you what you're bound
to ask
me in
a minute:
why isn't he in a hospital?"
"Okay, why?" /
"He was. For
weeks. And all the time
he was
there these things kept on happening
to him,
only worse. More, and more
often. I got him
home as soon as it
was safe
to get
him out
of traction for that broken thigh.
He's much better off with
Kelley. Kelley keeps him cheered
up, cooks
for him,
medicates him—the works. It's
all Kelley
does these days."
"I figured.
It must
be getting
tough."
"It is.
I wish
I had
your ability with invective. You can't lend that man
anything, give him anything .
. .
proud? God!"
"Don't take this
personally, but have you had
consultations?"
He shrugged. "Six
ways from the middle. And
nine-tenths of it behind
Kelley's back, which isn't easy.
The lies
I've told him! Hal's just got to have a special kind of
Persian melon that someone is receiving
in a
little store in Yonkers. Out
Kelley goes, and in the
meantime I have to corral
two or
three doctors and whip 'em in
to see
Hal and
out again
before Kelley gets back. Or Hal
has to-have
a special
prescription, and I fix
up with
the druggist
to take
a good
two hours
compounding it. Hal saw Grundage,
the osteo
man, that way, but poor old
Ancelowics the pharmacist got punched
in the
chops for the delay."
"Milton, you're
all right."
He snarled at
me, and
then went on quietly, "None
of it's
done any good. I've
learned a whole encyclopedia full of wise words and some therapeutic tricks I didn't know
existed. But . . ." He
shook his head. "Do you
know why Kelley and I
wouldn't let you meet
Hal?" He wet his lips
and cast
about for an example. "Remember the pictures of Mussolini's
corpse after the mob got through
with it?" I shuddered. "I saw
'em."
"Well, that's what
he looks
like, only he's alive, which
doesn't make it any
prettier. Hal doesn't know how
bad it
is, and neither Kelley nor I
would run the risk of
having him see it reflected in
someone else's face. I wouldn't send a wooden Indian into that room."
I began to
pound the table, barely touching
it, hitting
it harder and harder until Milton
caught my wrist. I froze
then, unhappily conscious of
the eyes
of everyone
in the
place looking at me. Gradually
the normal
sound of the restaurant resumed. "Sorry."
"It's all right."
"There's got to
be some
sort of reason!"
His lips twitched
in a
small acid smile. "That's what you get down to
at last,
isn't it? There's always a
reason for everything, and if we
don't know it, we can
find it out But just one
single example of real unreason
is enough
to shake
our belief in everything.
And then
the fear
gets bigger than the case at
hand and extends to a
whole universe of concepts labelled "unproven.' Shows you how
little we believe in anything,
basically."
'That's a miserable
piece of philosophy!"
"Sure. If you
have another arrival point for
a case
like this, I'll buy it with
a bonus.
Meantime I'll just go on
worrying at this one and feeling
more scared than I ought to."
"Let's get drunk."
"A wonderful idea."
Neither of us
ordered. We just sat there
looking at the lozenge of sugar
I'd made
on the
table top. After a while
I said, "Hasn't Kelley any idea
of what's
wrong?"
"You know Kelley.
If he
had an
idea he'd be working on
it All he's doing is sitting
by watching
his brother's
body stew and swell like yeast
in a vat"
"What about Hal?"
"He isn't lucid
much any more. Not if
I can
help it" "But maybe
he—"
"Look," said Milton,
"I don't want to sound
cranky or anything, but I
can't hold still for a
lot of
questions like . . ."
He stopped, took out his display
handkerchief, looked at it, put
it away. "I'm sorry.
You don't
seem to understand that I
didn't take this case
yesterday afternoon. I've been sweating
it out for nearly three months
now. I've already thought of
everything you're going to
think of. Yes, I questioned
Hal, back and forth and sideways.
Nothing. N-n-nothing."
That last word
trailed off in such a
peculiar way that I looked up
abruptly. 'Tell me," I demanded.
"Tell you what?"
Suddenly he looked at his
watch. I covered it with
my hand.
"Come on, Milt."
"I don't know
what you're—damn it, leave me
alone, will you? If it was
anything important, I'd've chased it
down long ago."
"Tell me
the unimportant
something."
"No."
'Tell me
why you
won't tell me."
"Damn you, I'll
do that.
It's because you're a crackpot.
You're a nice guy
and I
like you, but you're a
crackpot." He laughed suddenly, and it hit
me like
the flare
of a
flashbulb. "I didn't know
you could
look so astonished!" he said.
"Now take it easy
and listen
to me.
A guy
comes out of a steak
house and steps on
a rusty
nail, and ups and dies
of tetanus.
But your crackpot vegetarian
will swear up and down
that the man would still be
alive if he hadn't poisoned
his system
with meat, and uses
the death
to prove
his point.
The perennial
Dry will
call the same casualty a
victim of John Barleycorn if he knows the
man had
a beer
with his steak. This one death
can be
ardently and whole-heartedly blamed on
the man's divorce, his religion, his
political affiliations or on a
hereditary taint from his
great-great-grandfather who worked
for Oliver Cromwell. You're
a nice
guy and
I like
you," he said again, "and I
am not
going to sit across from
you and
watch you do the
crackpot act."
"I do not
know," I said slowly and
distinctly, **what the hell you are
talking about. And now you
have to tell
me."
"I suppose so,"
he said
sadly. He drew a deep
breath. "You believe what you write.
No," he said quickly, "I'm
not asking
you, I'm telling you.
You grind
out all
this fantasy and horror stuff and you believe every
word of it. More basically,
you'd rather believe in the outrS and the so-called
'unknowable' than in what
I'd call
real things. You
think I'm talking through my hat."
"I do,"
I said,
"but go ahead."
"If I called
you up
tomorrow and told you with
great joy that they'd isolated a
virus for Hal's condition and
a serum
was on the way, you'd be
just as happy about it
as I
would be, but way ddwn deep
you'd wonder if that was
what was really wrong with him,
or if
the serum
is what
really cured him. If on the
other hand I admitted to
you that
I'd found
two small punctures on
Hal's throat and a wisp
of fog
slipping out of the room—by God
I see
what I mean? You have
a gleam in
your eye already!"
I covered my
eyes. "Don't let me stop
you now,"
I said
coldly. "Since you are
not going
to admit
Dracula's punctures, what are you
going to admit?"
"A year ago
Kelley gave his brother a
present. An ugly little brute of
a Haitian
doll. Hal kept it around
to make
faces at for a
while and then gave it
to a
girl. He had bad trouble with the girl. She
hates him—really hates him.
As far
as anyone knows she
still has the doll. Are
you happy
now?"
"Happy," I said disgustedly. "But Milt—you're
not just
ignoring this doll thing.
Why, that could easily be
the whole
basis of . .
. hey,
sit down!
Where are you going?"
"I told you
I wouldn't
sit across
from a damn hobbyist. Enter hobbies, exit reason." He recoiled. "Wait—you sit down now."
I gathered up
a handful
of his
well-cut lapels. "We'll both sit down,"
I said
gently, "or I'll prove to
your heart's desire that I've reached
the end
of reason."
"Yessir," he said good-naturedly, and sat
down. I felt like a damn
fool. The twinkle left his
eyes and he leaned forward.
"Perhaps now you'll listen
instead of riding off like
that. I suppose you know that
in many
cases the voodoo doll does
work, and you know
why7"
"Well, yes. I
didn't think you'd admit it."
I got
no response
from his stony gaze,
and at
last realized that a fantasist's
pose of authority on such matters
is bound
to sit
ill with
a serious
and progressive physician. A lot less positively,
I said,
"It comes down to
a matter
of subjective
reality, or what some people call faith. If you
believe firmly that the mutilation
of a doll with which you
identify yourself will result in
your own mutilation, well, that's what
will happen."
"That, and a
lot of
things even a horror story
writer could find out if he
researched anywhere else except in
his projective
imagination. For example, there are
Arabs in North Africa today whom
you dare
not insult
in any
way really
important to them. If they
feel injured, they'll threaten to
die,
and if
you call
the bluff
they'll sit down; cover their
heads, and damn well die. There are psychosomatic phenomena
like the stigmata, or wounds of
the cross,
Which appear from time to time
on the
hands, feet and breasts of
exceptionally devout people. I know you
know a lot of this,"
he added
abruptly, apparently reading something
in my
expression, "but I'm not going to
get my
knee out of your chest
until you'll admit I'm at least
capable of taking a thing
like this into consideration and tracking it down."
"I never
saw you
before in my life," I said, and in
an important way I meant it.
"Good," he said,
with considerable relief. "Now I'll
tell you what I did. I
jumped at this doll episode
almost as wildly as you did.
It came
late in the questioning because apparently it really didn't matter to Hal."
"Oh, well,
but the
subconscious—"
"Shaddup!" He stuck a surprisingly sharp forefinger into my collarbone.
"I'm telling you; you're not
telling me. I won't disallow that a deep belief
in voodoo
might be hidden in Hal's
subconscious, but if it
is, it's
where sodium amytal and word
association and light and
profound hypnosis and a half-dozen
other therapies give not
a smidgin
of evidence.
I'll take that as proof that
he carries
no such
conviction. I guess from the
looks of you I'll
have to remind you again
that I've dug into this thing
in more
ways for longer and with
more tools than you have—and I
doubt that it means any
less to me than it
does to you."
"You know,
I'm just
going to shut up," I
said plaintively.
"High time," he said, and grinned.
"No, in every case of
voodoo damage or death,
there has to be that
element of devout belief in the
powers of the witch or
wizard, and through it a complete
sense of identification with the
doll. In addition, it helps if
the victim
knows what sort of damage
the doll is sustaining—crushing,
or pins
sticking into it, or what. And
you can
take my word for it
that no such news has reached
Hal."
"What about the
doll? Just to be absolutely
sure, shouldn't we get it back?"
"I thought
of that.
But there's
no way
I know
of getting
it back without making it look
valuable to the woman. And
if she thinks it's valuable to
Hal, we'll never
see it."
"Hm. Who is
she, and what's her royal
gripe?" 199
"She's as
nasty a piece of fluff
as they
come. She got involved with
Hal for
a little
while—nothing serious, certainly not on his
part. He was . .
. he's
a big
good-natured kid who thinks the only
evil people around are the
ones who get killed at the
end of
the movie.
Kelley was at sea at
the time
and he
blew in to find
this little vampire taking Hal
for everything
she could, first by
sympathy, then by threats. The
old badger
game. Hal was just
bewildered. Kelley got his word
that nothing had occurred between them,
and then
forced Hal to lower the booni.
She called
his bluff
and it
went to court. They forced a physical examination on her and she
got laughed
out of court. She wasn't the
mother of anyone's unborn child.
She never will be.
She swore
to get
even with him. She's without
brains or education or resources,
but that
doesn't stop her from being pathological.
She sure
can hate."
"Oh. You've
seen her."
Milton shuddered. "I've seen her. I
tried to get all Hal's
gifts back from her.
I had
to say
all because
I didn't'
dare itemize. All I wanted, it
might surprise you to know,
was that
damned doll. Just in
case, you know . .
. although
I'm morally
convinced that the thing has
nothing to do with it.
Now do you see what I
mean about a single example
of unreason?"
" 'Fraid I
do." I felt upset and
quelled and sat upon and
I wasn't fond of
the feeling.
.I've read too many stories
where the scientist just hasn't the
imagination to solve a haunt.
It had been great, feeling superior
to a
bright guy like Milton.
We walked out
of there
and for
the first
time I felt the mood of
a night
without feeling that an author
was ramming
it down my throat
for story
purposes. I looked at the
clean-swept, star-reaching cubism of the
Radio City area and its
living snakes of neon,
and I
suddenly thought of an Evelyn
Smith story the general
idea of which was "After
they found out the atom bomb
was magic,
the rest
of the
magicians who enchanted refrigerators
and washing
machines and the telephone system came out into
the open."
I felt
a breath
of wind
and wondered what it
was that
had breathed.
I heard
the snoring of the city and
for an
awesome second felt it would
roll over, open its
eyes, and . . .
speak.
On the comer
I said
to Milton,
"Thanks. You've given me a thumping
around. I guess I needed
it." I looked at him.
"By the Lord I'd
like to find some place
where you've been stupid in this
thing."
"I'd be
happy if you could," he said seriously.
I whacked him
on the
shoulder. "See? You take all
the fun out of it."
He got
a cab
and I
started to walk. I walked
a whole
lot that night, just anywhere. I
thought about ajot of things.
When I got home the phone
was ringing.
It was
Kelley.
I'm not
going to give you a
blow-by-blow of that talk with
Kelley. It was in
that small front room of
his place—an
apartment he'd rented after Hal
got sick,
and not
the one
Hal used
to have—and we talked
the night
away. All I'm withholding is Kelley's expression of things
you already
know: that he was deeply attached to his brother,
that he had no hope
left for him, that he would
find who or what was
responsible and deal with it his
way. It is a strong
man's right to break down
if he must, with whom and
where he chooses, and such
an occasion is only an expression
of strength.
But when
it happens
in a
quiet sick place, where he
must keep the command of hope strongly in the
air; when a chest heaves
and a
throat must be held wide open
to sob
silently so that the dying
one shall not know; these things
are not
pleasant to describe in detail. Whatever my ultimate feeling
for Kelley,
his emotions
and the expressions of them are for
him to
keep.
He did, however,
know the name of the
girl and where she was. He
did not
hold her responsible. I thought
he might
have a suspicion, but it turned
out to
be only
a certainty
that this was no disease, no
subjective internal disorder. If a
great hate and a great determination
could solve the problem, Kelley would solve it. If
research and logic could solve
it, Milton would do it If
I could
do it,
I would.
She was
checking hats in a sleazy
club out where Brooklyn and Queens, in a remote
meeting, agree to be known
as Long
Island. The contact was
easy to make. I gave
her my
spring coat with the label outward.
It's a good label. When
she turned away with it I
called her back and drunkenly
asked her for the bill in
the right-hand
pocket. She found it and
handed it to me.
It was
a hundred.
"Damn taxis never got change," I mumbled and took
it before
her astonishment
turned to sleight-of-hand. I got out my
wallet, crowded the crumpled note into
it clumsily
enough to display the two
other C-notes there, shoved
it into
the front
of my
jacket so that it missed the
pocket and fell to the
floor, and walked off. I walked
back before she could lift
the hinged
counter and skin out after it.
I picked
it up
and smiled
foolishly at her. "Lose more business
cards that way," I said.
Then I brought her into focus.
"Hey, you know, you're cute."
I suppose "cute"
is one
of the
four-letter words that describe her. "What's your name?"
"Charity," she said. "But don't get
ideas." She was wearing so much pancake makeup that
I couldn't
tell what her complexion was. She leaned so
far over
the counter
that I could see lipstick stains
on her
brassiere.
"I don't have
a favorite
charity yet," I said. "You
work here alia time?"
"I go
home once in a while,"
she said.
"What time?"
"One o'clock."
"Tell you what,"
I confided,
"let's both be in front
of this
place at a quarter
after and see who stands
who up,
okay?" Without waiting for
an answer
I stuck
the wallet
into my back pocket so that
my jacket
hung on it. All the
way into
the dining room I
could feel her eyes on
it like
two hot,
glistening, broiled mushrooms. I came
within an ace of losing
it to
the head waiter when
he collided
with me, too.
She was there
all right,
with a yellowish fur around
her neck and heels you could
have driven into a pine
plank. She was up to the
elbows in jangly brass and
chrome, and when we got into
a cab
she threw
herself on me with her
mouth open. I don't know where
I got
the reflexes,
but I
threw my head down and cracked
her in
the cheekbone
with my forehead, and when she
squeaked indignantly I said I'd
dropped the wallet again and she
went about helping me find
it quietly
as you please. We went to
a place
and another
place and an after-hours place, all
her choice.
They served her sherry in
her whiskey-ponies and doubled
all my
orders, and tilted the checks something outrageous. Once I
tipped a waiter eight dollars and she palmed the
five. Once she wormed my
leather notebook out of
my breast
pocket thinking it was the
wallet, which by this time was
safely tucked away in my
knit shorts. She did get one
enamel cuff link with a
rhinestone in it, and my fountain
pen. All in all it
was quite
a duel.
I was
loaded to the eyeballs with thiamin
hydrochloride and caffeine citrate, but a
most respectable amount of alcohol
soaked through them, and
it was
all I
could do to play it
through. I made it, though, and
blocked her at every turn
until she had no further choice
but to
take me home. She was
furious and made only the barest attempts to hide it
We got each
other up the dim dawnlit
stairs, shushing each other druhkenly, both much soberer than
we acted,
each promising what we
expected not to deliver. She
negotiated her lock successfully
and waved
me inside.
I hadn't expected
it to
be so
neat Or so cold. "I
didn't leave that window open," she said complainingly. She crossed the room and
closed it She pulled her
fur around
her throat
"This is awful."
It was
a long
low room
with three windows. At one
end, covered by a Venetian blind was
a kitchenette.
A door
at one
side of it was
probably a bathroom.
She went
to the
Venetian blind and
raised it "Have it warmed up
in a
jiffy," she said.
I looked at
the kitchenette.
"Hey," I said
as she
lit the
little oven, "coffee. How's about coffee?"
"Oh, all
right," she said glumly. "But
talk quiet huh?"
"Sh-h-h-h." I pushed my lips around
with a forefinger. I circled the room. Cheap phonograph and records. Small screen
TV. A big double studio couch.
A bookcase
with no books in it, just
china dogs. It occurred to
me that
her unsubtle
approach was probably not successful as often as she
might wish.
But where
was the
thing I was looking for?
"Hey, I wanna powder
my nose,"
I announced.
"In there,"
she said.
"Can't you talk quiet?"
I went into
the bathroom.
It was
tiny. There was a foreshortened
tub with
a circular
frame over it from which
hung a horribly cheerful shower curtain,
with big red roses. I
closed the door behind me and
carefully opened the medicine chest
Just the usual. I
closed it carefully so it
wouldn't click. A built-in shelf
held towels.
Must be a
closet in the main room,
I thought Hatbox,
trunk, suitcase, maybe. Where
would I put a devil-doll
if I
were hexing someone?
I wouldn't hide
it away,
I answered myself.
I don't
know why, but I'd sort of
have it out in the
open somehow . . .
I opened the
shower curtain and let it
close. Round curtain, square tub.
"Yupl"
I pushed the
whole round curtain back, and
there in the corner, just at
eye level,
was a
triangular shelf. Grouped on it were
four figurines, made apparently from kneaded wax. Three had wisps of hair
fastened by candle-droppings. The fourth was hairless, but had
slivers of a horny substance
pressed into the ends
of the
arms. Fingernail parings.
I stood for
a moment
thinking. Then I picked up
the hairless
doll, turned to the door.
I checked
myself, flushed the toilet, took a
towel, shook it out, dropped
it over
the edge
of the tub. Then I reeled
out. "Hey honey, look what
I got,
ain't it cute?"
"Shh!" she
said. "Oh for crying out
loud. Put that back, will you?"
"Well, what
is it?"
"It's none of
your business, that's what it
is. Come
on, put it back."
I wagged my
finger at her. "You're not being nice to
me," I complained.
She pulled some
shreds of patience together with
an obvious
effort. "It's just some sort
of toys
I have
around. Here."
I snatched it
away. "Ait right, you don't
wanna be nice!" I whipped my
coat together and began to
button it clumsily, still holding the
figurine.
She sighed, rolled
her eyes,
and came
to me.
"Come on, Dadsy. Have a nice
cup of
coffee and let's not fight."
She reached for the doll and
I snatched
it away
again.
"You got
to tell
me," I pouted.
"It's pers'nal."
"I wanna
be personal,"
I pointed
out
"Oh all right,"
she said.
"I had a roommate one
time, she used to make these
things. She said you make
one, and s'pose I decide I
don't like you, I got
something of yours, hair or
toenails or something. Say your name is
George. What is your name?"
"George," I said.
"All right,
I call
the doll
George. Then I stick pins
in it
That's all. Give it
to me."
"Who's this one?" "That's Al." "Hal?"
"Al. I got one
called Hal. He's in there.
I hate
him the
most."
"Yeah, huh.
Well, what happens to Al
and George
and all
when you stick pins
in 'em?"
"They're s'posed
to get
sick. Even die."
"Do they?"
"Nab.," she said
with immediate and complete candor.
"I told you, it's just a
game, sort of. If it
worked believe me old Al would
bleed to death. He runs
the delicatessen."
I handed
her the doll, and
she looked
at it
pensively. "I wish it did
work, sometimes. Sometimes I
almost believe in it. I
stick 'em and they just yell."
"Introduce me,"
I demanded.
"What?"
"Introduce me,"
I said.
I pulled
her toward
the bathroom.
She made a small
irritated "oh-h," and came along.
"This is Fritz
and this
is Bruno
and—where's the other one?"
"What other
one?"
"Maybe he fell
behind the—down back of—" She
knelt on the edge of the
tub and
leaned over to the wall,
to peer
behind it. She regained
her feet,
her face
red from
effort and anger. "What are you
trying to pull? You kidding
around or something?"
I spread
my arms.
"What you mean?"
"Come on," she
said between her teeth. She
felt my coat, my jacket. "You
hid it
some place."
"No I didn't.
There was only four." I pointed. "Al and
Fritz and Bruno and
Hal. Which one's Hal7"
'That's Freddie. He
give me twenny bucks and
took twenny-three out of my
purse, the dirty—. But Hal's
gone. He was the best one
of all.
You sure you didn't hide
him?" Then she thumped her forehead.
"The window!" she said, and ran
into the other room. I
was on my four bones peering
under the tub when I
understood what she meant. I
took a last good look
around and then followed her. She
was standing
by the
window, shading her eyes and peering
out. "What do you know.
Imagine somebody would swipe a thing
like that!"
A sick
sense of loss was born
in my
solar plexus.
"Aw, forget it.
I'll make another one for
that Hal. But I'll never make another one that
ugly," she added wistfully. "Come on, the coffee's—what's the matter? You sick?"
"Yeah," I said, "I'm
sick."
"Of all the
things to steal," she said
from the kitchenette. "Who
do you
suppose would do such a
thing?"
Suddenly I knew
who would.
I cracked
my fist
into my palm and laughed.
"What's the matter,
you crazy?"
"Yes," I said. "You
got a
phone?" "No. Where you
going?" "Out. Goodbye, Charity."
"Hey, now wait,
honey. Just when I got
coffee for you." I snatched the
door open. She caught my
sleeve. "You can't go
away like this! How's about
a little
something for Charity?"
"You'll get yours
when you make the rounds
tomorrow,-if you don't have a
hangover from those sherry highballs,"
I said cheerfully. "And don't forget
the five
you swiped
from the tip plate. Better watch
out for
that waiter, by the way.
I think
he saw you do it."
"You're not drunk!"
she gasped.
"You're not a
witch," I grinned. I blew
her a
kiss and ran out.
I shall
always remember her like that,
round-eyed, a little more astonished than she was resentful,
the beloved
dollar signs fading from her hot
brown eyes, the pathetic, useless
little twitch of her
hips she summoned up as
a last
plea.
Ever try to
find a phone booth at
five a.
m.? I half-trotted nine blocks before I found
a cab,
and I
was on
the Queens
side of the Triboro
Bridge before I found a
gas station
open.
I dialled. The
phone said, "Hello?"
"Kelley!" I roared happily. "Why didn't
you tell
me? You'd
'a saved sixty bucks
worth of the most dismal
fun I
ever—"
"This is Milton,"
said the telephone. "Hal just
died."
My mouth was still open and
I guess
it just
stayed that
way. Anyway it was
cold inside when I closed
it. "I'll
be right
over." »
"Better not,"
said Milton. His voice was
shaking with incomplete control. "Unless
you really
want to . . .
there's nothing you can
do, and
I'm going
to be
. .
. busy."
"Where's Kelley?" I whispered.
"I don't know."
"Well," I said.
"Call me."
I got
back into my taxi and
went home. I don't remember
the trip.
Sometimes I think
I dreamed
I saw
Kelley that morning. A lot of
alcohol and enough emotion to
kill it, mixed with no sleep
for thirty
hours, makes for blackout. I
came up out
of it
reluctantly, feeling that this was
no kind
of world
to be
aware of. Not today.
I lay looking
at the
bookcase. It was very quiet.
I closed
my eyes, turned over,
burrowed into the pillow, opened
my eyes again and saw Kelley
sitting in the easy chair,
poured out in his relaxed feline
fashion, legs too long, arms
too long,
eyes too long and
only partly open.
I didn't ask
him how
he got
in because
he was
already in, and welcome. I didn't
say anything
because I didn't want to
be the one to tell him
about Hal. And besides I
wasn't awake yet. I just lay
there.
"Milton told
me," he said. "It's all right."
I nodded.
Kelley said,
"I read your story. I
found some more and read them
too. You got a lot
of imagination."
He hung a
cigarette on his lower lip
and lit
it. "Milton,
he's got a lot
of knowledge.
Now, both of you think
real good up to a point.
Then too much knowledge presses
him off
to the
no'theast. And too much
imagination squeezes you off to
the no'thwest."
He smoked
a while.
"Me, I think straight
through but it takes me
a while."
I palmed my eyeballs.
"I don't know what you're
talking about."
"That's okay," he said quietly. "Look,
I'm goin'
after what killed Hal."
I closed
my eyes
and saw
a vicious,
pretty, empty little face. I said,
"I was most of the
night with Charity." "Were
you now."
"Kelley," I said, "if it's her
you're after, forget it. She's
a sleazy little tramp
but she's
also a little kid who
never had a chance. She didn't
kill Hal."
"I know she
didn't. I don't feel about
her one
way or
the other. I know what killed
Hal, though, and I'm goin'
after it the only way I
know for sure."
"All right then,"
I said.
I let
my head
dig back
into the pillow. "What did kill
him?"
"Milton told you
about that doll Hal give
her."
"He told me.
There's nothing in that, Kelley.
For a
man to be a voodoo victim,
he's got to believe that—"
"Yeh, yeh, yeh.
Milton told me. For hours
he told
me." '
"Well all
right."
"You got
imagination," Kelley said
sleepily. "Now just imagine along with
me a
while. Milt tell you how
some folks, if you point a
gun at
'em and
go bang,
they drop dead, even if there
was only
blanks in the gun?"
"He didn't,
but I
read it somewhere. Same general
idea."
"Now imagine all
the shootings
you ever
heard of was like that, with blanks."
"Go ahead."
"You got
a lot of
evidence, a lot of experts,
to prove
about this believing business, ever' time
anyone gets shot" "Got
it."
"Now imagine
somebody shows up with live
ammunition in his gun. Do you
think those bullets going to
give a damn who believes what?"
I didn't
say anything.
"For a long
time people been makin' dolls
and stickin'
pins in 'em. Wherever
somebody believes it can happen,
they get it. Now suppose somebody
shows up with the doll
all those
dolls was copied from.
The real
one."
I lay
still.
"You don't have
to know
nofhin' about it," said Kelley
lazily. "You don't have
to be
anybody special. You don't have
to understand how it
works. Nobody has to believe
nothing. All you do, you just
point it where you want
it to
work."
"Point it
how?" I whispered.
He shrugged.
"Call the doll by a name. Hate it,
maybe."
"For God's sake,
Kelley, you're crazy! Why, there
can't be anything like that!"
"You eat a
steak," Kelley said. "How's your gut know what
to take and what
to pass?
Do you know?"
"Some people
know."
"You don't
But your
gut does.
So there's
lots of natural laws that are
goin' to work whether anyone
understands 'em or not Lots of
sailors take a trick at
the wheel
without knowin' how a steering engine works.
Well, that's me. I know
where I'm goin' and I know
I'll get there. What do
I care
how does
it work, or who
believes what?"
"Fine, so
what are you going to
do?"
"Get what
got Hal."
His tone
was just
as lazy
but his
voice was very deep, and I
knew when not to ask
any more
questions. Instead I said,
with a certain amount of
annoyance, "Why tell me?"
"Want you
to do
something for me."
"What?"
"Don't tell
no one
what I just said for
a while.
And keep
something for me."
"What? And for
how long?"
"You'll know."
I'd have
risen up and roared at
him if
he had
not chosen
just that second to
get up
and drift
out of
the bedroom.
"What gets me," he
said quietly from the other
room, "is I could have
figured this out six
months ago."
I fell asleep
straining to hear him go
out. He moves quieter than any big man I
ever saw.
It was
afternoon when I awoke. The
doll was sitting on the
mantelpiece glaring at me.
Ugliest thing ever happened.
I saw
Kelley at Hal's funeral. He
and Milt
and I
had a
somber drink afterward. We didn't
talk about dolls. Far as
I know
Kelley shipped out right
afterward. You assume that seamen
do, when they drop
out of
sight. Milton was as busy
as a
doctor, which is very.
I left
the doll
where it was for a
week or two, wondering when Kelley
was going
to get
around to his project. He'd probably
tall for it when he
was ready.
Meanwhile I respected his request
and told
no one
about it. One day when some
people were coming over I
shoved it in the top
shelf of the closet,
and somehow
it just
got left
there.
About a month
afterward I began to notice
the smell.
I couldn't identify it right away;
it was
too faint;
but whatever
it was, I didn't
like it. I traced it
to the
closet, and then to the
doll. I took it
down and sniffed it. My
breath exploded out. It was that
same smell a lot of
people wish they could forget—
what Milton called necrotic
flesh. I came within an
inch of pitching the filthy thing
down the incinerator, but a
promise is a promise. I put
it down
on the
table, where it slumped repulsively. One of
the legs
was broken
above the knee. I mean,
it seemed to have
two knee
joints. And it was somehow
puffy, sick-looking.
I had an
old bell-jar
somewhere, that once had a
clock in it. I found it
and a
piece of inlaid linoleum, and
put the
doll under the jar at least
so I
could live with it.
I worked and
saw people—dinner
with Milton, once—and the days went
by the
way they
do, and
then one night it occurred
to me
to look
at the
doll again.
It was in
pretty sorry shape. I'd tried
to keep
it fairly
cool, but it seemed to be
melting and running all over.
For a
moment I worried about what Kelley
might say, and then I
heartily
damned Kelley
and put
the whole
mess down in the cellar.
And I guess
it was
altogether two months after Hal's
death that I wondered why I'd
assumed Kelley would have to
call for the little horror before
he did
what he had to do.
He said
he was going to get what
got Hal,
and he
intimated that the doll was that
something.
Well, that doll
was being
got, but good. I brought
it up
and put it under the light.
It was
still a figurine, but it
was one
unholy mess. "Attaboy, Kelley," I gloated. "Go get
'em, kid."
Milton called me
up and
asked me to meet him
at Rudy's.
He sounded pretty bad.
We had
the shortest
drink yet
He was sitting
in the
back booth chewing on the
insides of his cheeks. His hps
were gray and he slopped
his drink
when he lifted it.
"What in
time happened to you?" I gasped.
He gave me
a ghastly
smile. "I'm famous,"
he said.
I heard
his glass chatter against
his teeth.
He said,
"I called in so many consultants
on Hal
Kelley that I'm supposed to
be an
expert on that—on that
. .
. condition."
He forced
his glass
back to the table
with both hands and held
it down.
He tried
to smile and I
wished he wouldn't. He stopped
trying and almost whimpered, "I can't
nurse one of 'em like
that again. I can't."
"You going to
tell what, happened?" I asked
harshly. That works sometimes.
"Oh, oh yes.
Well they brought in a
. .
. another
one. At General. They called me
in. Just
like Hal. I mean exactly like Hal. Only I
won't have to nurse this
one, no I won't, I
won't have to. She died six
hours after she arrived."
"She?"
"You know what
you'd have to do to
someone to make them look like
that?" he said shrilly. "You'd
have to tie off parts so
they mortified. You'd have to
use a
wood rasp, maybe; a club; filth
to rub
into the wounds. You'd have
to break
bones in a vise."
"All right,
all right
but nobody—"
"And you'd have
to do
that for about two months,
every day, every night." He rubbed
his eyes.
He drove
his knuckles
in so hard that I caught
at his
wrists. "I know
nobody did
it; did I say anyone did
it?" he barked. "Nobody did anything to Hal, did
they?"
"Drink up."
He didn't He
whispered, "She just said the
same thing over 210 and over every
time anyone talked to her.
They'd say, 'What happened?' or 'Who
did this
to you?'
or 'What's
your name?' and she'd say. 'He
called me Dolly.' That's all
she'd say, just 'He called me
Dolly'." I got up.
"Bye, Milt."
He looked
stricken. "Don't go, will you,
you just
got—"
"I got to
go," I said. I didn't
look back. I had to
get out
and ask myself some questions. Think.
Who's guilty of
murder, I asked myself, the
one who
pulls the trigger, or the gun?
I thought of
a poor
damn pretty, empty little face
with greedy hot brown eyes, and
what Kelley said, "I don't
care about her one way or
the other."
I thought, when
she was
twisting and breaking and sticking,
how did
it look
to the
doll? Bet she never even
wondered about that.
I thought, action:
A girl
throws a fan at a
man. Reaction: The man throws the
girl at the fan. Action:
A wheel
sticks on a shaft. Reaction: Knock
the shaft
out of
the wheel.
Situation: We can't get inside.
Resolution: Take the outside off
it
It's a way of
thinking.
How do
you kill
a person?
Use a
doll.
How do
you kill
a doll?
Who's guilty,
the one
who pulls
the trigger,
or the
gun?
"He called me Dolly."
"He called me Dolly."
"He called me Dolly."
When I got home
the phone
was ringing.
"Hi," said
Kelley.
I said
"It's all gone. The doll's
all gone.
Kelley," I said, "stay away from
me." "All right," said Kelley.
You
are about to enter fantastic worlds beyond your wildest imaginings-worlds of
mystery and monsters, terror and ethereal love, sudden death and miraculous
life, jet-propelled shivers and humor.
On
this incredible, awesome journey, you will meet:
•
a strange, yet exquisitely beautiful and profoundly wise race of. . .
what?
•
a blood-sucking Teddy Bear which bestows on a four-year-old a terrifying
memory of the future.
•
Bianca, a deformed imbecile whose hands, hauntingly beautiful and with a
consciousness of their own, drive a man mad with love and desire and ultimately
fulfill a gruesome wish.
•
young Leo, who learns that his entire existence has been dreamed by
someone else.
•
virgins and unicorns who contest the meaning of truth.