Collected Stories

Nackles

This is perhaps not quite the Yuletide tale to read to your little nephew or your sweet old aunt. Still, while its theology is questionable, its sociology is rather sound. As for the author, we have been absolutely unable to learn anything about him or his whereabouts, and this, too, makes us wonder…

Did God create men, or does Man create gods? I don’t know, and if it hadn’t been for my rotten brother-in-law the question would never have come up. My late brother-in-law? Nackles knows.

It all depends, you see, like the chicken and the egg, on which came first. Did God exist before Man first thought of Him, or didn’t He? If not, if Man creates his gods, then it follows that Man must create the devils, too.

Nearly every god, you know, has his corresponding devil. Good and Evil. The polytheistic ancients, prolific in the creation (?) of gods and goddesses, always worked up nearly enough Evil ones to cancel out the stood, but not quite. The Greeks, those incredible supermen, combined Good and Evil in each of their gods. In Zoroaster, Ahura Mazda, being Good, is ranged forever against the Evil one, Ahriman. And we ourselves know God and Satan.

But of course it’s entirely possible I have nothing to worry about. It all depends on whether Santa Claus is or is not a god. He certainly seems like a god. Consider: He is omniscient; he knows every action of every child, for good or evil. At least on Christmas Eve he is omnipresent, everywhere at once. He administers justice tempered with mercy. He is superhuman, or at least non-human, though conceived of as having a human shape. He is aided by a corps of assistants who do not have completely human shapes. He rewards Good and punishes Evil. And, most important, he is believed in utterly by several million people, most of them under tin; age of ten. Is there any qualification for godhood that Santa Claus docs not possess?

And even the non-believers give him lip-service. He has surely taken over Christmas; his effigy is everywhere, but where are the manger and the Christ child? Retired rather forlornly to the nave. (Santa’s power is growing, too. Slowly but surely he is usurping Chanukah as well.)

Santa Claus is a god. He’s no less a god than Ahura Mazda, or Odin, or Zeus. Think of the white beard, the chariot pulled through the air by a breed of animal which doesn’t ordinarily fly, the prayers (requests for gifts) which are annually mailed to him and which so baffle the Post Office, the specially garbed priests in all the department stores. And don’t gods reflect their creators’ (?) society? The Greeks had a huntress goddess, and gods of agriculture and war and love. What else would we have but a god of giving, of merchandising, and of consumption? Secondary gods of earlier times have been stout, but surely Santa Claus is the first fat primary god.

And wherever there is a god, mustn’t there sooner or later be a devil?

Which brings me back to my brother-in-law, who’s to blame for whatever happens now. My brother-in-law Frank is — or was — a very mean and nasty man. Why I ever let him marry my sister I’ll never know. Why Susie wanted to marry him is an even greater mystery. I could just shrug and say Love Is Blind, I suppose, but that wouldn’t explain how she fell in love with him in the first place.

Frank is — Frank was — I just don’t know what tense to use. The present, hopefully. Frank is a very handsome man in his way, big and brawny, full of vitality. A football player; hero in college and defensive line-backer for three years in pro ball, till he did some sort of irreparable damage to his left knee, which gave him a limp and forced him to find some other way to make a living.

Ex-football players tend to become insurance salesmen, I don’t know why. Frank followed the form, and became an insurance salesman. Because Susie was then a secretary for the same company, they soon became acquainted.

Was Susie dazzled by the ex-hero, so big and handsome? She’s never been the type to dazzle easily, but we can never fully know what goes on inside the mind of another human being. For whatever reason, she decided she was in love with him.

So they were married, and five weeks later he gave her her first black eye. And the last, though it mightn’t have been, since Susie tried to keep me from finding out. I was to go over for dinner that night, but at eleven in the morning she called the auto showroom where I work, to tell me she had a headache and we’d have to postpone the dinner. But she sounded so upset that I knew immediately something was wrong, so I took a demonstration car and drove over, and when she opened the front door there was the shiner.

I got the story out of her slowly, in fits and starts. Frank, it seemed, had a terrible temper. She wanted to excuse him because he was forced to be an insurance salesman when he really wanted to be out there on the gridiron again, but I want to be President and Cm an automobile salesman and I don’t go around giving women black eyes. So I decided it was up to me to let Frank know he wasn’t to vent his pique on my sister any more.

Unfortunately. I am five feet seven inches tall and weigh one hundred thirty-four pounds, with the Sunday Times under my arm. Were I just to give Frank a piece of my mind, he’d surely give me a black eye to go with my sister’s. Therefore, that afternoon I bought a regulation baseball bat, and carried it with me when I went to see Frank that night.

He opened the door himself and snarled, “What do you want?”

In answer, I poked him with the end of the bat, just above the belt, to knock the wind out of him. Then, having unethically gained the upper hand, I clouted him five or six times more, and then stood over him to say, “The next time you hit my sister I won’t let you off so easy.” After which I took Susie home to my place for dinner

And after which I was Frank’s best friend.

People like that are so impossible to understand. Until the baseball bat episode, Frank had nothing for me but undisguised contempt. But once I’d knocked the stuffings out of him, he was my comrade for life. And I’m sure it was sincere; he would have given me the shirt off his back, had I wanted it, which I didn’t.

(Also, by the way, he never hit Susie again. He still had the bad temper, but he took it out in throwing furniture out windows or punching dents in walls or going downtown to start a brawl in some bar. I offered to train him out of maltreating the house and furniture as I had trained him out of maltreating his wife, but Susie said no, that Frank had to let off steam and it would be worse if he was forced to bottle it all up inside him, so the baseball bat remained in retirement.)

Then came the children, three of them in as many years. Frank Junior came first, and then Linda Joyce, and finally Stewart. Susie had held the forlorn hope that fatherhood would settle Frank to some extent, but quite the reverse was true. Shrieking babies, smelly diapers, disrupted sleep, and distracted wives are trials and tribulations to any man, but to Frank they were — like everything else in his life — the last straw.

He became, in a word, worse. Susie restrained him I don’t know how often from doing some severe damage to a squalling infant, and as the children grew toward the age of reason Frank’s expressed attitude toward them was that their best move would be to find a way to become invisible. The children, of course, didn’t like him very much, but then who did?

Last Christmas was when u started. Junior was six then, and Linda Joyce five, and Stewart four, so all were old enough to have heard of Santa Claus and still young enough to believe in him. Along around October, when the Christmas season was beginning, Frank began to use Santa Claus’s displeasure as a weapon to keep the children “in line,” his phrase for keeping them mute and immobile and terrified. Many parents, of course, try to enforce obedience the same way: “If you’re bad, Santa Claus won’t bring you any presents.” Which, all things considered, is a negative and passive son of punishment, wishy-washy in comparison with fire and brimstone and such. In the old days, Santa Claus would treat bad children a bit more scornfully, leaving a lump of coal in their stockings in lieu of presents, but I suppose the Depression helped to change that. There are times and situations when a lump of coal is nothing to sneer at.

In any case, an absence of presents was too weak a punishment for Frank’s purposes, so last Christmastime he invented Nackles.

Who is Nackles? Nackles is to Santa Claus what Satan is to God, what Ahriman is to Ahura Mazda, what the North Wind is to the South Wind. Nackles is the new Evil.

I think Frank really enjoyed creating Nackles; he gave so much thought to the details of him. According to Frank, and as I remember it, this is Nackles: Very very tall and very very thin. Dressed ail in black, with a gaunt gray face and deep black eyes. He travels through an intricate series of tunnels under the earth, in a black chariot on rails, pulled by an octet of dead-white goats.

And what does Nackles do? Nackles lives on the flesh of little boys and girls. (This is what Frank was telling his children; can you believe it?) Nackles roams back and forth under the earth, in his dark tunnels darker than subway tunnels, pulled by the eight dead-white goats, and he searches for little boys and girls to stuff into his big black sack and carry away and eat. But Santa Claus won’t let him have good boys and girls. Santa Claus is stronger than Nackles, and keeps a protective shield around little children, so Nackles can’t get at them.

But when little children are bad, it hurts Santa Claus, and weakens the shield Santa Claus has placed around them, and if they keep on being bad pretty soon there’s no shield left at all, and on Christmas Eve instead of Santa Claus coming down out of the sky with his bag of presents Nackles comes up out of the ground with his bag of emptiness, and stuffs the bad children in, and whisks them away to his dark tunnels and the eight dead-white goats.

Frank was proud of his invention, actually proud of it. He not only used Nackles to threaten his children every time they had the temerity to come within range of his vision, he also spread the story around to others. He told me, and his neighbors, and people in bars, and people he went to see in his job as insurance salesman. I don’t know how many people he told about Nackles, though I would guess it was well over a hundred. And there’s more than one Frank in this world; he told me from time to time of a client or neighbor or bar-crony who had heard the story of Nackles and then said, “By God, that’s great. That’s what I’ve been needing, to keep my brats in line.”

Thus Nackles was created, and thus Nackles was promulgated. And would any of the unfortunate children thus introduced to Nackles believe in this Evil Being any less than they believed in Santa Claus? Of course not.

This all happened, as I say, last Christmastime. Frank invented Nackles, used him to further intimidate his already-intimidated children, and spread the story of him to everyone he met. On Christmas Day last year I’m sure there was more than one child in this town who was relieved and somewhat surprised to awaken the same as usual, in his own trundle bed, and to find the presents downstairs beneath the tree, proving that Nackles had been kept away yet another year.

Nackles lay dormant, so far as Frank was concerned, from December 25th of last year until this October. Then, with the sights and sounds of Christmas again in the land, back came Nackles, as fresh and vicious as ever. “Don’t expect me to stop him!” Frank would shout. “When he comes up out of the ground the night before Christmas to carry you away in his bag, don’t expect any help from me!’

It was worse this year than last. Frank wasn’t doing as well financially as he’d expected, and then early in November Susie discovered she was pregnant again, and what with one thing and another Frank was headed for a real peak of ill-temper. He screamed at the children constantly, and the name of Nackles was never far from his tongue.

Susie did what she could to counteract Frank’s bad influence, but he wouldn’t let her do much. All through November and December he was home more and more of the time, because the Christmas season is the wrong time to sell insurance anyway and also because he was hating the job more every day and thus giving it less of his time. The more he hated the job, the worse his temper became, and the more he drank, and the worse his limp got, and the louder were his shouts, and the more violent his references to Nackles. It just built and built and built, and reached its crescendo on Christmas Eve, when some small or imagined infraction of one of the children — Stewart, I think — resulted in Frank’s pulling all the Christmas presents from all the closets and stowing them all in the cur to be taken back to the stores, because this Christmas for sure it wouldn’t be Santa Claus who would be visiting this house, it would be Nackles.

By the time Susie got the children to bed, everyone in the house was a nervous wreck. The children were too frightened to sleep, and Susie was too unnerved herself to be of much help in soothing them. Frank, who had taken to drinking at home lately, had locked himself in the bedroom with a bottle.

It was nearly eleven o’clock before Susie got the children all quieted down, and then she went out to the car and brought all the presents back in and arranged them under the tree. Then, not wanting to see or hear her husband any more that night — he was like a big spoiled child throwing a tantrum — she herself went to sleep on the living room sofa.

Frank junior awoke her in the morning, crying. “Look, Mama! Nackles didn’t come, he didn’t come!” And pointed to the presents she’d placed under the tree.

The other two children came down shortly after, and Susie and the youngsters sat on the floor and opened the presents, enjoying themselves as much as possible, but still with restraint. There were none of the usual squeals of childish pleasure; no one wanted Daddy to comic storming downstairs in one of his rages. So the children contented themselves with ear-to-ear smiles and whispered exclamations, and after a while Susie made breakfast, and the day carried along as pleasantly as amid he expected under the circumstances.

It was a little after twelve that Susie began to worry about Frank’s non-appearance. She braved herself to go up and knock on the locked door and call his name, but she girt no answer, not even the expected snarl, so just around one o’clock she called me and I hurried on over. I rapped smartly on the bedroom door, got no answer, and finally I threatened to break the door in if Frank didn’t open up. When I still got no answer, break the door in I did.

And Frank, of course, was gone.

The police say he ran away, deserted his family, primarily because of Susie’s fourth pregnancy. They say he went out the window and dropped to the backyard, so Susie wouldn’t see him and try to stop him. And they say he didn’t take the car because he was afraid Susie would hear him start the engine.

That all sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Yet, I just can’t believe Frank would walk out on Susie without a lot of shouting about it first. Nor that he would leave his car, which he was fonder of than his wife and children.

But what’s the alternative? There’s only one I can think of: Nackles.

I would rather not believe that I would rather not believe that Frank, in inventing Nackles and spreading word of him, made him real. I would rather not believe that Nackles actually did visit my sister’s house on Christmas Eve.

But did he? If so, he couldn’t have carried off any of the children, for a more subdued and better-behaved trio of youngsters you won’t find anywhere. But Nackles, being brand-new and never having had a meal before, would need somebody. Somebody to whom he was real, somebody not protected by the shield of Santa Claus. And, as I say, Frank was drinking that night. Alcohol makes the brain believe in the existence of all sorts of things. Also, Frank was a spoiled child if there ever was one.

There’s no question but that Frank Junior and Linda Joyce and Stewart believe in Nackles. And Frank spread the gospel of Nackles to others, some of whom spread it to their own children. And some of whom will spread the new Evil to other parents. And ours is a mobile society, with families constantly being transferred by Daddy’s company from one end of the country to another, so how long can it be before Nackles is a power not only in this one city, but all across the nation?

I don’t know if Nackles exists, or will exist. All I know for sure is that there’s suddenly a new level of meaning in the lyric of that popular Christmas song. You know the one I mean:

You’d better watch out.

Just the Lady We’re Looking For

Being a housewife in a suburban development is not just shopping, cleaning, and cooking — not when men like Mr. Merriweather ring the front doorbell…

That morning Mary cleaned the kitchen, and after lunch she went shopping. It was a beautiful sunny day, but getting hot; the lawns and curbs and ranch-style houses of Pleasant Park Estates gleamed and sparkled in the sunlight, and in the distance the blacktop street shone like glittering water.

Mary had lived here barely five weeks now, but one development was very like another, and in her seven years of marriage to Geoff she’d seen plenty of them. Geoff transferred frequently, spending six months here, eight months there, never as much as a year in any one location. It was a gypsyish life, but Mary didn’t mind: we’re just part of the new mobile generation, she told herself, and let it go at that.

All the stores in the shopping center were air-conditioned, but that only made it worse when Mary finally walked back across the griddle of a parking lot to the car. She thought of poor Geoff, working outdoors ’way over at Rolling Rancheros, and she vowed to make him an extra-special dinner tonight: London broil, a huge green salad, and iced coffee. In fact, she’d make up a big pot of iced coffee as soon as she got home.

But she didn’t get the chance. She’d barely finished putting the groceries away when the front doorbell sounded. She went to the living room, opened the door, and the man smiled, made a small bow, and said, “Mrs. Peters?”

He was about forty, very distinguished-looking, with a tiny Errol Flynn mustache and faint traces of gray at his temples. His dark suit fitted perfectly, and his black attaché case gleamed of expensive leather. He said, “I wonder if you could spare five minutes, or should I call back later?”

Mary frowned. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t under—”

“Oh! You think I’m a salesman!” He laughed, but as though the joke were on himself, not on Mary. “I should have shown you my identification,” he said, and from his inside coat pocket took a long flat wallet of black leather. From it he plucked a card, and extended it to Mary, saying, “Merriweather. Universal Electric.”

The card was in laminated plastic, the printing in two colors. There was a photo of Mr. Merriweather, full face, and his signature underneath. The reverse side gave the office locations of Universal Electric in major cities.

Mr. Merriweather said, smiling, “You have heard of Universal Electric, I hope.”

“Oh, of course. I’ve seen your ads on television.”

Mr. Merriweather accepted his card back. “If you don’t have time now—”

“Oh, I have time. Come on in.”

“Thank you.” He wiped his feet on the mat, and entered. “What a lovely home!”

“Oh, not really. We just moved in last month and it’s still an awful mess.”

“Not at all, not at all! You have charming taste.”

They sat down, Mary in the armchair and Mr. Merriweather on the sofa, his attaché case beside him. He said, “May I ask what make of refrigerator you now have in your home?”

“It’s a Universal.”

“Wonderful.” He smiled again. “And how old is it?”

“I really don’t know — it came with the house.”

“I see. And a home freezer unit, do you have one of those?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, fine. You may be just the lady we’re looking for.” Taking his attaché case onto his lap, he opened it and began removing brightly colored sheets of glossy paper. “A part of our advertising campaign for—”

Now she was sure. “Excuse me,” she said, and got to her feet. Trying to smile normally and naturally, she said, “My groceries. I just got home from the store and nothing’s put away yet. Your talking about the refrigerator reminded me.”

“If you’d prefer that I come back la—”

“Oh, no.” No, she didn’t want to frighten him away. “This won’t take a minute,” she assured him. “I’ll just put the perishables away, and I’ll be right back.”

He got to his feet and smiled and bowed as she left the room.

Her heart was pounding furiously and her legs didn’t seem to want to work right. In the kitchen she went straight to the wall phone and dialed Operator, her hand trembling as she held the receiver to her ear. When the operator came on, Mary said, keeping her voice low, “I want the police, please. Hurry!”

It seemed to take forever, but finally a gruff male voice spoke, and Mary said. “My name is Mrs. Mary Peters, two-twelve Magnolia Court, Pleasant Park Estates. There’s a confidence man in my house.”

“A what?”

Didn’t this policeman watch television? “A confidence man,” she said. “He’s trying to get money from me under false pretenses. I’ll try to keep him here until you send somebody, but you’ll have to hurry.”

“In five minutes,” the policeman promised.

Mary hung up, wishing there was some way to call Geoff. Well, she’d just have to handle it herself. Generally speaking, confidence men avoided violence whenever they could, so she probably wasn’t in any direct physical danger; but you could never be sure. This one might be wanted for other more serious crimes as well, and in that case he might be very dangerous indeed.

Well, she’d started it, so she might as well see it through to the end. She took a deep breath, and went back to the living room.

Mr. Merriweather rose again, polite as ever. He now had the coffee table completely covered with glossy sheets of paper. She said, “I’m sorry I took so long, but I didn’t want any of the food to spoil.”

“Perfectly all right.” He settled himself on the sofa again and said, “As I was saying, Universal Electric is about to introduce a revolutionary new type of refrigerator-freezer, with an advertising campaign built around the concept of the satisfied user. We are placing this refrigerator-freezer in specially selected homes for a six months’ trial period, absolutely free, asking only that the housewife, if she loves this new product as much as we are convinced she will, give us an endorsement at the end of that time and permit us to use her statement and name and photograph in our advertising, both in magazines and on television.”

What would a housewife say who hadn’t seen through this fraud? Mary strove for a suitably astonished expression and said, “And you picked me?”

“Yes, we did. Now, here—” he pointed to one of the papers on the coffee table “—is the product. On the outside it looks like an ordinary refrigerator, but—”

“But how did you happen to pick me?” She knew it was a dangerous question to ask, but she couldn’t resist seeing how he would handle it. Besides, if she acted sufficiently naïve, there wouldn’t be any reason for him to get suspicious.

He smiled again, not at all suspicious, and said, “Actually, I didn’t pick you, Mrs. Peters. The names were chosen by an electronic computer at our home office. We are trying for a statistical cross-section of America.”

It was time to leave that, and become gullibly enthusiastic. She said, “And you really want to give me a refrigerator for six months?”

“Six months is the trial period. After that, you can either keep the unit in payment for your endorsement, or return it and take cash instead.”

“Well, it sounds absolutely fantastic! A brand-new refrigerator for nothing at all.”

“I assure you, Mrs. Peters,” he said, smiling, “we don’t expect to lose on this proposition. Advertising based on satisfied customers is far more effective than any other sort of campaign.” He flipped open a notebook. “May I put you down as willing?”

“Yes, of course. Who wouldn’t be willing?” And where in the world were the police?

He started to write, then suddenly cried, “Oh!” and looked stricken. “I’m so sorry, there’s something I forgot, something I should have told you before. As I explained, you have the option either to keep the unit or return it. Now, we want to be sure our trial users won’t harm the units in any way, so we do request a small damage deposit before delivery. The deposit is automatically refunded after the six months, unless you wish to return the unit and we find that it has been mistreated.”

Would the unsuspicious housewife become suspicious at this point? Mary wasn’t sure. But if she seemed too gullible, that might be just as bad as seeming too wary. So she said, guardedly, “I see.”

“I’ll give you a receipt for the deposit now,” he went on glibly, “and you show it when the unit is delivered. It’s just as simple as that.”

“How much is this damage deposit?”

“Ten dollars.” He smiled, saying, “You can see it’s merely an expression of good faith on your part. If the unit is mistreated, ten dollars will hardly cover its repair.”

“I’m not sure,” she said doubtfully. She had to act more wary now, if only to stall until the police got here. “Maybe I ought to talk it over with my husband first.”

“Certainly. Could you phone him at work? I do have to have your answer today. If you elect not to take the unit, I’ll have to contact our second choice in this area.”

“No, my husband works outdoors. I wish I could phone him.” There was nothing to do now but pay him the money and pray that the police would arrive in time. “All right,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

“Fine!”

“I’ll just get my purse.”

Mary went back to the kitchen and looked longingly at the telephone. Call the police again? No, they were surely on the way by now. She got her purse and returned to the living room.

It seemed to take no time at all to give him the money and get the receipt. Then he was rising, saying, “The unit should be delivered within three weeks.”

Desperately, she said, “Wouldn’t you like a glass of iced coffee before you go? It’s so hot out today.”

He was moving toward the door. “Thank you, but I’d better be getting back to the office. There’s still—”

The doorbell chimed.

Mary opened the door, and Mr. Merriweather walked into the arms of two uniformed policemen.

The next five minutes were hectic. Merriweather blustered and bluffed, but the policemen would have none of it. When Mary told them his line, they recognized it at once: complaints had been coming in from swindled housewives in the area for over a month. “There’s always a couple of these short-con artists working the suburbs,” one of the policemen said.

But Mr. Merriweather didn’t give up until one of the policemen suggested that they phone the local office of Universal Electric and verify his identification. At that, he collapsed like a deflated balloon. Turning to Mary, he said, “How? How did you know?”

“Women’s intuition,” she told him. “You just didn’t seem right to me.”

“That’s impossible,” he said. “What did I do wrong? How did you tumble to it?”

“Just women’s intuition,” she said.

The policemen took him away, shaking his head, and Mary went back to the kitchen and got started on dinner. She could hardly wait for Geoff to get home — to tell him about her day.

Geoff came in a little after five, his suit and white shirt limp and wrinkled. “What a scorcher,” he said. “If it keeps up like this, we’d better move north again.”

He pulled a handful of bills from his pockets, fives and tens, and dumped them on the dining-room table. As he counted them, he said, “How was your day?”

“Got rid of some of the competition,” she told him. “Guy working the Free Home Demonstration dodge. Get that grift off the table, I have to set it for dinner.”