The Avram Davidson Treasury : a tribute collection

Where Do You Live, Queen Esther? INTRODUCTION BY KATE WILHELM

There is magic, indeed there is. Not in amulets or powders, not in rings with powers, or wells that grant wishes. The real magic is in words; the real magician is one who has mastered that magic. Avram was a magician. In a few words he opens the door to reveal another world, magic. Oh, my, but a woman your age shouldn’t be working, the ladies said. No, no, I couldn’t, really. Magic. A revealed world. Or later: “Another day. And everything is left to me. Every single thing… Don’t take all morning with those few dishes.” Another world, narrower, meaner. And again: Her thrust she hand into she bosom… “You ugly old duppy! Me never fear no duppy, no, not me!”

Deftly, with enviable precision, savage wit, an undeceived eye and infallible ear Avram created his magic spell and in a very short story answered the question: “Where Do You Live, Queen Esther?” But more, by drawing us into his universe, his universe also entered us. It is now part of us. That is the enchantment of words woven by a master magician.

COLD, COLD, IT WAS, in the room where she lodged, so far from her work. The young people complained of the winter, and those born to the country — icy cold, it was, to them. So how could a foreign woman bear it, and not a young one? She had tried to find another job not so far (none were near). Oh, my, but a woman your age shouldn’t be working, the ladies said. No, no, I couldn’t, really. Kindly indeed. Thank you, mistress.

There was said to be hot water sometimes in the communal bathroom down the hall — the water in the tap in her room was so cold it burned like fire: so strange: hot/cold — but it was always too late when she arrived back from work. Whither she was bound now. Bound indeed.

A long wait on the bare street corner for the bus. Icy winds and no doorway, even, to shelter from the winds. In the buses — for there were two, and another wait for the second — if not warm, then not so cold. And at the end, a walk for many blocks. The mistress not up yet.

Mistress … Queen Esther thought about Mrs. Raidy, the woman of the house. At first her was startled by the word — to she it mean, a woman live with a man and no marriage lines. But then her grew to like it, Mrs. Raidy did. Like to hear, too, mention of the Master and the young Master, his brother.

Both of they at table. “That second bus,” Queen Esther said, unwrapping her head. “He late again. Me think, just to fret I.”

“Oh, a few minutes don’t matter. Don’t worry about it,” the master, Mr. Raidy, said. He never called the maid by name, nor did the mistress, but the boy—

As now, looking up with a white line of milk along his upper lip, he smiled and asked. “Where do you live, Queen Esther?” It was a game they played often. His brother — quick glance at the clock, checking his watch, head half turned to pick up sounds from upstairs, said that he wasn’t to bother “her” with his silly question. A pout came over the boy’s face, but yielded to her quick reply.

“Me live in the Carver Rooms on Fig Street, near Burr.”

His smile broadened. “Fig! That’s a fun-ny name for a street… But where do you live at home, Queen Esther? I know: Spahnish Mahn. And what you call a fig we call a bah-nah-nah. See, Freddy? I know.”

The older one got up. “Be a goodboynow,” he said, and vanished for the day.

The boy winked at her. “Queen Esther from Spanish Man, Santa Marianne, Bee-Double-You-Eye. But I really think it should be Spanish Main, Queen Esther.” He put his head seriously to one side. “That’s what they used to call the Caribbean Sea, you know.”

And he fixed with his brooding, ugly little face her retreating back as she went down to the cellar to hang her coat and change her shoes.

“The sea surround we on three sides at Spanish Man,” she said, returning.

“You should say, ‘surrounds us,’ Queen Esther… You have a very funny accent, and you aren’t very pretty.”

Looking up from her preparations for the second breakfast, she smiled. “True for you, me lad.”

“But then, neither am I. I look like my father. I’m his brother, not hers, you know. Do you go swimming much when you live at home, Queen Esther?”

She put up a fresh pot of coffee to drip and plugged in the toaster and set some butter to brown as she beat the eggs; and she told him of how they swim at Spanish Man on Santa Marianna, surrounded on three sides by the sea. It was the least of the Lesser Antilles… She lived only part of her life in the land she worked in, the rest of the time — in fact, often at the same time — she heard, in the silence and cold of the mainland days and nights, the white surf beating on the white sands and the scuttling of the crabs beneath the breadfruit trees.

“I thought I would come down before you carried that heavy tray all the way upstairs,” said the mistress, rubbing her troubled puffy eyes. Her name was Mrs. Eleanor Raidy — she was the master’s wife — and her hair was teased up in curlers. She sat down with a grunt, sipped coffee, sighed. “What would I ever do without you?”

She surveyed the breakfast-in-progress. “I hope I’ll be able to eat. And to retain. Some mornings …” she said darkly. Her eyes made the rounds once more. “There’s no pineapple, I suppose?” she asked faintly. “Grated, with just a little powdered sugar? Don’t go to any extra trouble,” she added, as Queen Esther opened the icebox. “Rodney. Rodney? Why do I have to shout and—”

“Yes, El. What?”

“In that tone of voice? If it were for my pleasure, I’d say, Nothing. But I see your brother doesn’t care if you eat or not. Half a bowl of—”

“I’m finished.”

“You are not finished. Finish now.”

“I’ll be late, El. They’re waiting for me.”

“Then they’ll wait. Rush out of here with an empty stomach and then fill up on some rubbish? No. Finish the cereal.”

“But it’s cold.”

“Who let it get cold? I’m not too sure at all I ought to let you go. This Harvey is older than you and he pals around with girls older than he is. Or maybe they just fix themselves up to look — eat. Did you hear what I say? Eat. Most disgusting sight I ever saw, lipstick, and the clothes? Don’t let me catch you near them. They’ll probably be rotten with disease in a few years.” Silently, Queen Esther grated pineapple. “I don’t like the idea of your going down to the Museum without adult supervision. Who knows what can happen? Last week a boy your age was crushed to death by a truck. Did you have a—look at me, young man, when I’m talking to you — did you have a movement?”

“Yes.”

“Ugh. If looks could kill. I don’t believe you. Go upstairs and — RodNEY!”

But Rodney had burst into tears and threw down his spoon and rushed from the room. Even as Mrs. Raidy, her mouth open with Shock, tried to catch the maid’s eye, he slammed the door behind him and ran down the front steps.

The morning was proceeding as usual.

“And his brother leaves it all to me,” Mrs. Raidy said, pursuing a piece of pineapple with her tongue. She breathed heavily. “I have you to thank, in part, I may as well say since we are on the subject, for the fact that he wakes up screaming in the middle of the night. I warned you. Didn’t I warn you?”

Queen Esther demurred, said she had never spoken of it to the young master since that one time of the warning.

“One time was enough. What was that word? That name? From the superstitious story you were telling him when I interrupted. Guppy?”

“Duppy, mistress.” It was simply a tale from the old slave days, Queen Esther reflected. A cruel Creole lady who went to the fields one night to meet she lover, and met a duppy instead. The slaves all heard, but were affrighted to go out; and to this day the pile of stones near Petty Morne is called The Grave of Mistress-Serve-She-Well. Mistress Raidy had suddenly appeared at the door, as Queen Esther finished the tale, startling Master Rodney.

“Why do you tell the child such stories?” she had demanded, very angry. “See, he’s scared to death.”

“You scared me, El, sneaking up like that.”

Queen Esther hastened to try to distract them.

“‘Tis only a fancy of the old people. Me never fear no duppy—”

But she was not allowed to finish. The angry words scalded her. And she knew it was the end of any likelihood (never great) that she might be allowed to move her things into the little attic room, and save the hours of journeying through the cutting, searing cold.

Said the mistress, now, “Even the sound of it is stupid… He didn’t eat much breakfast.” She glanced casually out the window at the frost-white ground. “You noticed that, I suppose.”

Over the sound of the running water Queen Esther said, Yes. She added detergent to the water. He never did eat much breakfast — but she didn’t say this out.

“No idea why, I suppose? No? Nobody’s been feeding him anything — that you know of? No spicy West Indian messes, no chicken and rice with bay leaves? Yes, yes, I know, not since that one time. All right. A word to the wise is sufficient.” Mrs. Raidy arose. A grimace passed over her face. “Another day. And everything is left to me. Every single thing… Don’t take all morning with those few dishes.”

Chicken and rice, with bay leaves and peppercorns. Queen Esther, thinking about it now, relished the thought. Savory, yes. Old woman in the next yard at home in Spanish Man, her cook it in an iron caldron. Gran’dame Hephsibah, who had been born a slave and still said “wittles” and “vhiskey”… Very sage woman. But, now, what was wrong with chicken and rice? The boy made a good meal of it, too, before he sister-in-law had come back, unexpected and early. Then shouts and tears and then a dash to the bathroom. “You’ve made him sick with your nasty rubbish!” But, for true, it wasn’t so.

Queen Esther was preparing to vacuum the rug on the second floor when the mistress appeared at the door of the room. She dabbed at her eyes. “You know, I’m not a religious person,” she observed, “but I was just thinking: It’s a blessing the Good Lord didn’t see fit to give me a child. You know why? Because I would’ve thrown away my life on it just as I’m throwing it away on my father-in-law’s child. Can you imagine such a thing? A man fifty-two years old, a widower, suddenly gets it into his head to take a wife half his age—” She rattled away, winding up, “And so now they’re both dead, and who has to put up with the results of his being a nasty old goat? No… Look. See what your fine young gentleman had hidden under the cushion of his bedroom chair.”

And she rifled the pages of a magazine. Queen Esther suppressed a smile. It was only natural, she wanted to say. Young gentlemen liked young ladies. Even up in this cold and frozen land — true, the boy was young. That’s why it was natural he only looked — and only at pictures.

“Oh, there’s very little gets past me, I can assure you. Wait. When he gets back. Museum trips. Dirty pictures. Friends from who knows where. No more!”

Queen Esther finished the hall rugs, dusted, started to go in to vacuum the guest room. Mrs. Raidy, she half observed in the mirror, was going downstairs. Just as the mistress passed out of sight, she threw a glance upward. Queen Esther only barely caught it. She frowned. A moment later a faint jar shook the boards beneath her feet. The cellar door. Bad on its hinges. Queen Esther started the vacuum cleaner; a sudden thought made her straighten up, reach for the switch. For a moment she stood without moving. Then she propped the cleaner, still buzzing, in a corner, and flitted down the steps.

There was, off the kitchen, a large broom closet, with a crack in the wall. Queen Esther peered through the crack. Diagonally below in the cellar was an old victrola and on it the maid had draped her coat and overcoat and scarf; next to it were street shoes, not much less broken than the ones she wore around the house.

Mistress Raidy stood next to the gramophone, her head lifted, listening. The hum of the vacuum cleaner filtered through the house. With a quick nod of her head, tight-lipped in concentration, the mistress began going through the pockets of the worn garments. With little grunts of pleasurable vexation she pulled out a half-pint bottle of fortified wine, some pieces of cassava cake. “That’s all we need. A drunken maid. Mice. Roaches. Oh, yes.” A smudged hektographed postal card announcing the Grand Annual Festivity of the St. Kitts and Nevis Wesleyan Benevolent Union, a tattered copy of Lucky Tiger Dream Book, a worn envelope …

Here she paused to dislodge a cornerless photograph of Queen Esther’s brother Samuel in his coffin and to comment, “As handsome as his sister.” There were receipts for international postal orders to Samuel’s daughter Ada—“Send my money to foreign countries.” A change purse with little enough in it, and a flat cigarette tin. This she picked at with nervous fingers, chipping a nail. Clicking her tongue, she got it open, found, with loathing large upon her face—

— a tiny dried frog — a frog? — a — surely not! —

“Oh!” she said, in a thin, jerky, disgusted voice. “Uh. Uh!” She threw the tin away from her, but the thing was bound with a scarlet thread and this caught in her chipped fingernail.

“—out of this house!” she raged, flapping her wrist, “and never set foot in it again, with her filthy — ah!” The thread snapped, the thing flew off and landed in a far corner. She turned to go and had one unsteady foot on the first step when she heard the noise behind her.

Later on, when Queen Esther counted them, she reckoned it as twenty-five steps from the broom closet to the bottom of the cellar stairs. At that moment, though, they seemed to last forever as the screams mounted in intensity, each one seeming to overtake the one before it without time or space for breath between. But they ceased as the maid clattered down the steps, almost tripping over the woman crouched at the bottom.

Queen Esther spared she no glance, then, but faced the thing advancing. Her thrust she hand into she bosom. “Poo!” her spat. “You ugly old duppy! Me never fear no duppy, no, not me!”

And her pulled out the powerful obeah prepared for she long ago by Gran’dame Hephsibah, that sagest of old women, half Ashanti, half Coromanti. The duppy growled and driveled and bared its worn-down stumps of filthy teeth, but retreated step by step as her came forward, chanting the words of power; till at last it was shriveled and bound once more in the scarlet thread and stowed safely away in the cigarette tin. Ugly old duppy…!

Mr. Raidy took the sudden death of his wife with stoical calm. His young brother very seldom has nightmares now, and eats heartily of the savory West Indian messes that Queen Esther prepares for all three of them. Hers is the little room in the attic; her chimney passes through one corner of it, and Queen Esther is warm, warm, warm.

The Sources of the Nile INTRODUCTION BY GREGORY FEELEY

By 1960 Avram Davidson had developed his own peculiar mastery of the modern short story, and within ten years he would produce a novel of classic stature, but his work in the “novelette” form — that hybrid category, shorter than the novella that has enjoyed so distinguished a history in American literature yet essentially different from the brief compass of the short story — has been relatively little remarked. To be sure, the (much later) Limekiller and Eszterhazy stories are mostly novelettes, but they possess the peculiar status of stories that form parts of a sequence, and can moreover be seen as variations (in their different ways) on the Vergil Magus figure, which increasingly occupied the last decades of Davidson’s life. The actual novelette, which can retain the concision and urgency of the short story while permitting more complex dramatic development, is a form that the early Davidson rarely used.

When “The Sources of the Nile” appeared in the January, 1961, issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Davidson had written one previous novelette, the unorthodox time-travel fantasy “Take Wooden Indians,” which Galaxy had published a year earlier. The two stories are essentially companion pieces: each is set in a contemporary Manhattan that is satirized with an acute eye; each offers an escape from the world of commercial philistinism into another time. But while the arcadia of “Take Wooden Indians” is the idealized small-town America of the nineteenth century, “The Sources of the Nile” looks rather to the future, a future in which one can escape the banalities of modern fashion only by embracing them. This paradox (the first of several) lies at the heart of Davidson’s story, which is constructed of oppositions — something subtly different and more complex than the contrasts (between a rich past and an impoverished present, for example) that constitute Davidson’s more usual dramatic method.

Don Benedict, the sculptor of “Take Wooden Indians” who yearns to be an artisan laboring in the extinct craft of carving cigar-store Indians, is able to escape the horrors of the modern art world by way of the mysterious Elwell equations; but Bob Rosen, the struggling writer in “The Sources of the Nile,” sees the commercial bonanza implicit in the Bensons’ ability to predict fashions as a means of making his fortune. He is also besotted with the Bensons’ daughter Kitty, with an erotic (and comical) urgency that foretokens his role as betrayed dupe. But Bob Rosen (whom we first see reading an arcane article on “The Demography of the Jackson Whites”) is also enough of a scholar gypsy — though distracted by avarice and lust — to appreciate the Bensons for the wonder they are: the fascination they hold for him is also the fascination they hold for us.

This complexity of motivation — as well as the fact that the faithless Rosen has wronged his girlfriend Noreen as surely as she (later) wrongs him — gives the story a moral core (although one hesitates to apply so sober a term to a work of such comic energy) that is significantly knottier than most of Davidson’s stories dealing with an artist at odds with the workaday world, in which the protagonist tends to get off rather easily (and women rather hard). Even Davidson’s villain, the awful T. Pettys Shadwell (“the most despicable of living men”), seems no worse, save for his appalling style — the perforated business cards being an especially nice touch — than the executives who go baying after Peter Martens’ secret, a pack among which Rosen finds himself. Davidson’s exhilarating comedy, which begins with old Peter Martens cadging the drinks that will kill him and ends in utter defeat and desolation, is humor of the blackest hue.

Davidson considered himself weak in plot construction, and indeed many of his stories constitute a triumph of stylistic virtuosity over structure, but the architecture of “The Sources of the Nile” is nearly perfect. The story is free of expository baggage (compare “Take Wooden Indians,” which betrays an occasionally unsure hand) and exceptionally close-knit: tiny droll elements (such as the talkative blonde in the bar) appear, seemingly as throwaway lines, then later prove crucial to the plot. Davidson’s earlier short stories were largely miniatures, which often revolved around a single dramatic event; his later stories tended toward the picaresque. “The Sources of the Nile” is one of the few works in which Davidson combined the compression of his finest prose with genuine dramatic development.

Davidson’s comic effects work in broad-seeming strokes that are actually quite deft. Joseph Tressling’s fulsome assurances are almost fugal in form: the hearty declaration “What the great cheese-eating American public wants is a story of resolved conflict concerning young contemporary American couples earning more than ten thousand dollars a year” is immediately followed by the antiphonal “But nothing sordid, controversial, outré, or passé”; and variations are played upon both themes for another page, which reach a climax that is immediately capped by the sinister query: “You’re not going to be one of those hungry writers, are you?” References to “the sources of the Nile” and the hackneyed wisdom that comes down from Robert R. Mac Ian are similarly sounded like musical motifs.

But, as with all Davidson, it is the prose we finally remember. Rereading, we note the tiny details: the colloquialisms from the heyday of British imperialism that cluster about the aged Martens, or the various hangover cures that Bob Rosen tries (they include the recipe Jeeves uses on Bertie Wooster). The title of Rosen’s best-known short story is taken from a passage in one of Lincoln’s letters, and even the horrid Shadwell makes a witty reference to The Merchant of Venice. Peter Martens, “glaring at [Bob] with bloody eye,” is both the Ancient Mariner and Dickens’s Magwitch, bestowing a terrible legacy on a chance-met young man. These baroque allusions are set against a series of sharp details concerning life in the Manhattan business world: the issues of Botteghe Oscure (a highbrow literary quarterly published in Rome until 1960), or the passing references to The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and the vogue for books about Aku-Aku, which firmly set Davidson’s tale in the late 1950s. The overheard remarks by a hussy in a bar are a staple of Madison Avenue satires of this period — see William Gaddis’s The Recognitions—but whether Davidson observed this phenomenon himself or encountered it in books (and one should never underestimate the breadth of Davidson’s reading), he makes it seem authentically of its time, unforced, and funny.

In “The Sources of the Nile” the future is presented, for perhaps the only time in Davidson’s work, as something other than a calamity. The (near-term) changes it will bring — soup-bowl haircuts for men, etc. — are, to be sure, utterly arbitrary, but the wealth awaiting those who espy them correctly gives the story a prospective (rather than backward-looking) impulse that is finally cheering. When we last see Bob Rosen, he has made the vanished Bensons his El Dorado, whom he pursues with undiminished ardor like the man who chases the horizon in the Stephen Crane poem. We want to cheer him on.

IT WAS IN THE Rutherford office on Lexington that Bob Rosen met Peter (“Old Pete”—“Sneaky Pete”—“Poor Pete,”: take your pick) Martens for the first and almost last time. One of those tall, cool buildings on Lexington with the tall, cool office girls it was; and because Bob felt quite sure he wasn’t and damned well never was going to be tall or cool enough for him to mean anything to them, he was able to sit back and just enjoy the scenery. Even the magazines on the table were cool: Spectator, Botteghe Oscure, and Journal of the New York State Geographical Society. He picked up the last and began to leaf through “Demographic Study of The Jackson Whites.”

He was trying to make some sense out of a mass of statistics relating to albinism among that curious tribe (descended from Tuscorora Indians, Hessian deserters, London street women, and fugitive slaves), when one of the girls — delightfully tall, deliciously cool — came to usher him in to Tressling’s office. He laid the magazine face down on the low table and followed her. The old man with the portfolio, who was the only other person waiting, got up just then, and Bob noticed the spot of blood in his eye as he passed by. They were prominent eyes, yellowed, reticulated with tiny red veins, and in the corner of one of them was a bright red blot. For a moment it made Rosen feel uneasy, but he had no time then to think about it.

“Delightful story,” said Joe Tressling, referring to the piece which had gotten Rosen the interview, through his agent. The story had won first prize in a contest, and the agent had thought that Tressling…if Tressling…maybe Tressling …

“Of course, we can’t touch it because of the theme,” said Tressling.

“Why, what’s wrong with the Civil War as a theme?” Rosen said.

Tressling smiled. “As far as Aunt Carrie’s Country Cheese is concerned,” he said, “the South won the Civil War. At least, it’s not up to Us to tell Them differently. It might annoy Them. The North doesn’t care. But write another story for us. The Aunt Carrie Hour is always on the lookout for new dramatic material.”

“Like for instance?” Bob Rosen asked.

“What the great cheese-eating American public wants is a story of resolved conflict concerning young contemporary American couples earning over ten thousand dollars a year. But nothing sordid, controversial, outré, or passé.”

Rosen was pleased to be able to see Joseph Tressling, who was the J. Oscar Rutherford Company’s man in charge of scripts for the Aunt Carrie Hour. The Mené Mené of the short story was said that year to be on the wall, the magazines were dying like mayflies, and the sensible thing for anyone to do who hoped to make a living writing (he told himself) was to get into television. But he really didn’t expect he was going to make the transition, and the realization that he didn’t really know any contemporary Americans — young, old, married, single — who were earning over ten thousand dollars a year seemed to prophesy that he was never going to earn it himself.

“And nothing avant-garde,” said Tressling.

The young woman returned and smiled a tall, cool smile at them. Tressling got up. So did Bob. “Mr. Martens is still outside,” she murmured.

“Oh, I’m afraid I won’t be able to see him today,” said Joe Tressling. “Mr. Rosen has been so fascinating that the time seems to have run over, and then some… Great old boy,” he said, smiling at Bob and shaking his hand. “Really one of the veterans of advertising, you know. Used to write copy for Mrs. Winslow’ Soothing Syrup. Tells some fascinating yarns. Too bad I haven’t the time to listen. I expect to see you back here soon, Mr. Rosen,” he said, still holding Bob’s hand as they walked to the door, “with another one of your lovely stories. One that we can feel delighted to buy. No costume dramas, no foreign settings, nothing outré, passé, or avant-garde, and above all — nothing controversial or sordid. You’re not going to be one of those hungry writers, are you?”

Even before he answered, Rosen observed Tressling’s eyes dismiss him; and he resolved to start work immediately on an outré, controversial, sordid costume drama with a foreign setting, etc., if it killed him.

He made the wrong turn for the elevator and on coming back he came face to face with the old man. “‘Demography of the Jackson Whites’,” the old man said, feigning amazement. “What do you care about those poor suckers for? They don’t buy, they don’t sell, they don’t start fashion, they don’t follow fashion. Just poach, fornicate, and produce oh-point-four hydrocephalic albinoes per hundred. Or something.”

The elevator came and they got in together. The old man stared at him, his yellow-bloody eye like a fertilized egg. “Not that I blame them,” he went on. “If I’d had any sense I’d’ve become a Jackson White instead of an advertising man. The least you can do,” he said, without any transition, “is to buy me a drink. Since Truthful Tressling blames it onto you that he can’t see me, the lying bugger. Why, for crying out loud!” he cried. “What I’ve got here in this little old portfolio — why, it’s worth more to those men on Madison, Lexington, Park — if they only—”

“Let me buy you a drink,” said Rosen, resignedly. The streets were hot, and he hoped the bar would be cool.

“A ball of Bushmill,” said old Peter Martens.

The bar was cool. Bob had stopped listening to his guest’s monologue about what he had in his little old portfolio (something about spotting fashion trends way in advance) and had begun talking about his own concerns. By and by the old man, who was experienced beyond the norm in not being listened to, had begun to listen to him.

“This was when everybody was reading Aku-Aku,” Bob said. “So I thought for sure that mine would go over good because it was about Rapa Nui — Easter Island — and Peruvian blackbirders and hints of great legends of the past and all that.”

“And?”

“And it didn’t. The publisher, the only one who showed any interest at all, I mean, that publisher, he said he liked the writing but the public wouldn’t buy it. He advised me to study carefully the other paperbacks on the stands. See what they’re like, go thou and do likewise. So I did. You know the stuff. On even-numbered pages the heroine gets her brassiere ripped off while she cries, ‘Yes! Yes! Now! Oh!’”

He was not aware of signalling, but from time to time a hand appeared and renewed their glasses. Old Martens asked, “Does she cry ‘rapturously’—or ‘joyously’?”

“Rapturously and joyously. What’s the matter, you think she’s frigid?”

Martens perished the thought. At a nearby table a large blonde said, lugubriously, “You know, Harold, it’s a lucky thing the Good Lord didn’t give me any children or I would of wasted my life on them like I did on my rotten step-children.” Martens asked what happened on the odd-numbered children.

“I mean, ‘pages’,” he corrected himself, after a moment.

The right side of Bob Rosen’s face was going numb. The left side started tingling. He interrupted a little tune he was humming and said, “Oh, the equation is invariable: On odd-numbered pages the hero either clonks some bastard bloodily on the noggin with a roscoe, or kicks him in the collions and then clonks him, or else he’s engaged — with his shirt off, you’re not allowed to say what gives with the pants, which are so much more important: presumably they melt or something — he’s engaged, shirtless, in arching his lean and muscular flanks over some bimbo, not the heroine, because these aren’t her pages, some other female in whose pelvis he reads strange mysteries …” He was silent for a moment, brooding.

“How could it fail, then?” asked the old man, in his husky voice. “I’ve seen the public taste change, let me tell you, my boy, from A Girl of the Limberlost (which was so pure that nuns could read it) to stuff which makes stevedores blench: so I am moved to inquire, How could the work you are describing to me fail?”

The young man shrugged. “The nuns were making a come-back. Movies about nuns, books about nuns, nuns on TV, westerns… So the publisher said public taste had changed, and could I maybe do him a life of St. Teresa?”

“Coo.”

“So I spent three months doing a life of St. Teresa at a furious pace, and when I finished it turned out I’d done the wrong saint. The simple slob had no idea there was any more than one of the name, and I never thought to ask did he mean the Spanish St. Teresa or the French one? D’Avila or The Little Flower?”

“Saints preserve us… Say, do you know that wonderful old Irish toast? ‘Here’s to the Council of Trent, that put the fasting on the meat and not on the drink’?”

Bob gestured to the barkeeper. “But I didn’t understand why if one St. Teresa could be sold, the other one couldn’t. So I tried another publisher, and all he said was, public taste had changed, and could I do him anything with a background of juvenile delinquency? After that I took a job for a while selling frozen custard in a penny arcade and all my friends said, BOB! You with your talent? How COULD you?”

The large blonde put down a jungle-green drink and looked at her companion. “What you mean, they love me? If they love me why are they going to Connecticut? You don’t go to Connecticut if you love a person,” she pointed out.

Old Martens cleared his throat. “My suggestion would be that you combine all three of your mysteriously unsalable novels. The hero sails on a Peruvian blackbirder to raid Easter Island, the inhabitants whereof he kicks in the collions, if male, or arches his loins over, if female; until he gets converted by a vision of both St. Teresas who tell him their life stories — as a result of which he takes a job selling frozen custard in a penny arcade in order to help the juvenile delinquents who frequent the place.”

Bob grunted. “Depend on it, with my luck I would get it down just in time to see public taste change again. The publishers would want a pocket treasury of the McGuffey Readers, or else the memoirs of Constantine Porphyrogenitos. I could freeze my arse climbing the Himalayas only to descend, manuscript in hand, to find everybody on Publishers’ Row vicariously donning goggles and spearing fish on the bottom of the Erythrean Sea… Only thing is, I never was sure to what degree public taste changed by itself or how big a part the publishers play in changing it…”

The air, cool though he knew it was, seemed to shimmer in front of him, and through the shimmer he saw Peter Martens sitting up straight and leaning over at him, his seamed and ancient face suddenly eager and alive. “And would you like to be sure?” old Martens asked. “Would you like to be able to know, really to know?”

“What? How?” Bob was startled. The old man’s eye looked almost all blood by now.

“Because,” Martens said, “I can tell you what. I can tell you how. Nobody else. Only me. And not just about books, about everything. Because—”

There was an odd sort of noise, like the distant sussuration of wind in dry grass, and Rosen looked around and he saw that a man was standing by them and laughing. This man wore a pale brown suit and had a pale brown complexion, he was very tall and very thin and had a very small head and slouched somewhat. He looked like a mantis, and a mustache like an inverted V was cropped out of the broad blue surface of his upper lip.

“Still dreaming your dreams, Martens?” this man asked, still wheezing his dry whispery laugh. “Gates of Horn, or Gates of Ivory?”

“Get the Hell away from me, Shadwell,” said Martens.

Shadwell turned his tiny little head to Rosen and grinned. “He been telling you about how he worked on old Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup Account? Too bad the Harrison Narcotics killed that business! He tell you how he worked on the old Sapolio account. The old Stanley Steamer account?” (“Shove off, Shadwell,” Martens ordered, planting his elbows in the table and opening his mouth at Bob again.) “Or has he been muttering away like an old Zambezi hand who claims to know the location of the Elephants’ Graveyard? Tell me, where is fashion bred?” he intoned. “In the bottle — or in Martens’ head?”

Martens’ head, thinly covered with yellowish-white hair, jerked in the direction of the new arrival. “This, my boy, is T. Pettys Shadwell, the most despicable of living men. He runs — out of his pocket, because no one will sell him a hat on credit — he runs a so-called market research business. Though who in blazes would hire him since Polly Adler went respectable beats the Hell out of me. I’m warning you, Shadwell,” he said, “take off. I’ve had my fill of you. I’m not giving you any more information.” And with a further graphic description of what else he would not give T. Pettys Shadwell if the latter was dying of thirst, he folded his arms and fell silent.

The most despicable of living men chuckled, poked a bone-thin hand into a pocket, plucked out a packet of white flaps of cardboard, one of which he tore along a perforated line and handed to Bob. “My card, sir. My operation, true, is not large, but it is Ever Growing. Don’t take Mr. Martens too seriously. And don’t buy him too many drinks. His health is not as good as it used to be — and then, it never was.” And with a final laugh, like the rustling of dried corn-shucks, he angled away.

Martens sighed, lapped the last few dewy drops of Bushmill’s off a molten ice-cube. “I live in mortal fear that some day I’ll have the money to buy all the booze I want and wake up finding I have spilled the beans to that cockatrice who just walked out. Can you imagine anyone having business cards printed to be torn off of perforated pads? Keeps them from getting loose and wrinkled, is his reason. Such a man has no right, under natural or civil law, to live.”

In the buzzing coolness of the barroom Bob Rosen tried to catch hold of a thought which was coyly hiding behind a corner in his mind. His mind otherwise, he felt, was lucid as never before. But somehow he lost the thought, found he was telling himself a funny story in French and — although he had never got more than an 80 in the course, back in high school — marvelled at the purity of his accent and then chuckled at the punch-line.

“‘Never mind about black neglijays,’” the stout blonde was saying. “‘If you want to keep your husband’s affections,’ I said to her, ‘then listen to me—”

The errant thought came trotting back for reasons of its own, and jumped into Bob’s lap. “‘Spill the beans’?” he quoted, questioningly. “Spill what beans? To Shadwell, I mean.”

“Most despicable of living men,” said old Martens, mechanically. Then a most curious expression washed over his antique countenance: proud, cunning, fearful …

“Would you like to know the sources of the Nile?” he asked. “Would you?”

“‘Let him go to Maine,’ I said. ‘Let him paint rocks all day,’ I said. ‘Only for Heaven’s sake, keep him the Hell off of Fire Island,’ I said. And was I right, Harold?” demanded the large blonde.

Pete Martens was whispering something, Bob realized. By the look on his face it must have been important, so the young man tried to hear the words over the buzzing, and thought to himself in a fuddled fashion that they ought to be taken down on a steno pad, or something of that sort…want to know, really know, where it begins and how, and how often? But no; what do I know? For years I’ve been Clara the rotten step-mother, and now I’m Clara the rotten mother-in-law. Are there such in every generation? Must be…known for years…known for years…only, Who? — and Where? — searched and sought, like Livingston and all the others searching and seeking, enduring privation, looking for the sources of the Nile …

Someone, it must have been Clara, gave a long, shuddering cry; and then for a while there was nothing but the buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, in Bob Rosen’s head; while old Martens lolled back in the chair, regarding him silently and sardonically with his blood-red eye, over which the lid slowly, slowly drooped: but old Martens never said a word more.

It was one genuine horror of a hangover, subsiding slowly under (or perhaps despite) every remedy Bob’s aching brain could think of: black coffee, strong tea, chocolate milk, raw-egg-red-pepper-worcestershire sauce. At least, he thought gratefully after a while, he was spared the dry heaves. At least he had all the fixings in his apartment and didn’t have to go out. It was a pivotal neighborhood, and he lived right in the pivot, a block where lox and bagels beat a slow retreat before the advance of hog maw and chitterlings on the one hand and bodegas, comidas criollas, on the other; swarms of noisy kids running between the trucks and buses, the jackhammers forever wounding the streets.

It took him a moment to realize that the noise he was hearing now was not the muffled echo of the drills, but a tapping on his door. Unsteadily, he tottered over and opened it. He would have been not in the least surprised to find a raven there, but instead it was a tall man, rather stooping, with a tiny head, hands folded mantis-like at his bosom.

After a few dry, futile clickings, Bob’s throat essayed the name “Shadburn?”

“Shadwell,” he was corrected, softly. “T. Pettys Shadwell… I’m afraid you’re not well, Mr. Rosen …”

Bob clutched the doorpost, moaned softly. Shadwell’s hands unfolded, revealed — not a smaller man at whom he’d been nibbling, but a paper bag, soon opened.

“…so I thought I’d take the liberty of bringing you some hot chicken broth.”

It was gratefully warm, had both body and savor. Bob lapped at it, croaked his thanks. “Not at all, not-a-tall,” Shadwell waved. “Glad to be of some small help.” A silence fell, relieved only by weak, gulping noises. “Too bad about old Martens. Of course, he was old. Still, a shocking thing to happen to you. A stroke, I’m told. I, uh, trust the police gave you no trouble?”

A wave of mild strength seemed to flow into Bob from the hot broth. “No, they were very nice,” he said. “The sergeant called me, ‘Son.’ They brought me back here.”

“Ah.” Shadwell was reflective. “He had no family. I know that for a fact.”

“Mmm.”

“But — assume he left a few dollars. Unlikely, but — And assume he’d willed the few dollars to someone or some charity, perhaps. Never mind. Doesn’t concern us. He wouldn’t bother to will his papers…scrapbooks of old copy he’d written, so forth. That’s of no interest to people in general. Just be thrown out or burned. But it would be of interest to me. I mean, I’ve been in advertising all my life, you know. Oh, yes. Used to distribute handbills when I was a boy. Fact.”

Bob tried to visualize T. Pettys Shadwell as a boy, failed, drank soup. “Good soup” he said. “Thanks. Very kind of you.”

Shadwell urged him strongly not to mention it. He chuckled. “Old Pete used to lug around some of the darndest stuff in that portfolio of his,” he said. “In fact, some of it referred to a scheme we were once trying to work out together. Nothing came of it, however, and the old fellow was inclined to be a bit testy about that, still — I believe you’d find it interesting. May I show you?”

Bob still felt rotten, but the death wish had departed. “Sure,” he said. Shadwell looked around the room, then at Bob, expectantly. After a minute he said, “Where is it?” “Where is what?” “The portfolio. Old Martens’.”

They stared at each other. The phone rang. With a wince and a groan, Bob answered. It was Noreen, a girl with pretensions to stagecraft and literature, with whom he had been furtively lecherous on an off-and-on basis, the off periods’ commencements being signaled by the presence in Noreen’s apartment of Noreen’s mother, (knitting, middleclass morality and all) when Bob came, intent on venery.

“I’ve got a terrible hangover,” he said, answering her first (guarded and conventional) question; “and the place is a mess.”

“See what happens if I turn my back on you for a minute?” Noreen clucked, happily. “Luckily, I have neither work nor social obligations planned for the day, so I’ll be right over.”

Bob said, “Crazy!”, hung up, and turned to face Shadwell, who had been nibbling the tips of his prehensile fingers. “Thanks for the soup,” he said, in tones of some finality.

“But the portfolio?” “I haven’t got it.” “It was leaning against the old man’s chair when I saw the two of you in the bar.” “Then maybe it’s still in the bar. Or in the hospital. Or maybe the cops have it. But—” “It isn’t. They don’t.” “But I haven’t got it. Honest, Mr. Shadwell, I appreciate the soup, but I don’t know where the Hell—”

Shadwell rubbed his tiny, sharp mustache, like a Δ-mark pointing to his tiny, sharp nose. He rose. “This is really too bad. Those papers referring to the business old Peter and I had been mutually engaged in — really, I have as much right to them as… But look here. Perhaps he may have spoken to you about it. He always did when he’d been drinking and usually did even when he wasn’t. What he liked to refer to as, ‘The sources of the Nile’? Hmm?” The phrase climbed the belfry and rang bells audible, or at least apparent, to Shadwell. He seemed to leap forward, long fingers resting on Bob’s shoulders.

“You do know what I mean. Look. You: Are a writer. The old man’s ideas aren’t in your line. I: Am an advertising man. They are in my line. For the contents of his portfolio — as I’ve explained, they are rightfully mine — I will give: One thousand: Dollars. In fact: For the opportunity of merely looking through it: I will give: One hundred. Dollars.”

As Bob reflected that his last check had been for $17.72 (Monegasque rights to a detective story), and as he heard these vasty sums bandied about, his eyes grew large, and he strove hard to recall what the Hell had happened to the portfolio — but in vain.

Shadwell’s dry, whispery voice took on a pleading note. “I’m even willing to pay you for the privilege of discussing your conversation with the old f — the old gentleman. Here—” And he reached into his pocket. Bob wavered. Then he recalled that Noreen was even now on her way uptown and crosstown, doubtless bearing with her, as usual, in addition to her own taut charms, various tokens of exotic victualry to which she — turning her back on the veal chops and green peas of childhood and suburbia — was given: such as Shashlik makings, lokoumi, wines of the warm south, baklava, provalone, and other living witnesses to the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.

Various hungers, thus stimulated, began to rise and clamor, and he steeled himself against Shadwell’s possibly unethical and certainly inconveniently timed offers.

“Not now,” he said. Then, throwing delicacy to the winds, “I’m expecting a girl friend. Beat it. Another time.”

Annoyance and chagrin on Shadwell’s small face, succeeded by an exceedingly disgusting leer. “Why, of course,” he said. “Another time? Certainly. My card—” He hauled out the perforated pack. “I already got one,” Bob said. “Goodbye.”

He made haste to throw off the noisome clothes in which he had been first hot, then drunk, then comatose; to take a shower, comb his mouse-colored hair, shave the pink bristles whose odious tint alone prevented him from growing a beard, to spray and anoint himself with various nostra which T. Pettys Shadwell’s more successful colleagues in advertising had convinced him (by a thousand ways, both blunt and subtle) were essential to his acceptance by good society; then to dress and await with unconcealed anticipation the advent of the unchaste Noreen.

She came, she kissed him, she prepared food for him: ancient duties of women, any neglect of which is a sure and certain sign of cultural decadence and retrogression. Then she read everything he had written since their last juncture, and here she had some fault to find.

“You waste too much time at the beginning, in description,” she said, with the certainty possible to those who have never sold a single manuscript. “You’ve got to make your characters come alive—in the very first sentence.”

“‘Marley was dead, to begin with,’” muttered Bob.

“What?” murmured Noreen, vaguely, feigning not to hear. Her eye, avoiding lover boy, lit on something else. “What’s this?” she asked. “You have so much money you just leave it lying around? I thought you said you were broke.” And Bob followed her pointing and encarnadined fingertip to where lay two crisp twenty-dollar bills, folded lengthwise, on the table next the door.

“Shadwell!” he said, instantly. And, in response to her arched brows (which would have looked much better unplucked, but who can what will away?), he said, “A real rat of a guy — a louse, a boor — who had some crumby proposal.”

“And who also has,” said Noreen, going straight to the heart of the matter, “money.” Bob resolved never to introduce the two of them, if he could help it. “Anyway,” she continued, laying aside Bob’s manuscript, “now you can take me out somewhere.” Feebly he argued the food then cooking; she turned off the gas and thrust the pots incontinently into the ice-box, rose, and indicated she was now ready to leave. He had other objections to leaving just then, which it would have been impolitic to mention, for in Noreen’s scheme of morality each episode of passion was a sealed incident once it was over, and constituted no promise of any other yet to come.

With resignation tempered by the reflection that Shadwell’s four sawbucks couldn’t last forever, and that there was never so long-drawn-out an evening but would wind up eventually back in his apartment, Bob accompanied her out the door.

And so it was. The next day, following Noreen’s departure in mid-morning, found Bob in excellent spirits but flat-broke. He was reviewing the possibilities of getting an advance from his agent, Stuart Emmanuel, a tiny, dapper man whose eyes behind double lenses were like great black shoebuttons, when the phone rang. ESP or no ESP, it was Stuart himself, with an invitation to lunch.

“I’m glad some of your clients are making money,” said Bob, most ungraciously.

“Oh, it’s not my money,” said Stuart. “It’s J. Oscar Rutherford’s. One of his top men — no, it’s not Joe Tressling, I know you saw him the day before yesterday, yes, I know nothing came of it, this is a different fellow altogether. Phillips Anhalt. I want you to come.”

So Bob left yesterday’s half-cooked chow in the ice-box and, very little loath, set out to meet Stuart and Phillips Anhalt, of whom he had never heard before. The first rendezvous was for a drink at a bar whose name also meant nothing to him, though as soon as he walked in he recognized it as the one where he had been the day before yesterday, and this made him uneasy — doubly so, for he had callously almost forgotten what had had happened there. The bartender, it was at once evident, had not. His wary glance at the three of them must have convinced him that they were reasonably good insurance risks, however, for he made no comment.

Anhalt was a middle-sized man with a rather sweet and slightly baffled face and iron-gray haircut en brosse. “I enjoyed your story very much,” he told Bob — thus breaking in at once upon the shallow slumber of the little scold who boarded in Bob’s Writer’s Consciousness. Of course (it shrilled) I know exactly the one you mean, after all, I’ve written only one story in my entire life so “your story” is the only identification it needs. I liked your novel, Mr. Hemingway. I enjoyed your play, Mr. Kaufman.

Stuart Emmanuel, who knew the labyrinthine ways of writers’ mind as he knew the figures in his bank statement, said smoothly, “I expect Mr. Anhalt refers to Unvexed to the Sea.”

With firm politeness Mr. Anhalt disappointed this expectation. “I know that’s the prize-winner,” he said, “and I mean to read it, but the one I referred to was The Green Wall.” Now, as it happened this very short little story had been bounced thirteen times before its purchase for a negligible sum by a low-grade salvage market of a magazine; but it was one of Bob’s favorites. He smiled at Phillips Anhalt, Anhalt smiled at him, Stuart beamed and ordered drinks.

The waiter passed a folded slip of paper to Bob Rosen when he came with the popskull. “The lady left it,” he said. “What lady?” “The blond lady.” Agent and ad man smiled, made appropriate remarks while Bob scanned the note, recognized it as being in his own handwriting, failed to make it out, crammed it in his pocket.

“Mr. Anhalt,” said Stuart, turning dark, large-pupiled eyes on his client, “is a very important man at Rutherford’s: he has a corner office.” A gentle, somewhat tired smile from Anhalt, who gave the conversation a turn and talked about his home in Darien, and the work he was doing on it, by himself. Thus they got through the round of drinks, then walked a few blocks to the restaurant.

Here Bob was infinitely relieved that Anhalt did not order poached egg on creamed spinach, corned beef hash, or something equally simple, wholesome, and disgusting, and tending to inhibit Bob’s own wide-ranging tastes: Anhalt ordered duckling, Stuart had mutton chops, and Bob chose tripe and onions.

“Joe Tressling tells me that you’re going to write something for the cheese show,” said Anhalt, as they disarranged the pickle plate. Bob half-lifted his eyebrows, smiled. Stuart gazed broodingly into the innards of a sour tomato as if he might be saying to himself, “Ten percent of $17.72, Monegasque rights to a detective story.”

“More cheese is being eaten today in the United States than twenty-five years ago,” Anhalt continued. “Much, much more… Is it the result of advertising? Such as the Aunt Carrie Hour? Has that changed public taste? Or — has public taste changed for, say, other reasons, and are we just riding the wave?”

“The man who could have answered that question,” Bob said, “died the day before yesterday.”

Anhalt let out his breath. “How do you know he could have?”

“He said so.”

Anhalt, who’d had a half-eaten dilled cucumber in his hand, carefully laid it in the ash-tray, and leaned forward. “What else did he say? Old Martens, I mean. You do mean Old Martens, don’t you?”

Bob said that was right, and added, with unintentional untruthfulness, that he’d been offered a thousand dollars for that information, and had turned it down. Before he could correct himself, Anhalt, customary faint pink face gone almost red, and Stuart Emmanuel, eyes glittering hugely, said with one voice, “Who offered—?”

“What comes out of a chimney?”

Stuart, recovering first (Anhalt continued to stare, said nothing, while the color receded), said, “Bob, this is not a joke. That is the reason we have this appointment. An awful lot of money is involved — for you, for me, for Phil Anhalt, for, well, for everybody. For just everybody. So—”

It slipped out. “For T. Pettys Shadwell?” Bob asked.

The effect, as they used to say in pre-atomic days, was electrical. Stuart made a noise, between a moan and a hiss, rather like a man who, having trustingly lowered his breeches, sits all unawares upon an icicle. He clutched Bob’s hand. “You didn’t godforbid sign anything?” he wailed. Anhalt, who had gone red before, went white this time around, but still retained diffidence enough to place his hand merely upon Bob’s jacket cuff.

“He’s a cad!” he said, in trembling tones. “A swine, Mr. Rosen!”

“‘The most despicable of living men’,” quoted Mr. Rosen. (“Exactly,” said Anhalt.)

“Bob, you didn’t sign anything, godforbid?”

“No. No. No. But I feel as if I’ve had all the mystery I intend to have. And unless I get Information, why, gents, I shan’t undo one button.” The waiter arrived with the food and, according to the rules and customs of the Waiters’ Union, gave everybody the wrong orders. When this was straightened out, Stuart said, confidently, “Why, of course, Bob: Information: Why, certainly. There is nothing to conceal. Not from you,” he said, chuckling. “Go ahead, start eating. I’ll eat and talk, you just eat and listen.”

And so, as he tucked away the tripe and onions, Bob heard Stuart recount, through a slight barrier of masticated mutton-chop, a most astonishing tale. In every generation (Stuart said) there were leaders of fashion, arbiters of style. At Nero’s court, Petronius. In Regency England, Beau Brummel. At present and for some time past, everyone knew about the Paris designers and their influence. And in the literary field (“Ahah!” muttered Bob, staring darkly at his forkful of stewed ox-paunch) — in the literary field, said Stuart, swallowing in haste for greater clarity, they all knew what effect a review by any one of A Certain Few Names, on the front page of the Sunday Times book section, could have upon the work of even an absolute unknown.

“It will sky-rocket it to Fame and Fortune with the speed of light,” said Stuart.

“Come to the point.” But Stuart, now grinding away on a chunk of grilled sheep, could only gurgle, wave his fork, and raise his eyebrows. Anhalt stopped his moody task of reducing the duckling to a mass of orange-flavored fibres, and turned to take the words, as it were, from Stuart’s mutton-filled mouth.

“The point, Mr. Rosen, is that poor old Martens went up and down Madison Avenue for years claiming he had found a way of predicting fashions and styles, and nobody believed him. Frankly, I didn’t. But I do now. What caused me to change my mind was this: When I heard, day before yesterday, that he had died so suddenly, I had a feeling that I had something of his, something that he’d left for me to look at once, something I’d taken just to get rid of him. And, oh, perhaps I was feeling a bit guilty, certainly a bit sorry, so I asked my secretary to get it for me. Well, you know, with the J. Oscar Rutherford people, as with Nature, nothing is ever lost—” Phillips Anhalt smiled his rather shy, rather sweet and slightly baffled smile—“so she got it for me and I took a look at it… I was …” he paused, hesitated for mot juste.

Stuart, with a masterful swallow, leaped into the breach, claymore in hand. “He was flabbergasted!”

Astounded, amended Anhalt. He was astounded.

There, in an envelope addressed to Peter Martens, and postmarked November 10, 1945, was a color snapshot of a young man wearing a fancy weskit.

“Now, you know, Mr. Rosen, no one in 1945 was wearing fancy weskits. They didn’t come in till some years later. How did Martens know they were going to come in? And there was another snapshot of a young man in a charcoal suit and a pink shirt. Nobody was wearing that outfit in ’45… I checked the records, you see, and the old gentleman had left the things for me in December of that year. I’m ashamed to say that I had the receptionist put him off when he called again… But just think of it: fancy weskits, charcoal suits, pink shirts, in 1945.” He brooded. Bob asked if there was anything about gray flannel suits in the envelope, and Anhalt smiled a faint and fleeting smile.

“Ah, Bob, now, Bob,” Stuart pursed his mouth in mild (and greasy) reproof. “You still don’t seem to realize that this is S*E*R*I*O*U*S*.”

“Indeed it is,” said P. Anhalt. “As soon as I told Mac about it, do you know what he said, Stu? He said, ‘Phil, don’t spare the horses.’” And they nodded soberly, as those who have received wisdom from on high.

“Who,” Bob asked, “is Mac?”

Shocked looks. Mac, he was told, the older men speaking both tandem and au pair, was Robert R. Mac Ian, head of the happy J. Oscar Rutherford corporate family.

“Of course, Phil,” Stuart observed, picking slyly at his baked potato, “I won’t ask why it took you till this morning to get in touch with me. With some other outfit, I might maybe suspect that they were trying to see what they could locate for themselves without having to cut our boy, here, in for a slice of the pie. He being the old man’s confidante and moral heir, anyway, so to speak.” (Bob stared at this description, said nothing. Let the thing develop as far at it would by itself, he reflected.) “But not the Rutherford outfit. It’s too big, too ethical, for things like that.” Anhalt didn’t answer.

After a second, Stuart went on, “Yes, Bob, this is really something big. If the late old Mr. Martens’ ideas can be successfully developed — and I’m sure Phil, here will not expect you to divulge until we are ready to talk Terms — they will be really invaluable to people like manufacturers, fashion editors, designers, merchants, and, last but not least — advertising men. Fortunes can literally be made, and saved. No wonder that a dirty dog like this guy Shadwell is trying to horn in on it. Why, listen — but I’m afraid we’ll have to terminate this enchanting conversation. Bob has to go home and get the material in order—” (What material? Bob wondered. Oh, well, so far: $40 from Shadwell and a free lunch from Anhalt.)—“and you and I, Phil, will discuss those horses Mac said not to spare.”

Anhalt nodded. It seemed obvious to Rosen that the ad man was unhappy, unhappy about having given Peter Martens the brush-off while he was alive, unhappy about being numbered among the vultures now that he was dead. And, so thinking, Bob realized with more than a touch of shame, that he himself was now numbered among the vultures; and he asked about funeral arrangements. But it seemed that the Masonic order was taking care of that: the late Peter Martens was already on his way back to his native town of Marietta, Ohio, where his lodge brothers would give him a formal farewell: aprons, sprigs of acacia, and all the ritual appurtenances. And Bob thought, why not? And was feeling somehow, very much relieved.

On the uptown bus which he had chosen over the swifter, hotter, dingier subway, he tried to collect his thoughts. What on earth could he ever hope to remember about a drunken conversation, which would make any sense to anybody, let alone be worth money? “The Sources of the Nile,” the old man had said, glaring at him with bloody eye. Well, Shadwell knew the phrase, too. Maybe Shadwell knew what it meant, exactly what it meant, because he, Bob Rosen, sure as Hell didn’t. But the phrase did catch at the imagination. Martens had spent years — who knew how many? — seeking the sources of his particular Nile, the great river of fashion, as Mungo Park, Livingstone, Speke, and other half-forgotten explorers, had spent years in search of theirs. They had all endured privation, anguish, rebuffs, hostility…and in the end, just as the quest had killed Mungo Park, Livingstone, Speke, the other quest had killed old Peter Martens.

But, aside from insisting that there was a source or sources, and that he knew where, what had Peter said? Why hadn’t Bob stayed sober? Probably that fat blonde at the next table, she of the poisonously green drink and the rotten step-children, probably she retained more of the old man’s tale, picked up by intertable osmosis, than did Bob himself.

And with that he heard the voice of the waiter at the bar that noon: The lady left it … What lady? … The blond lady … Bob scrabbled in his pocket and came up with the note. On the sweaty, crumpled bit of paper, scrawled in his own writing, or a cruel semblance of it, he read: Ditx sags su Bimsoh oh—

“What the Hell!” he muttered, and fell to, with furrowed face, to make out what evidently owed more to Bushmill’s than to Everhard Faber. At length he decided that the note read, Peter says, see Bensons on Purchase Place, the Bronx, if I don’t believe him. Peter says, write it down.

“It must mean something,” he said, half-aloud, staring absently from Fifth Avenue to Central Park, as the bus roared and rattled between opulence and greenery. “It has to mean something.”

“Well, what a shame,” said Mr. Benson. “But how nice it was of you to come and tell us.” His wavy-gray hair was cut evenly around in soupbowl style, and as there was no white skin at the back of his neck, had evidently been so cut for some time. “Would you like some iced tea?”

“Still, he Went Quickly,” said Mrs. Benson, who, at the business of being a woman, was in rather a large way of business. “I don’t think there’s any iced tea, Daddy. When I have to go, that’s the way I want to go. Lemonade, maybe?”

“There isn’t any lemonade if what Kitty was drinking was the last of the lemonade. The Masons give you a nice funeral. A real nice funeral. I used to think about joining up, but I never seem to get around to it. I think there’s some gin. Isn’t there some gin, Mommy? How about a nice cool glass of gin-and-cider, Bob? Kit will make us some, by and by.”

Bob said, softly, that that sounded nice. He sat half-sunken in a canvas chair in the large, cool living-room. A quarter of an hour ago, having found out with little difficulty which house on Purchase Place was the Bensons’, he had approached with something close to fear and trembling. Certainly, he had been sweating in profusion. The not-too-recently painted wooden house was just a blind, he told himself. Inside there would be banks of noiseless machines into which cards were fed and from which tapes rolled in smooth continuity. And a large, broad-shouldered young man whose hair was cut so close to the skull that the scars underneath were plain to see, this young man would bar Bob’s way and, with cold, calm, confidence, say, “Yes?”

“Er, um, Mr. Martens told me to see Mr. Benson.”

“There is no Mr. Martens connected with our organization and Mr. Benson had gone to Washington. I’m afraid you can’t come in: everything here is Classified.”

And Bob would slink away, feeling Shoulders’ scornful glance in the small of his shrinking, sweaty back.

But it hadn’t been like that at all. Not anything like that at all.

Mr. Benson waved an envelope at Bob. “Here’s a connivo, if you like,” he said. “Fooled I don’t know how many honest collectors, and dealers, too: Prince Abu-Somebody flies over here from Pseudo-Arabia without an expense account. Gets in with some crooked dealers, I could name them, but I won’t, prints off this en — tire issue of airmails, precancelled. Made a mint. Flies back to Pseudo-Arabia, whomp! they cut off his head!” And he chuckled richly at the thought of this prompt and summary vengeance. Plainly, in Mr. Benson’s eyes, it had been done in the name of philatelic ethics; no considerations of dynastic intrigues among the petrol pashas entered his mind.

“Kitty, are you going to make us some cold drinks?” Mrs. B. inquired. “Poor old Pete, he used to be here for Sunday dinner on and off, oh, for just years. Is that Bentley coming?”

Bob just sat and sucked in the coolness and the calm and stared at Kitty. Kitty had a tiny stencil cut in the design of a star and she was carefully lacquering her toenails with it. He could hardly believe she was for real. “Ethereal” was the word for her beauty, and “ethereal” was the only word for it. Long, long hair of an indescribable gold fell over her heart-shaped face as she bent forward towards each perfectly formed toe. And she was wearing a dress like that of a child in a Kate Greenaway book.

“Oh, Bentley,” said B., Senior. “What do you think has happened? Uncle Peter Martens passed away, all of a sudden, day before yesterday, and this gentleman is a friend of his and came to tell us about it; isn’t that thoughtful?”

Bentley said, “Ahhh.” Bentley was a mid-teener who wore jeans cut off at the knees and sneakers with the toes, insteps, and heels removed. He was naked to the waist and across his suntanned and hairless chest, in a neat curve commencing just over his left nipple and terminating just under his right nipple, was the word VIPERS stenciled in red paint.

“Ahhh,” said Bentley Benson. “Any pepsies?”

“Well, I’d asked you to bring some,” his mother said, mildly. “Make a nice, big pitcher of gin-and-cider, Bentley, please, but only a little gin for yourself, in a separate glass, remember, now.” Bentley said, “Ahhh,” and departed, scratching on his chest right over the bright, red S.

Bob’s relaxed gaze took in, one by one, the pictures in the mantelpiece. He sat up a bit, pointed. “Who is that?” he asked. The young man looked something like Bentley and something like Bentley’s father.

“That’s my oldest boy, Barton, Junior,” said Mother B. “You see that nice vest he’s wearing? Well, right after the War, Bart, he was in the Navy then, picked up a piece of lovely brocade over in Japan, and he sent it back home. I thought of making a nice bed-jacket out of it, but there wasn’t enough material. So I made it into a nice vest, instead. Poor old Uncle Peter, he liked that vest, took a picture of Bart in it. Well, what do you know, a few years later fancy vests became quite popular, and, of course, by that time Bart was tired of his (“Of course,” Bob murmured), so he sold it to a college boy who had a summer job at Little and Harpey’s. Got $25 for it, and we all went out to dinner down town that night.”

Kitty delicately stenciled another star on her toenails.

“I see,” Bob said. After a moment, “Little and Harpey’s?” he repeated.

Yes, that same. The publishers. Bart, and his younger brother Alton, were publishers’ readers. Alt had been with Little and Harpey but was now with Scribbley’s Sons; Bart had worked for Scribbley’s at one time, too. “They’ve been with all the biggest publishing houses,” their mother said, proudly. “Oh, they aren’t any of your stick-in-the-muds, no sirree.” Her hands had been fiddling with a piece of bright cloth, and then, suddenly, cloth and hands went up to her head, her fingers flashed, and — complete, perfect — she was wearing an intricately folded turban.

Bentley came in carrying a pitcher of drink in one hand and five glasses — one to each finger — in the other. “I told you to mix yours separately, I think,” his mother said. Taking no notice of her youngest’s Ahhh, she turned to Bob. “I have a whole basket of these pieces of madras,” she said, “some silk, some cotton…and it’s been on my mind all day. Now, if I just remember the way those old women from the West Indies used to tie them on their heads when I was girl…and now, sure enough, it just came back to me! How does it look?” she asked.

“Looks very nice, Mommy,” said Bart, Sr. And added, “I bet it would cover up the curlers better than those babushkas the women wear, you know?”

Bob Rosen bet it would, too.

So here it was and this was it. The sources of the Nile. How old Peter Martens had discovered it, Bob did not know. By and by, he supposed, he would find out. How did they do it, was it that they had a panache—? or was it a “wild talent,” like telepathy, second sight, and calling dice or balls? He did not know.

“Bart said he was reading a real nice manuscript that came in just the other day,” observed Mrs. Benson, dreamily, over her glass. “About South America. He says he thinks that South America has been neglected, and that there is going to be a revival of interest in non-fiction about South America.”

“No more Bushmen?” Barton, Sr., asked.

“No, Bart says he thinks the public is getting tired of Bushmen. He says he only gives Bushmen another three months and then — poo — you won’t be able to give the books away.” Bob asked what Alton thought. “Well, Alton is reading fiction now, you know. He thinks the public is getting tired of novels about murder and sex and funny war experiences. Alt thinks they’re about ready for some novels about ministers. He said to one of the writers that Scribbley’s publishes, ‘Why don’t you do a novel about a minister?’ he said. And the man said he thought it was a good idea.”

There was a long, comfortable silence.

There was no doubt about it. How the Bensons did it, Bob still didn’t know. But they did do it. With absolute unconsciousness and with absolute accuracy, they were able to predict future trends in fashion. It was marvelous. It was uncanny. It—

Kitty lifted her lovely head and looked at Bob through the long, silken skein of hair, then brushed it aside. “Do you ever have any money?” she asked. It was like the sound of small silver bells, her voice. Where, compared to this, were the flat Long Island vocables of, say, Noreen? Nowhere at all.

“Why, Kitty Benson, what a question,” her mother said, reaching out her glass for Bentley to refill. “Poor Peter Martens, just to think — a little more, Bentley, don’t think you’re going to drink what’s left, young man.”

“Because if you ever have any money,” said the voice like the Horns of Elfland. “We could go out somewhere together. Some boys don’t ever have any money,” it concluded, with infinitely loving melancholy.

“I’m going to have some money,” Bob said at once. “Absolutely. Uh — when could—”

She smiled an absolute enchantment of a smile. “Not tonight,” she said, “because I have a date. And not tomorrow night, because I have a date. But the day after tomorrow night, because then I don’t have a date.”

A little voice in one corner of Bob’s mind said, “This girl has a brain about the size of a small split pea; you know that, don’t you?” And another voice, much less little, in the opposite corner, shrieked, “Who cares? Who cares?” Furthermore, Noreen had made a faint but definite beginning on an extra chin, and her bosom tended (unless artfully and artificially supported) to droop. Neither was true of Kitty at all, at all.

“The day after tomorrow night, then,” he said. “It’s a date.”

All that night he wrestled with his angel. “You can’t expose these people to the sordid glare of modern commerce,” the angel said, throwing him with a half-nelson. “They’d wither and die. Look at the dodo — look at the buffalo. Will you look?” “You look,” growled Bob, breaking the hold, and seizing the angel in a scissors-lock. “I’m not going to let any damned account executives get their chicken-plucking hands on the Bensons. It’ll all be done through me, see? Through me!” And with that he pinned the angel’s shoulders to the mat. “And besides,” he said, clenching his teeth, “I need the money …”

Next morning he called up his agent. “Here’s just a few samples to toss Mr. Phillips Anhalt’s way,” he said grandiosely. “Write ’em down. Soupbowl haircuts for men. That’s what I said. They can get a sunlamp treatment for the backs of their necks in the barber-shops. Listen. Women will stencil stars on their toe-nails with nail polish. Kate Greenaway style dresses for women are going to come in. Huh? Well, you bet your butt that Anhalt will know what Kate Greenaway means. Also, what smart women will wear will be madras kerchiefs tied up in the old West Indian way. This is very complicated, so I guess they’ll have to be pre-folded and pre-stitched. Silks and cottons… You writing this down? Okay.

“‘Teen-agers will wear, summer-time, I mean, they’ll wear shorts made out of cut-down blue jeans. And sandals made out of cut-down sneakers. No shirts or undershirts — barechested, and — What? NO, for cry-sake, just the boys!”

And he gave Stuart the rest of it, books and all, and he demanded and got an advance. Next day Stuart reported that Anhalt reported that Mac Ian was quite excited. Mac had said — did Bob know what Phil said Mac said? Well, Mac said, “Let’s not spoil the ship for a penny’s worth of tar, Phil.”

Bob demanded and received another advance. When Noreen called, he was brusque.

The late morning of his date-day he called to confirm it. That is, he tried to. The operator said that she was sorry, but that number had been disconnected. He made it up to the Bronx by taxi. The house was empty. It was not only empty of people, it was empty of everything. The wallpaper had been left, but that was all.

Many years earlier, about the time of his first cigarette, Bob had been led by a friend in the dead of night (say, half-past ten) along a quiet suburban street, pledged to confidence by the most frightful vows. Propped against the wall of a garage was a ladder — it did not go all the way to the roof: Bob and friend had pulled themselves up with effort which, in another context, would have won the full approval of their gym teacher. The roof made an excellent post to observe the going-to-bed preparations of a young woman who had seemingly never learned that window shades could be pulled down. Suddenly lights went on in another house, illuminating the roof of the garage; the young woman had seen the two and yelled; and Bob, holding onto the parapet with sweating hands and reaching for the ladder with sweating feet, had discovered that the ladder was no longer there…

He felt the same way now.

Besides feeling stunned, incredulous, and panicky, he also felt annoyed. This was because he acutely realized that he was acting out an old moving picture scene. The scene would have been close to the (film) realities had he been wearing a tattered uniform, and in a way he wanted to giggle, and in a way he wanted to cry. Only through obligation to the script did he carry the farce farther: wandering in and out of empty rooms, calling out names, asking if anyone was there.

No one was. And there was no notes or messages, not even Croatan carved on a doorpost. Once, in the gathering shadows, he thought he heard a noise, and he whirled around, half-expecting to see an enfeebled Mr. Benson with a bacon-fat lamp in one hand, or an elderly Negro, perhaps, who would say, tearfully, “Marse Bob, dem Yan-kees done burn all de cotton …” But there was nothing.

He trod the stairs to the next house and addressed inquiries to an old lady in a rocking-chair. “Well, I’m sure that I don’t know,” she said, in a paper-thin and fretful voice. “I saw them, all dressed up, getting into the car, and I said, ‘Why, where are you all going, Hazel?’ (“Hazel?” “Hazel Benson. I thought you said you knew them, young man?” “Oh, yes. Yes, of course. Please go on.”) Well, I said, ‘Where are you all going, Hazel?’ And she said, ‘It’s time for a change, Mrs. Machen.’ And they all laughed and they waved and they drove away. And then some men came and packed everything up and took it away in trucks. Well ‘Where did they all go?’ I asked them. ‘Where did they all go?’ But do you think they’d have the common decency to tell me, after I’ve lived here for fifty-four years? Not-a-word. Oh—”

Feeling himself infinitely cunning, Bob said, offhandedly, “Yes, I know just the outfit you mean. O’Brien Movers.”

“I do not mean O’Brien Movers. Whatever gave you such an idea? It was the Seven Sebastian Sisters.”

And this was the most that Bob Rosen could learn. Inquiries at other houses either drew blanks or produced such probably significant items as, “Kitty said, ‘Here are your curlers, because I won’t need them anymore’”; “Yes, just the other day I was talking to Bart, Senior, and he said, ‘You know, you don’t realize that you’re in a rut until you have to look up to see the sky.’ Well, those Bensons always talked a little crazy, and so I thought nothing of it, until—”; and, “I said to Bentley, ‘Vipe, how about tomorrow we go over to Williamsbridge and pass the chicks there in review?’ and he said, ‘No, Vipe, I can’t make the scene tomorrow, my ancients put another poster on the billboard.’ So I said, ‘Ay-las,’ and next thing I know—”

“His who did what?”

“Fellow, you don’t wot this Viper talk one note, do you? His family, see, they had made other plans. They really cut loose, didn’t they?”

They really did. So there Bob was, neat and trim and sweet-smelling, and nowhere to go, and with a pocketful of money. He looked around the tree-lined street and two blocks away, on the corner, he saw a neon sign. Harry’s, it flashed (green). Bar and Grill (red).

“Where’s Harry?” he asked the middle-aged woman behind the bar.

“Lodge meeting,” she said. “He’ll be back soon. They aren’t doing any labor tonight, just business. Waddle ya have?”

“A ball of Bushmill,” he said. He wondered where he had heard that, last. It was cool in the bar. And then he remembered, and then he shuddered.

“Oh, that’s bad,” Stuart Emmanuel moaned. “That sounds very bad… And you shouldn’t’ve gone to the moving van people yourself. Now you probably muddied the waters.”

Bob hung his head. His efforts to extract information from the Seven Sebastian Sisters — apparently they were septuplets, and all had gray mustaches — had certainly failed wretchedly. And he kept seeing Kitty Benson’s face, framed in her golden hair like a sun-lit nimbus, kept hearing Kitty Benson’s golden voice.

“Well,” Stuart said, “I’ll do my damndest.” And no doubt he did, but it wasn’t enough. He was forced to come clean with Anhalt. And Anhalt, after puttering around, his sweet smile more baffled than ever, told Mac everything. Mac put the entire force majeure of the T. Oscar Rutherford organization behind the search. And they came up with two items.

Item. The Seven Sebastian Sisters had no other address than the one on Purchase Place, and all the furniture was in their fireproof warehouse, with two years’ storage paid in advance.

Item. The owner of the house on Purchase Place said, “I told them I’d had an offer to buy the house, but I wouldn’t, if they’d agree to a rent increase. And the next thing I knew, the keys came in the mail.”

Little and Harpey, as well as Scribbley’s Sons, reported only that Alt and Bart, Junior, had said that they were leaving, but hadn’t said where they were going.

“Maybe they’ve gone on a trip somewhere,” Stuart suggested. “Maybe they’ll come back before long. Anhalt has ears in all the publishing houses, maybe he’ll hear something.”

But before Anhalt heard anything, Mac decided that there was no longer anything to hear. “I wash my hands of it all,” he declared. “It’s a wild goose chase. Where did you ever pick up this crackpot idea in the first place?” And Phillips Anhalt’s smile faded away. Weeks passed, and months.

But Bob Rosen has never abandoned hope. He has checked with the Board of Education about Bentley’s records, to see if they know anything about a transcript or transfer. He has haunted Nassau Street, bothering — in particular — dealers specializing in Pseudo-Arabian air mail issues, in hopes that Mr. Benson has made his whereabouts known to them. He has hocked his watch to buy hamburgers and pizzas for the Vipers, and innumerable Scotches on innumerable rocks for the trim young men and the girls fresh out of Bennington who staff the offices of our leading publishers. He—

In short, he has taken up the search of Peter Martens (Old Pete, Sneaky Pete). He is looking for the sources of the Nile. Has he ever found anything? Well, yes, as a matter of fact, he has.

The strange nature of cyclical coincidences has been summed up, somewhere, in the classical remark that one can go for years without seeing a one-legged man wearing a baseball cap; and then, in a single afternoon, one will see three of them. So it happened with Bob Rosen.

One day, feeling dull and heavy, and finding that the elfin notes of Kitty Benson’s voice seemed to be growing fainter in his mind, Bob called up her old landlord.

“No,” said the old landlord, “I never heard another word from them. And I’ll tell you who else I never heard from, either. The fellow who offered to buy the house. He never came around and when I called his office, he just laughed at me. Fine way to do business.”

“What’s his name?” Bob asked, listlessly.

“Funny name,” said the old landlord. “E. Peters Shadwall? Something like that. The Hell with him, anyway.”

Bob tore his rooms apart looking for the card with the perforated top edge which Shadwell had — it seemed so very long ago — torn off his little book and given him. Also, it struck him, neither could he find the piece of paper on which he had scribbled Old Martens’ last message, with the Bensons’ name and street on it. He fumbled through the Yellow Book, but couldn’t seem to locate the proper category for the mantisman’s business. And he gave up on the regular directory, what with Shad, Shadd, — wel, — well, — welle, etc.

He would, he decided, go and ask Stuart Emmanuel. The dapper little agent had taken the loss of the Bensons so hard (“It was a beauty of a deal,” he’d all but wept) that he might also advance a small sum of money for the sake of the Quest. Bob was in the upper East 40s when he passed a bar where he had once taken Noreen for cocktails — a mistake, for it had advanced her already expensive tastes another notch — and this reminded him that he had not heard from her in some time. He was trying to calculate just how much time, and if he ought to do something about it, when he saw the third one-legged man in the baseball cap.

That is to say, speaking nonmetaphorically, he had turned to cross a street in the middle of a block, and was halted by the absence of any gap between the two vehicles (part of a traffic jam caused by a long-unclosed incision in the street) directly in front of him. Reading from right to left, the vehicles consisted of an Eleanor-blue truck reading Grandma Goldberg’s Yum-Yum Borsht, and an Obscene-pink Jaguar containing T. Pettys Shadwell and Noreen.

It was the Moment of the Shock of Recognition. He understood everything.

Without his making a sound, they turned together and saw him, mouth open, everything written on his face. And they knew that he knew.

“Why, Bob,” said Noreen. “Ah, Rosen,” said Shadwell.

“I’m sorry that we weren’t able to have you at the wedding,” she said. “But everything happened so quickly. Pete just swept me off my feet.”

Bob said, “I’ll bet.”

She said, “Don’t be bitter”—seeing that he was, and enjoying it. Horns sounded, voices cursed, but the line of cars didn’t move.

“You did it,” Bob said, coming close. Shadwell’s hands left the wheel and came together at his chest, fingers down. “You saw that crisp green money he left and you saw his card and got in touch with him and you came in and took the note and—Where are they?” he shouted, taking hold of the small car and shaking it. “I don’t give a damn about the money, just tell me where they are! Just let me see the girl!”

But T. Pettys Shadwell just laughed and laughed, his voice like the whisper of the wind in the dry leaves. “Why, Bob,” said Noreen, bugging her eyes and flashing her large, coarse gems, and giving the scene all she had, “why, Bob, was there a girl? You never told me.”

Bob abandoned his anger, disclaimed all interest in the commercial aspect of the Bensons, offered to execute bonds and sign papers in blood, if only he were allowed to see Kitty. Shadwell, fingering his tiny carat of a mustache, shrugged. “Write the girl a letter,” he said, smirking. “I assure you, all mail will be forwarded.” And then the traffic jam broke and the Jag zoomed off, Noreen’s scarlet lips pursed in blowing a kiss.

“Write?” Why, bless you, of course Bob wrote. Every day and often twice a day for weeks. But never a reply did he get. And on realizing that his letters probably went no farther than Noreen (Mrs. T. Pettys) Shadwell, who doubtless gloated and sneered in the midst of her luxury, he fell into despair, and ceased. Where is Kitty of the heart-shaped face, Kitty of the light-gold hair, Kitty of the elfin voice? Where are her mother and father and her three brothers? Where now are the sources of the Nile? Ah, where?

So there you are. One can hardly suppose that Shadwell has perforce kidnapped the entire Benson family, but the fact is that they have disappeared almost entirely without trace, and the slight trace which remains leads directly to and only to the door of T. Pettys Shadwell Associates, Market Research Advisors. Has he whisked them all away to some sylvan retreat in the remote recesses of the Great Smoky Mountains? Are they even now pursuing their prophetic ways in one of the ever-burgeoning, endlessly proliferating suburbs of the City of the Angels? Or has he, with genius diabolical, located them so near to hand that far-sighted vision must needs forever miss them?

In deepest Brooklyn, perhaps, amongst whose labyrinthine ways an army of surveyors could scarce find their own stakes? — or in fathomless Queens, red brick and yellow brick, world without end, where the questing heart grows sick and faint?

Rosen does not know, but he has not ceased to care. He writes to live, but he lives to look, now selling, now searching, famine succeeding feast, but hope never failing.

Phillips Anhalt, however, has not continued so successfully. He has not Bob’s hopes. Anhalt continues, it is true, with the T. Oscar Rutherford people, but no longer has his corner office, or any private office at all. Anhalt failed: Anhalt now has a desk in the bullpen with the other failures and the new apprentices.

And while Bob ceaselessly searches the streets — for who knows in which place he may find the springs bubbling and welling? — and while Anhalt drinks bitter tea and toils like a slave in a salt mine, that swine, that cad, that most despicable of living men, T. Pettys Shadwell, has three full floors in a new building of steel, aluminum, and blue-green glass a block from the Cathedral; he has a box at the Met, a house in Bucks County, a place on the Vineyard, an apartment in Beekman Place, a Caddy, a Bentley, two Jaguars, a yacht that sleeps ten, and one of the choicest small (but ever-growing) collection of Renoirs in private hands today…

The Affair at Lahore Cantonment INTRODUCTION BY EILEEN GUNN

Its twists and turns, its nested stories, its suggestion of other tales that never quite cross the path of the narration, all mark “The Affair at Lahore Cantonment” as a Davidsonian fabulation. It begins quite wonderfully, with a cool dawn, the promise of a hot day, a sudden plunge into bitter cold, then a damp plateau of thermal misery — all in the space of five sentences.

The layers of narration interact to yield a short, sharp meditation on the decline of empire. At the very heart of the piece is a theme to which Avram returned a number of times: the odd and not necessarily requited attachments formed by big, brawling soldiers to their smaller, meeker buddies.

The story’s chilly glimpse of postwar London harkens back to a winter visit Avram made there in the early 1950s. A letter from that trip natters on cheerfully about the December weather: “California is California,…nothing but month after month of dreary, monotonous sunshine. Hey, look at that delightful drizzle!” Avram describes an improbable encounter with a pink-cheeked English lad:

“Will you give us a thruppence for the sweets?” he asks. Poor kid. Probably hasn’t had a piece of candy in a coon’s age. Everything is rationed over here.

“Which one of these are thruppence?” I ask him.

“That one there,” he says.

“Isn’t that what they call a florin?” They have more coins over here than Carter has liver pills.

“Ooo, you don’t want to go calling it a florin, mister. Only foreigners call them that.” Good thing to know.

… A couple years from now and most likely he’ll be a Resident Magistrate in Southern Somaliland, calmly picking off man-eating tigers while the anguished villagers beat their drums.

In some peculiar fashion, “The Affair at Lahore Cantonment” echos the letter’s juxtaposition of Avram’s experience and Kipling’s Anglo-India.

First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, in June of 1961, “The Affair at Lahore Cantonment” received the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for best short story of the year. Oddly for a celebrated story, it has never before been collected.

IT IS SOME TIME before dawn, in the late spring, as I write this. The seagulls have more than an hour before it will be their moment to fly in from the river, screeing and crying, and then fly back. After them, the pigeons will murmur, and it will be day, perhaps a hot, sticky day. Right now the air is deliciously cool, but I find myself shivering. I find myself imagining the cold, the bitter cold, of that morning when Death came in full panoply, like one dressed for dinner. That morning so very long ago …

In the winter of 1946-7 it was cold enough to suit me, and more, although the thermometer was well above what I used to consider a cold winter at home. But I was then in England, and the wet and the chill never seemed to leave me. The cottage where I was staying had the most marvelous picturesque fireplaces — it had them in every single room, in fact. But coal was rationed and firewood seemed not only unavailable, it seemed unheard of. There was an antique electric heater, but it emitted only a dull coppery glow which died out a few inches away. The only gas fire was, naturally enough, in the kitchen, a cramped and tiny room, where it was impossible to write.

And it was in order to write that I was in England. In the mornings I visited the private library, fortunately unbombed, where lay a mass of material unavailable in America. Afternoons I did the actual writing. In the early evenings I listened to the Third Program while I looked over what I had written, and revised it.

Late evenings? It was, as I say, cold. Raw and damp. I could retire to bed with a brace of hot water bottles and read. I could go to the movies. I could go to the local, see if they had any spirits left, or, failing that — and it usually failed — have a mug of cider. Beer, I don’t care for. The local was named…well, I won’t say exactly what it was named. It may have been called The Green Man. Or The Grapes. Or The Something Arms. A certain measure of reticence is, I think, called for, although by now the last of the principals in the story must surely be dead. But for those who are insatiably curious there are always the newspaper files to check.

But be all that as it may. It was eight o’clock at night. The Marx Brothers were playing at the cinema, but I had seen this one twice before the War and twice during the War. My two hot water bottles gaped pinkly, ready to preserve my feet from frostbite if I cared to retire early to bed. I would have, but it happened that the only reading matter was a large and illustrated work on Etruscan tombs.

So the local won. It was really no contest.

It was warm there, and noisy and smoky and sociable. True, almost none of the sociability was directed my way, but as long as I wasn’t openly being hated, I didn’t care. Besides, we were all in luck: there was whiskey on hand. Gin, too. I drank slowly of the stuff that keeps the bare knees of Scotland warm and watched the people at their quaint native rituals — darts, football pools, even skittles.

A large, rather loutish-looking man at my right, who had made somewhat of a point of ignoring me, said suddenly, “Ah, Gaffer’s heard there’s gin!” A sort of ripple ran through the crowded room, and I turned around to look.

A man and a woman had come in. A little husk of a shriveled old man, wrapped almost to the tip of his rufous nose. An old woman, evidently his wife, was with him, and she helped undo the cocoon of overcoat, pullover, and muffler that, once removed, seemed to reduce him by half. They were obviously known and liked.

“Hello, Gaffer,” the people greeted him. “Hello, Ma.”

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to come fetch him when it’s his going-home time,” she said.

“I can manage meself, Missus,” the old man said querulously.

“If I don’t turn up, some of you give him a hand and see he has all his buttons buttoned. One gin and two ales, Alfred — no more, mind!” And with a brisk, keen look all around she was off.

She seemed the younger of the two, but it may not have been a matter of years. Thin, she was, white-haired and wrinkled; but there was no pink or gray softness about her. Her black eyes snapped as she looked around. Her back was straight. There was something not quite local in the accents of her speech — a certain lilting quality.

The old man was given a seat at a table near me and the fellow who had first announced the old man’s entrance now said, “Got your pension today, eh, Gaffer? Stand us a drink, there’s a good fellow.”

The old man stared at a palmful of change, then stirred it with a twisted finger. “My missus hasn’t given me but enough for the gin and the two ales,” he said.

“Ah, Tom’s only having his games with you, Gaffer,” someone said. “He does with everyone. Pay no mind.” And they resumed their conversation where they’d left off, the chief topic of the night being that the English wife of an American serviceman stationed in the county had given birth to triplets. “Ah, those Yanks,” they said indulgently.

“‘Ah, those Yanks,’” Tom mimicked. His spectacles were mended on the bridge with tape. “They get roaring drunk on the best whiskey that you and me can’t find and couldn’t afford to buy it if we could; they smash up cars like they cost nothing — you and me couldn’t buy them if we saved forever. Curse and brawl like proper savages, they do.”

There was an embarrassed silence. Someone said, “Now, Tom—” Someone looked at me, and away, quickly. And someone muttered, rather weakly, about there being “good and bad in all nations.” I said nothing, telling myself that there was no point in getting into a quarrel with a middle-aged man whose grievances doubtless would be as great if all Americans, civil and military, vanished overnight from the United Kingdom.

To my surprise, and to everyone else’s, it was the Gaffer who spoke up against the charge.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, laddie-boy,” he said to Tom, who must have been fifty, at least. “’Tisn’t that they’re Yanks at all. ’Tis that they’re soldiers, and in a strange land. That’s a wicked life for a man. I’ve seen it meself. I could tell you a story—”

“Sweet Fanny Adams, no, don’t!” Tom said loudly — an outburst which did nothing to increase his popularity. “I heard ’em all, millions of times. The old garrison at Lahore and the Pay-thans and the Af-gains and the Tarradiddles, mountain guns and mules, and, oh, the whole bloody parade. Give us a rest, Gaffer!”

He could have killed the old man with a slap of his hand, I suppose, the Gaffer looked that feeble. But he couldn’t shut the old man up, now he’d had his sip of gin.

“No, you don’t want to hear naught about it, but I’ll tell it anyway. Me, that was fighting for the flag before you was born.” For a moment his faded blue eyes seemed puzzled. “Oh, but I have seen terrible things,” he said in a voice altogether different from his vigorously annoyed tone of a second before. “And the most terrible thing of all — to see my friend die before my eyes, and he died hard, and not to be able to do aught to help him.” His words died off with a slow quiver.

Tom wasn’t giving up that easily. “What’s the football news?” he asked at large. No one answered.

“And not just the fighting in the Hills,” the Gaffer went on. “What was that all for? India? They’re giving India away now. No — other things… My best friend.”

“How about a game of darts?” Tom urged, gesturing toward the back room, through the open door of which we could see the darts board and a frieze of old pictures which dated back six reigns or more. I’d often meant to examine them with attention, but never had.

“…and it’s all true, for I’ve got cuttin’s to prove it. Young chap from newspaper was there and saw it and wrote it all up. Oh, it was terrible!” Tears welled to the reddened edges of his eyes. “But it had to be.”

“Anyone for darts?”

Someone said, “Shut up, Tom. Go on, Gaffer.”

And this was many years ago.

As you went along the Mall in Lahore (which was the local section of the Grand Trunk Road from Calcutta to Peshawur), you passed the museum and the cathedral and the Gardens and Government House and the Punjab Club. And you kept on passing, because you were an enlisted man and the Club was for officers and civilians of high rank. And then for three dusty miles there was nothing to speak of (natives hardly counted), and then there was the Cantonment, and in the Cantonment was the garrison.

“Head-bloody-quarters of the Third bloody Division of the Northern bloody Army,” said the Docker. He spat into the dust. “And you can ’ave it all for one bloody yard of the Commercial Road of a Saturday night,” he said. “Or any bloody night, for that matter!”

But his friend, the Mouse, knew nothing of the glories of the Commercial Road. He had taken the Queen’s shilling in the market town that all his life he had regarded as if it were London, Baghdad, and Babylon. Lahore? He would have ‘listed to go serve in Kamtchatka, if it had only got him away from his brute of a father, a drunken farm-laborer in a dirty smock. How, he often wondered, had he got the courage to take the step at all?

“It frightens me sometimes, Docker,” he confessed. “It’s all so strange and different.”

The Docker gave him a look on which his habitual sneer was half overcome by affection. “Don’t you ’ave no bloody fear while I’m wiv you!” And he touched him, very lightly, on the shoulder. The Docker was tall and strong, with straight black hair and sallow skin and a mouth that was quick to anger and quick to foul words even without anger, and a mind that was quick to take offense and slow — very slow — to forgive.

Sergeant-Major had shouted, “I’ll teach you to look at me!” and had kicked him hard. That night in the lanes on the other side of the little bazaar, past the tank and the place where the hafiz taught, someone hit Sergeant-Major with a piece of iron, thrown with main force. Split his scalp open. Who? No one ever knew. When Sergeant-Major came off sick-list and went round telling about it, spreading his hair with his thick fingers to show the long and ugly wound with its black scab, the Docker passed by, walking proper slow. And Sergeant-Major looked up, suddenly, as if he recognized the footfalls, and there was a look passed between them that had murder in it. But nothing was said, nothing at all.

And no one kicked the Docker after that, and when it became known that he was the pal of the little private everyone called the Mouse, because of his coloring and his timid ways, why, no one kicked the Mouse either, after that.

“See that blackie there, Docker?” the Mouse demanded. “See that white bit of string round his waist and over? He’s what they call a braymin. Like our parson back ’ome — only, fancy a parson with not more clothes on than that!”

A mild interest stirred the big soldier’s face. “Knew a parson give me sixpence once, when I was a nipper,” he said. “Only I ‘ad to come to church and let ’im christen me, like, afore ’e’d leave me ’ave it. Nice old chap. Bit dotty.”

The crowd was thick on the road, but somehow there was always space where the soldiers walked. They passed a blind Jew from Peshawur, with a gray lambskin cap on his head, playing music on the harmonium. It wasn’t like any music the Mouse had ever heard, but it stirred him all the same. The Docker grandly threw a few pice in the cup and his little friend admired the gesture.

“That lane there—” the mouse drew close, dropped his voice—“they say there’s women there. They say some of’m won’t look at sojers. But they say that some of’m will.”

The Docker set his cap acock on his head. “Let’s ’ave a look, then, kiddy,” he said. “And see which ones will.” But they never did — at least, not that day. Because they met Lance-Corporal Owen going to the bazaar and with him were three young ladies, with ruffles and fancy hats and parasols. They were going to the bazaar to help Lance-Corporal Owen buy gifts to send home to his mother and sisters. And this was quite a coincidence, because when the Docker heard it he at once explained that he and the Mouse were bound on the same errand.

“Only they say the best prices are at the places where they don’t speak English. And Alf, ’ere, and me, we don’t know none of this Punjabee-talk, y’see.”

And because the young ladies — two of whom were named Cruceiro and one De Silva, and they were cousins — said that they knew a few words and would be pleased to help Lance-Corporal Owen’s friends, and because Owen was very decent about it all — and why not, seeing that he had three of them? — they all walked off, three pairs of them. The Mouse had the youngest Miss Cruceiro on his arm, and the Docker had Miss De Silva. Perhaps Owen wasn’t quite so pleased with this arrangement, but he smiled.

That was how it began, many years ago.

Harry Owen was a proper figure of a man: broad shoulders, narrow waist, chestnut-colored hair, eyes as bright blue as could be. Always smiling and showing his good, white teeth. Not many men had teeth that good. Even the wives of the officers didn’t feel themselves too proud to say, “Good morning, Owen.” It was as if there was a sun inside of him, shining all the time.

The three of them became friends. The six of them. The Docker and Leah De Silva, Harry and Margaret Cruceiro, and the Mouse and Lucy Cruceiro. To be sure, Lucy was rather dim and didn’t say much, but that suited her escort well enough: he had little to say to her. But he would have felt all sorts of things bubbling up inside of him — if he had been walking with Miss De Silva.

But that, he knew, was impossible. Miss De Silva was so clever, so handsome, so self-assured; he would have been tongued-tied beside her. Besides, she walked with the Docker. And so, for all that she was pleasant to the Mouse, he was too shy to do much more than nod.

Later on he was to think that if the Docker had known that Leah De Silva was not really English, and that she and her cousins and all the others of their class were not regarded by the soldiery as…well …

But he did not know. Chasteness was not a highly prized attribute in Cat’s-meat Court where the Docker’s wild, slum-arab childhood had been largely spent — indeed, it was a quality almost completely unknown. He had no experience of respectable girls, neither half-caste nor quarter-caste nor simon-pure English. The daughters of the officers lived in a world sealed off from him, and the few daughters of NCOs almost as much so.

To men like Lance-Corporal Owen, Eurasian girls may have seemed to lack that certain quality which spelled Rude Hands Off, which the English girls at home had had. But the Docker knew nothing of afternoon teas and tiny sandwiches, of strict papas and watchful mamas, of prim and chaperoned walks in country towns. For him the Victorian Age had never existed, raised as he had been in a world little changed from the fierce and savage Eighteenth Century.

But this did not bring him to take liberties now. On the contrary. To the Docker a railroad telegrapher (for such was Mr. De Silva, burly and black-mustached) was a member of a learned profession. He little noticed that the ever-blooming Mrs. De Silva wore no corsets and let her younger children run about the house naked. And little cared. He knew that there were girls to be had for a thrupney-bit and there were girls who were not. All the latter were respectable. No cottage in Kensington could have been more respectable, in the Docker’s eyes, than the old house where the De Silvas lived, three or four generations of them, in dark and not always orderly rooms smelling of incense and odd sorts of cooking. That the girls were not exactly bleached-white in complexion was nothing to him; the Docker was dark himself. When Mr. and Mrs. De Silva boasted of their ancestry — of Portuguese generals and high-ranking officials of the old East India Company — the Docker felt no desire to doubt. He felt humble.

Miss Leah De Silva was quiet and ladylike enough when talking to the Docker. But she could be fierce and sudden when someone in her family did anything she thought not right. Perhaps her parents had been something less than keen as mustard about the Docker. He was only a corporal. Did they feel that their daughter should look higher? A sentence like a shower of swords from Leah, in a language which had once been Portuguese, silenced them.

One afternoon, when the barracks were almost deserted, the Docker summoned Owen and the Mouse to consult with. He produced a bottle and offered it.

“And risk my stripe? Thanks, my boy, but no thanks,” said Owen. The Mouse took a small sip. The Docker’s manner was very odd, he thought. He was proud and he was abashed; he was happy and he was uneasy.

“’Ere’s the thing,” he said. “I mean to marry Miss De Silva.” And he gave them a challenging look.

“Good!” said the Mouse.

“I know she’ll ’ave me,” the Docker went on. “But…well…there’s Susanna.”

“Oh, ah,” agreed Owen. “There’s Susanna.”

Susanna was a girl who had a little house of her own, often visited by soldiers, one of whom had been the Docker. Her mother was a woman of some tribe so very deep in the Hills that they were neither Hindu nor Moslem. Heaven only knew how she had come to Lahore, or where she had gone after leaving it — for leave it she did, after her baby was born; and Heaven, presumably, knew who the father had been.

Susanna had been raised and educated by the Scottish Mission and had once been employed in the tracts department of its Printing Establishment. The officials of the Mission had been willing to forgive Susanna once, then twice— they had even been willing to forgive Susanna a third time — but not to retain her in the Printing Establishment. Whereupon Susanna had renounced the Church of Scotland and all its works, and had gone altogether to the bad.

“I’m going to break off wiv ’er,” said the Docker determinedly. “I shan’t give ’er no present, neither — no money, I mean. I know it’s the custom, but if I’m going to be married I shall need all the money I’ve got.”

“That’s rather hard on Susanna,” said Owen.

“Can’t be ’elped,” said the Docker briefly. “Now I’m going to write ’er a letter.” He wanted assistance, but he also was strong for his own style. The letter, in its third and least-smudged version, was brief.

Dear Friend,

It’s been a great lark but now it’s all over, for I am getting married to someone else. Best not to see each other again. Keep merry and bright.

Respectfully,

“That’ll do it,” the Docker said, with satisfaction. “Here’s two annas — give ’em to a bearer, one of you, and send the letter off directly. I’m going to start tidying up meself and me kit, as I mean to speak to Mr. De Silva tonight.”

But he never spoke to Mr. De Silva that night. Sergeant-Major came striding in, big as Kachen-junga, and swollen with violent satisfaction, and found the bottle in with the Docker’s gear. The Docker drew three weeks, and was lucky not to lose his stripes.

There was a note waiting for him when he came out.

For a long time the Docker just sat and stared. Then he said to the Mouse, “Well, if it must be. I should ’ave known a girl of ’er quality wouldn’t ever marry a brute like me.”

“Ah, but Docker,” the Mouse said. Then in a rush of words: “It isn’t that at all! Don’t you see what it was? The note you meant for Susanna — Owen sent it off to Miss De Silva instead! And then went and proposed ’imself! And it must’ve been ’im who peached that you ’ad the bottle.”

The Docker’s face went dark, but his voice kept soft. “Oh,” he said, “that was how it was.” And said nothing more. That night he got drunk, wildly, savagely drunk, wrecked twenty stalls in the little bazaar, half killed two Sikhs who tried to stop him, and coming into the sleeping barracks as silently as the dust, took and loaded his rifle and shot Harry Owen through the head …

“Yarn, yarn, yarn!” said Tom. “I don’t believe you was ever in India in your life!”

The Gaffer, who had been sipping his beer silently, fired up.

“Ho, don’t you! One of you fetch that pict’re — the one directly under the old king’s—”

He gestured toward the rear room. In very short time someone was back and handed over an old cardboard-backed photograph. It was badly faded, but it showed plainly enough three soldiers posed in front of a painted backdrop. They wore ornate and tight-fitting uniforms and had funny, jaunty little caps perched to one side of their heads.

“That ’un’s me,” said the Gaffer, pointing his twisted old finger. The faces all looked alike, but the one in the middle was that of the shorrest.

When it was passed to me I turned it over. The back was ornately printed with the studio’s name and sure enough, it was in Lahore — a fact I pointed out, not directly to Tom, but in his general direction; and in one corner, somehow bare of curlicues, was written in faded ink a date in the late ’80s, and three names: Lance-Corporal Harry Owen, Corporal Daniel Devore, Private Alfred Graham.

“…young chap from newspaper was talking about it to the Padre Sahib,” the Gaffer was saying. “Earnest young fellow, ‘ad spectacles, young’s ’e was. ‘But a thing like that, sir,’ says ’e, ’so unlike a British soldier — what could’ve made him do a thing like that?’ And the Chaplain looks at ’im and sighs and says, ‘Single men in barracks don’t turn into plaster saints.’ The writing-wallah thought this over a bit, then, ‘No,’ ’c says, ‘I suppose not,’ and wrote it down in ’is notebook.”

“Well,” Tom said grudgingly, “so you’ve been to India. But that doesn’t prove the rest of the story.”

“It’s true, I tell you. I’ve got cuttin’s to prove it. Civil And Military Gazette of Lahore.”

Tom began singing:

Someone laughed. Tears started in the old man’s weak blue eyes, and threatened to overflow the reddened rims. “I’ve got cuttin’s.”

Tom said, “Yes, you’ve always got cuttin’s. But nobody does see ’em but you.”

“You come ’ome with me,” the Gaffer said, pushing his nobby old hands against the table top and making to rise. “You come ’ome with me. The cuttin’s are in my old trunk and you ask my missus — for she keeps the keys — you just ask my missus.”

“What!” cried Tom. “Me ask your missus for anything? Why, I’d as soon ask a lion or a tiger at Whipsnade Zoo for a bit o’ their meat, as ask your missus for anything. She’s a Tartar, she is!”

The Gaffer’s mind had evidently dropped the burden of the conversation. He began to nod and smile as if Tom had paid him a very acceptable compliment. But he seemed to recall the object of Tom’s remarks, rather than their tone.

“Oh, she was a lovely creature,” he said softly. “Most beautiful girl you ever saw. And it was me that she married, after all, y’see. Not either of them two others, but me, that they called the Mouse!” And he chuckled. It was not a nice chuckle, and as I looked up, sharply, I caught his eye, and there was something sly and very ugly in it.

I went cold. In one second I was all but certain of two things. “Gaffer,” I said, trying to sound casual. “What was your wife’s maiden name?”

The Gaffer seemed deep in thought, but he answered, as casually as I’d asked, “Her name? Her name was Leah De Silva. Part British, part Portugee, and part — but who cares about that? Not I. I married her in church, I did.”

“And how,” I asked, “do you pronounce D-e-v-o-r-e?”

The dim eyes wavered. “Worked in the West India Docks, was why we called him the Docker,” said the old man. “But his Christian name, it was Dan’l Deever.”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course it was. And it wasn’t Harry Owen who peached about the whiskey bottle in Dan’l’s gear, so as to get him in the guardhouse — and it wasn’t Harry Owen who sent the note to the wrong young lady — was it? It was someone who knew what Harry would do if he had the chance. Someone who knew that the Docker would certainly kill Harry, if told the right set of lies. And he did, didn’t he? And then the way was all clear and open for you, wasn’t it?”

For just a second there was fear in Gaffer Graham’s face. And there was defiance, too. And triumph. Then, swiftly, all were gone, and only the muddled memories of old age were left.

“It was cold,” he whimpered. “It was bitter cold when they hanged Danny Deever in the morning. There was that young chap from the newspaper, that wrote about it. Funny name ’e ’ad — somethin’ like Kipling — Ruddy Kipling, ’twas.”

“Yes,” I said, “something like that.”

Afterword to “The Affair at Lahore Cantonment” BY EILEEN GUNN

You may not be surprised to hear that, after rising to the bait Avram left for the “insatiably curious,” I failed to find any sources that mention a historic referent for Kipling’s poem “Danny Deever.” Rudyard Kipling, of course, lived in Lahore as a young man and, as the story implies, wrote for the Civil and Military Gazette: the scenario proposed in the story would not have been impossible. The poem was first published in The Scots Observer in 1890. It consists of four stanzas in drumroll cadences, a series of questions and responses between a sergeant and enlisted men who have been called out in files to witness a hanging.

Each stanza ends with four lines in Cockney dialect that describe the effect of the hanging on the young recruits, and closes with a phrase (slightly different for each stanza) about “hangin’ Danny Deever in the mornin’.” The focus is entirely on the reactions of the men to witnessing a fellow-soldier being hanged, and we never find out anything about Danny Deever himself, other than he was convicted of shooting a sleeping comrade.

Reading “Danny Deever” again after reading “The Affair at Lahore Cantonment” adds an additional ironic patina to the poem that I think Kipling himself would have relished. It’s in Barrack-Room Ballads; you’ll just have to look it up.

Revolver INTRODUCTION BY BILL PRONZINI

When “Revolver” was first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1962, editor Frederic Dannay blurbed it in part as “a kind of roundelay in prose, and a bitter, ironic slice of life — in the raw.” A perfectly apt description as far as it goes. But it neglects to mention another vital element of the story: its understated and mordant wit.

Humor plays a role in all of Avram’s crime fiction, just as it does in his science fiction and fantasy tales; it was a central facet of his mind-set and his prose style. In some stories the humor is broad, farcical, laugh-out-loud funny. In others, such as “Revolver,” it is subtle, and because of its subtlety, even more caustic. Read carefully his descriptions of Mr. Edward Mason, slumlord; of the tenants who inhabit Mason’s old brownstone houses; of the other denizens of the inner-city neighborhood in which the brownstones stand a-moldering. The descriptions won’t generate laughter, but they will produce wry smiles — and at the same time make you feel just a little uncomfortable. This kind of humor was an Avram specialty, the quiet kind with an edge and an attitude.

“Revolver” is one of several stories in the Avram oeuvre, both mysteries and fantasies, that remind me of another writer whose work I admire: Gerald Kersh. Each was his own person and his own writer, but it seems to me they shared a similar, slightly skewed worldview, a similar passion for oddball characters and situations; and that the humor which infuses their work is similarly acidulous and knife-edged. I wonder if Avram knew Kersh. If he did, I think they must have enjoyed each other’s company. I wonder, too, what a Davidson-Kersh collaboration might have been like. Something pretty wonderful, to be sure. Something to create both a smile and a faint but pervasive unease, and to linger long in the memory. Something like “Revolver,” perhaps …

THERE WAS A MR. Edward Mason who dealt in real estate. His kind of real estate consisted mainly of old brownstone houses into which Mr. Mason crammed a maximum number of tenants by turning each room into a single apartment. Legally this constituted “increasing available residence space” or some similar phrase. As a result of this deed of civic good, Mr. Mason was enabled to get tax rebates, rent increases which were geometrically rather than arithmetically calculated, and a warm glow around his heart.

Mr. Mason’s tenants were a select group, hand-picked; one might say — to use a phrase favored in other facets of the real estate profession — that his holdings were “restricted.” He didn’t care for tenants who had steady employment. You might think this was odd of him, but that would be because you didn’t know the philanthropic cast of Mr. Mason’s mind. He favored the lame, the halt, and the blind; he preferred the old and the feeble; he had no scruples, far from it, against mothers without marriage licenses.

And his kindheartedness was rewarded. For, after all, employment, no matter how steady, can sometimes be terminated. And then rent cannot be paid. A landlord who can’t collect rent is a landlord who can’t meet his own expenses — in short, a landlord who is bound to go out of business. In which case it follows that he is a landlord who can no longer practice philanthropy.

Therefore, Mr. Mason would be obliged to evict such a tenant in order to protect his other tenants.

But, owing to his care, foresight, and selectivity, he had no such tenants. Not any more. No, sir. All his tenants at the time our account begins were in receipt of a steady income not derived from employment. Welfare checks come in regularly, and so do old-age assistance checks, state aid checks, and several other variety of checks more or less unknown to the average citizen (and may he never have to know of them from the recipients’ point of view — that is our prayer for him), the average citizen whose tax dollar supplies said checks.

Then, too, people who earn their own income are inclined to take a high-handed attitude toward landlords. They seem to think that the real estate investor has nothing better to do with his income than to lavish it on fancy repairs to his property. But a tenant whose soul has been purified by long years as the recipient of public charity is a tenant who is less troublesome, whose tastes are less finicking, who is in no position to carry on about such rēs naturae as rats, mice, roaches, crumbling plaster, leaky pipes, insufficient heat, dirt, rot, and the like.

Is it not odd, then, that after a term of years of being favored by the philanthropic attentions of Mr. Mason and similarly minded entrepreneurs, the neighborhood was said to have “gone down”? It could not really be, could it, that garbage, for instance, was collected less frequently than in other sections of town? Or that holes in streets and sidewalks were not repaired as quickly as in “better” neighborhoods? Surely it was a mere coincidence that these things were so — if, indeed, they were so at all.

And anyway, didn’t the City make up for it by providing more protection? Weren’t patrol cars seen on the streets thereabouts more often than elsewhere? Weren’t policemen usually seen on the streets in congenial groups of three? To say nothing of plainclothesmen.

This being the case, it was disconcerting for Mr. Mason to acknowledge that crime seemed to be on the increase in the neighborhood where he practiced his multifold benevolences. But no other conclusion seemed possible. Stores were held up, apartments burglarized, cars broken into, purses snatched, people mugged—

It was almost enough to destroy one’s faith in human nature.

Finally, there was no other choice but for Mr. Mason to secure a revolver, and a license for same. Being a respectable citizen, a taxpayer, and one with a legitimate reason to go armed — the necessity to protect himself and the collection of his tenants’ rents — he had no difficulty in obtaining either …

Among Mr. Mason’s tenants was a Mrs. Richards. She was quite insistent, whenever the matter was raised (though it was never raised by Mr. Mason, who was totally indifferent to such items), that “Mrs.” was no mere courtesy title. She had, indeed, been married to Mr. Richards and she had a snapshot of Mr. Richards to prove it. The wedding may have occurred in North Carolina, or perhaps in South Carolina. Nor did she recall the town or country where the happy event took place: Mr. Richards (she did remember that his given name was Charley) had been a traveling man. Also, it was a long time ago.

Mrs. Richards may have been a bit feeble-minded, but she possessed other qualities, such as a warm, loving, and open — very open — heart. She had two children by the evanescent Mr. Richards, and two children by two other gentlemen, with whom she had been scrupulous not to commit bigamy; and was currently awaiting the birth in about six months of her fifth child, the father of whom she thought was most probably a young man named Curtis.

Current social welfare policy held that it would be destructive to the family unit to suggest that Mrs. Richards, now or at any time, place her children in a day nursery and go out and labor for her (and their) bread. Consequently, she was supplied with a monthly check made up with city, state, and federal taxes. It cannot be said that the amount of the check was lavish, but Mrs. Richards did not demand very much and was easily satisfied. She had never been trained in any craft, trade, or profession, and if anyone was crude or unkind enough to suggest that she had enough skill required to manipulate a scrub-brush and-bucket, she would point out that when she did this her back hurt her.

The state of the floor of her “apartment,” on the day when Mr. Mason came to call, at an hour nicely calculated with reference to the mail schedule, indicated that Mrs. Richards had not risked backache lately.

After an exchange of greetings, Mr. Mason said, “If you’ve cashed your check, I’ve got the receipt made out.”

“I don’t believe it’s come,” she said placidly. This was her routine reply. It was her belief that eventually it might be believed, although it never had been; nor was it now.

“If you spend the rent money on something else,” Mr. Mason said, “I’ll have to go down to The Welfare and have them close your case.” This was his routine reply.

Curtis, in a peremptory tone, said, “Give the man his money.” The prospect of approaching fatherhood had raised in him no tender sentiment; in fact, it raised no sentiment at all other than an increasing daily restlessness and a conviction that it was time for him to move on.

Without so much as a sigh Mrs. Richards now produced an envelope from her bosom and examined it closely. “I guess maybe it might be this one,” she said. “I haven’t opened it.”

Curtis, quite tired of every routine gambit of his lady-love, now said, quite testily, “Give the man his money!” He wanted cigarettes and he wanted whiskey and he knew that neither of these could be had until the check was cashed. “If I got to hit you—”

Mrs. Richards endorsed the check with her landlord’s pen, and Mr. Mason began to count out her change. A new consideration now entered Curtis’ mind — previously occupied only by the desire for cigarettes, whiskey, and moving on; it entered with such extreme suddenness that it gave him no time to reflect on it. He observed that Mr. Mason had a revolver in a shoulder holster inside his coat and he observed that Mr. Mason’s wallet was quite engorged with money.

Curtis was not naturally malevolent, but he was naturally impulsive. He whipped Mr. Mason’s revolver from its holster, struck Mr. Mason heavily on the side of the head with it, and seized his wallet.

Mr. Mason went down, but he went down slowly. He thought he was shouting for help, but the noise coming out of his mouth was no louder than a mew. He was on his hands and knees by the time Curtis reached the door, and then he slid to one side and lay silent.

Mrs. Richards sat for a moment in her chair. New situations were things she was not well equipped to cope with. After the sound of Curtis’ feet on the stairs ceased, she continued to sit for some time, looking at Mr. Mason.

Presently a thought entered her mind. The familiar-looking piece of paper on the dirty table was a receipt for her rent. The money scattered around was the money Mr. Mason had been counting out to cash her check. His practice was to count it out twice and then deduct the amount of the rent.

Mrs. Richards slowly gathered up the money, slowly counted it, moving her lips. It was all there.

And so was the receipt.

Mrs. Richards nodded. She now had the receipt for her rent and the money. True, she no longer had Curtis, but, then, she knew he was bound to move along sooner or later. Men always did.

She hid the rent money in one of the holes with which the walls of the “apartment” were plentifully supplied, and then reflected on what she had better do next.

All things considered, she decided it was best to start screaming.

Curtis went down the stairs rapidly, but once in the street he had sense enough to walk at a normal pace. Running men were apt to attract the attention of the police.

Three blocks away was a saloon he favored with his trade. He entered by the back door, causing a buzzer to sound. He tried to slip quickly into the Men’s Room, but wasn’t quite quick enough to escape the attention of the bartender-proprietor, an irascible West Indian called Jumby, and no great friend of Curtis’.

“Another customer for the toilet trade,” said Jumby, so loudly that he could be heard through the closed door. “I’d make more money if I gave the drinks away free and charged admission to the water closet!”

Curtis ignored this familiar complaint, and emptied the wallet of its money, dropping the empty leather case into the trash container which stood, full of used paper towels, alongside the sink. Then he left.

Police cars sped by him, their sirens screaming.

Vague thoughts of cigarettes and whiskey still floated in Curtis’ mind, but the desire to move on was by now uppermost. It was with some relief, therefore, that he saw a young man sitting in an open convertible. The convertible was elegantly fitted out, and so was the young man. His name was William.

“You’ve been talking about going to California, William,” Curtis said.

“I have also been talking,” William said with precision, “about finding some congenial person with money to share the expenses of going to California.”

Curtis said, “I hit the numbers. I got money enough to take care of all the expenses. Don’t that make me congenial?”

“Very much so,” said William, opening the door. Curtis started to slide in, but William stopped him with a long, impeccably groomed hand, which touched him lightly. “Curtis,” he said in low but firm tones, “if you have something on you, I really must insist that you get rid of it first. Suppose I meet you here in an hour? That will also enable me to pack.”

“One hour,” Curtis said.

He went into another bar, obtained cigarettes and whiskey. At the bar was a man generally, if not quite popularly, known as The Rock.

“How you doing, Rock?” Curtis inquired.

The Rock said nothing.

“Got some business to talk over with you,” Curtis went on.

The Rock continued to say nothing.

“Like to take in a movie?” Curtis asked.

The Rock finished his drink, set down the glass, looked at Curtis. Curtis put down money, left the bar, The Rock behind him. He bought two tickets at the movie theater and they went in. The house was almost empty.

After a minute or two Curtis whispered, “Fifty dollars buys a gun. I got it on me.”

The Rock took out a handkerchief, spread it in his lap, counted money into it, passed it to Curtis. After a moment Curtis passed the handkerchief back. The Rock soon left, but Curtis stayed on. He still had the better part of an hour to kill.

The Rock took a bus and traveled a mile. He walked a few blocks on a side street and entered a house which, like most of its fellows, bore a sign that it has been selected for something euphemistically called “Urban Renewal,” and that further renting of rooms was illegal. Most of the windows were already marked with large X signs.

On the second floor The Rock disturbed a teenage boy and girl in close, though wordless, conversation. The boy looked up in some annoyance, but after a quick glance decided to say nothing. The girl clutched his arm until the intruder passed.

The door on the third floor was locked, but The Rock pushed hard, once, and it yielded. The room was ornately furnished, and the dressing table was crowded with perfumes and cosmetics and a large doll; but seated on the bed was a man.

“It ain’t you,” the man said. He was red-eyed drunk.

“It ain’t me,” The Rock agreed.

“It’s Humpty Slade,” said the man on the bed. “He don’t pay for her rent. He don’t buy her no clothes. He don’t feed her. I do.”

The Rock nodded his massive head.

“Everybody knows that,” The Rock said. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket, laid it on the bed, opened its folds. “Seventy-five dollars,” he said.

A quick turnover and a modest profit — that was The Rock’s policy.

The boy and girl, now seated on the stairs, shrank to one side as he came down. They did not look up. It was not very comfortable there in that all but abandoned house; but it was private — as private as you can get when you have no place of your own to go.

Upstairs, on the bed, the waiting man stared at the revolver with his red, red eyes …

After a while the boy and the girl sauntered down into the street and went separate ways in search of something to eat. But after supper they met again in the same hallway.

Scarcely had they taken their places when they were disturbed. A man and woman came up, talking loudly. They paused at the sight of the younger pair in the dim light of the single bulb, and for a moment the two couples looked at one another. The older woman was handsome, flamboyantly dressed and made up. Her companion was large and on the ugly side, his looks not improved by a crooked shoulder which jutted back on one side.

“What are you kids doing here?” he demanded. “Go on, get out—”

“Oh, now, Humphrey,” the woman pleaded. “You leave them alone. They ain’t hurting nobody.”

“Okay, sugar,” the big man said submissively. They continued up the stairs. The boy and girl listened as they fumbled at the door. Then the woman’s voice went high and shrill with fear, screaming, “No — no — no—”

At the loud sound of the revolver the boy and girl leaped to their feet. Something fell past them, and landed below with a thud.

“You’d point a gun at me?” a man’s voice growled. Then there was the noise of a blow.

“My woman—!”

“You’d take a shot at me?”

The sound of fist on flesh, again and again. The boy and girl crept down the stairs.

“No, Humpty, don’t hit me any more! I’m sorry, Humpty! I didn’t mean it! I was — oh, please, Humpty! Please?”

“Don’t hit him any more, honey. He was drunk. Honey—”

The boy and girl stopped at the bottom floor for only a moment. Then they were gone …

Curtis paused, uncertain. He was sure that it was dangerous for him to remain on the street, but he didn’t know where to go. That little rat, William, had failed to reappear. There were planes flying, and trains and buses running, but even if he decided what to take he would still have to decide which airfield, which station, which terminal. The problems seemed to proliferate each time he thought about them.

He would have a drink to help him consider.

There wasn’t really any hurry.

That dirty rat, William!

The Sepoy Lords were holding an informal meeting — a caucus, as it were.

Someone has remarked that the throne of Russia was neither hereditary, nor elective, but occupative. The same might be said of office in the Sepoy Lords.

The scene was a friendly neighborhood rooftop.

“So you think you’re going to be Warlord?” a boy named Buzz demanded.

“That’s right,” said the one called Sonny.

The quorum, including several Sepoy Ladies, listened with interest.

“I don’t think you’re going to be Warlord,” said Buzz.

“I know I am,” said Sonny.

“What makes you so sure?” inquired Buzz.

“This,” Sonny said, simply, reaching into his pocket, and taking something out.

Sudden intakes of breath, eyes lighting up, members crowding around, loud comments of admiration. “Sonny got a piece!” “Look at that piece Sonny’s got!”

The President of the Sepoy Lords, one Big Arthur, who had until now remained above the battle, asked, “Where’d you get it, Son’.”

Sonny smirked, cocked his head. “She knows where I got it,” he said. His girl, Myra, smiled knowingly.

Buzz said only one word, but he said it weakly. He now had no case, and he knew it.

The new Warlord sighted wickedly down the revolver. “First thing I’m going to do,” he announced; “there’s one old cat I am going to burn. He said something about my old lady, and that is something I don’t take from anybody, let alone from one of those dirty old Ermine Kings.”

Diplomatically, no one commented on the personal aspect of his grievance, all being well aware how easy it was to say something about Sonny’s old lady, and being equally aware that the old lady’s avenging offspring now held a revolver in his hand. But the general aspect of the challenge was something else.

“Those Ermine Kings better watch out, is all!” a Sepoy Lady declared. There was a murmur of assent.

Big Arthur now deemed it time to interpose his authority. “Oh, yeah, sure,” he said. “‘They better watch out!’—how come? Because we got one piece?”

Warlord Sonny observed a semantic inconsistency. With eyes narrowed he said, “What do you mean, ‘we’? ‘We’ haven’t got anything. I’m the one who’s got the piece, and nobody is going to tell me what to do with my personal property — see?” He addressed this caveat to the exuberant Sepoy Lady, but no one misunderstood him — least of all, Big Arthur.

Allowing time for the message to sink in, Sonny then said, “Big Arthur is right. I mean, one ain’t enough. We need money to get more. How? I got a plan. Listen—”

They listened. They agreed. They laughed their satisfaction.

“Now,” Sonny concluded, “let’s get going.”

He watched as most of them filed through the door. He started after them, then stopped. Was stopped. Big Arthur seized his wrist with one hand and grabbed the revolver with the other.

Sonny, crying, “Gimme that back!” leaped for it. But Big Arthur, taking hold of Sonny’s jacket with his free hand, slapped him — hard — back against the door.

“You got the wrong idea, Son’,” Big Arthur said. “You seem to think that you are the President around here. That’s wrong. Now, if you really think you are man enough, you can try to get this piece away from me. You want to try?”

For a while Sonny had been somebody. Now he was nobody again. He knew that he would never in a million years take the revolver away from Big Arthur, never burn that one old cat from the Ermine Kings who had said something about his old lady. Tears of pain and humiliation welled in his eyes. “Cheer up,” Big Arthur said. “We’re going to see how your plan works out. And it better work out good. Now get down those stairs with the other members, Mr. Sonny Richards.”

Head down, Sonny stumbled through the door. Myra started to slip through after him, but Big Arthur detained her. “Not so quick, chick,” he said. “Let’s move along together. You and me are going to get better acquainted.” For just a second Myra hesitated. Then she giggled.

“Much better acquainted,” Big Arthur said.

Feeling neither strain nor pain, Curtis glided out of the bar. The late afternoon spread invitingly before him. He was supposed to meet somebody and go somewhere… William …

There, slowly passing by in his fancy convertible, was the man himself. With great good humor Curtis cried, “William!” and started toward him.

William himself saw things from a different angle. Curtis, to be sure, was rough, but what had really set William against going to California with him was the fact that he had observed Curtis that way. He, William, wanted nothing to do at any time with people who carried guns. And, anyway, he wasn’t quite ready to leave for California — something had come up.

What came up at that moment was Curtis, roaring (so it seemed) with rage, and loping forward with murder in his eye.

William gave a squeak of fright. The convertible leaped ahead, crashing into the car in front. And still Curtis came on—

Screaming, “Keep away from me, Curtis!” William jumped out of the car and started to run. Someone grabbed him. “Don’t stop me — he’s got a gun—Curtis!” he yelled.

But they wouldn’t let go. It was the police, wouldn’t you know it, grimfaced men in plain clothes; of all the cars to crash into—

One of them finished frisking Curtis. “Nope, no gun,” he said. “This one ain’t dangerous. You.” He turned to William. “What do you mean by saying he had a gun?”

William lost his head and started to babble, and before he could move, the men were searching him. And the car. They found his cigarette case stuffed with sticks of tea, and they found the shoebox full of it, too.

“Pot,” said one of them, sniffing. “Real Mexican stuff. Convertible, hey? You won’t need a convertible for a long time, fellow.”

William burst into tears. The mascara ran down his face and he looked so grotesque that even the grim faces of the detectives had to relax into smiles.

“What about this one, Leo,” one of them asked, jerking his thumb. “He’s clean.”

But Leo was dubious. “There must be some connection, or the pretty one wouldn’t of been so scared,” he said. A thought occurred to him. “What did he call him? What did you say his name was? Curtis?”

The other detective snapped his fingers. “Curtis. Yeah. A question, Curtis: You in the apartment of a Mrs. Selena Richards today?”

“Never heard of her,” said Curtis, sobering rapidly. Move on, that’s what he should have done — move on.

Mrs. Richards was entertaining company. The baby was awake — had been awake, in fact, since those chest-deep, ear-splitting screams earlier in the afternoon — and the girls had come home from school. She had sent them down to the store for cold cuts and sliced bread; they hadn’t eaten more than half of it on the way back, and Mrs. Richards and the neighbors were dining off the other half. There was also some wine they had all chipped in to buy. Excitement didn’t come very often, and it was a shame to let it go to waste.

“Didn’t that man bleed!” a neighbor exclaimed. “All over your floor, Selena!”

“All over his floor, you mean—he owns this building.”

After the whoops of laughter died down, someone thought of asking where Mrs. Richards’ oldest child was.

“I don’t know where Sonny is,” she said, placid as ever. “He takes after his daddy. His daddy always was a traveling sort of man.” She felt in her bosom for the money she had placed there — the money she had taken from the hole in the wall after the police and ambulance left. Yes, it was safely there.

All in all, she thought, it had been quite a day. Curtis gone, but he was on the point of becoming troublesome, anyway. Excitement — a lot of excitement. Company in, hanging on her every word. The receipt for the rent, plus the rent itself. Yes, a lucky day. Later on she would see what the date was, and tomorrow she would play that number.

If luck was coming to you, nothing could keep it away.

They had taken three stitches in Mr. Mason’s scalp, and taped and bandaged it.

“You want us to call you a taxi?” the hospital attendant asked.

“No,” Mr. Mason said. “I don’t have any money to waste on taxis. The bus is still running, isn’t it?”

“There’s a charge of three dollars,” the attendant said.

Mr. Mason snorted. “I don’t have three cents. I’ll have to borrow bus fare from some storekeeper, I guess. That dirty — he took everything I had. Right in broad daylight. I don’t know what we pay taxes for.”

“I guess we pay them to reward certain people for turning decent buildings into flophouses,” the attendant said. He was old and crusty and due to retire soon, and didn’t give a damn for anybody.

Mr. Mason narrowed his eyes and looked at him. “Nobody has the right to tell me what to do with my personal property,” he said meanly.

The attendant shrugged. “That’s your personal property, too,” he said, pointing. “Take it with you; we don’t want it.”

It was the empty shoulder holster.

On leaving the hospital Mr. Mason headed first for a store, but not to borrow bus fare. He bought a book of blank receipts. He still had most of his rents to collect, and he intended to collect every single one of them. It hardly paid a person to be decent, these days, he reflected irritably. One thing was sure: nobody else had better tangle with him — not today.

He headed for the first house on his round, and it was there, in the hallway, that the Sepoy Lords caught up with him.

The Tail-Tied Kings INTRODUCTION BY FREDERIK POHL

Avram Davidson was one of a kind. He was physically gentle, intellectually ferocious, and disturbingly erudite. He was also markedly Jewish. When I say “markedly,” the word should be understood in the context of my own lapsed-Protestant relationship with Jewish people: most of the science-fiction fans and writers I grew up with were Jews, so were the fifty percent of my Brooklyn neighbors who weren’t Catholic, so, at the time I first met Avram, was my wife. In my experience, however, few of them took the matter very seriously. They might remember to be choosy about their diet when it wasn’t too inconvenient, and most of them thought seders were a lot of fun (for that matter, so did I), but that was about it. Avram was different.

I had not appreciated quite how different until the day when, while Avram was supervising some friends’ children in a swimming pool, one of the kids got into trouble and had to be taken to a hospital. The nearest hospital was ten miles away. It was the Sabbath. And Avram was the only adult around. So he took the child to the emergency room in a car, because that was permissible as a matter of saving life, but there was no such justification for riding back. In Avram’s view the only lawful way to return was to walk. So he did. Ten long miles of it.

Avram was good, civilized company; his opinions were always strongly held but his sense of humor was reliably meliorating. It was good fun to argue with him. Good exercise, too; half an hour with Avram toned you up for days of disagreement with lesser mortals.

And, of course, as a writer Avram was a pure wonder. His densely textured and beautifully phrased prose was a delight to read, and a pleasure to publish. Well, you can see the part about why it was a delight to read for yourself, because this book is full of some of the best of his stories. But I doubt that unless you’ve had the actual experience you can quite understand how pleasing it was to find, among the bushels of hopelessly inept manuscripts that every editor has to pick through in order to find the ones worth putting into print, one of Avram’s little gems.

“The Tail-Tied Kings” is one of my personal favorite Davidsons — partly because of its own considerable merits, partly because it was one of the ones that I was lucky enough to publish in Galaxy, partly because of an event that occurred shortly after its publication, thirty years ago or so.

I was visiting the Milford Science Fiction Writers Workshop (so long ago that the workshop was actually still held in Milford, Pennsylvania). So was Avram, and during a break in the proceedings he came up to me and, amiably but forcefully, grabbed my lapel. “Why did you change my title to ‘The Tail-Tied Kings?’” he demanded.

I answered promptly, “Because I didn’t think the title you had on it would make anyone want to read the story. In fact, it was so uncompelling I don’t even remember what it was. What was it?”

He reflected for a belligerent moment, then shrugged. “I don’t remember it either,” he said.

So I figured I won that one. I don’t recall winning many others.

HE BROUGHT THEM WATER, one by one.

“The water is sweet, One-eye,” said a Mother. “Very sweet.”

“Many bring Us water,” a second Mother said, “but the water you bring is sweet.”

“Because his breath is sweet,” said a third Mother.

The One-Eye paused, about to leave. “I would tell you of a good thing,” a Father said, “which none others know, only We. I may tell him, softly, in his ear, may I not?”

In his corner, Keeper stirred. A Mother and a Father raised their voices. “It is colder now,” They said. “Outside: frost. A white thing on the ground, and burns. We have heard. Frost.” Keeper grunted, did not move. “Colder, less food, less water, We have heard, but for Us always food, always water, water, food, food …” They went on. Keeper did not move.

“Come closer,” said the Father, softly. “I will tell you of a good thing, while Keeper sleeps.” The Father’s voice was deep and rich. “Come to my mouth. A secret thing. One-Eye.”

“I may not come, Father,” said the One-Eye, uncertainly. “Only to bring water.”

“You may come,” said a Mother. Her voice was like milk, her voice was good. “Your breath is sweet. Come, listen. Come.”

Another Father said, “You will be cold, alone. Come among Us and be warm.” The One-Eye moved his head from side to side, and he muttered.

“There is food here and you will eat,” the other Father said. The One-Eye moved a few steps, then hesitated.

“Come and mate with me,” said the milk-voiced Mother. “It is my time. Come.”

The One-Eye perceived that it was indeed her time and he darted forward, but the Keeper blocked his way.

“Go, bring water for Them to drink,” said Keeper. He was huge.

“He has water for Us now,” a Mother said, plaintively. “Stupid Keeper. We are thirsty. Why do you stop him?”

A Father said, “He has water in his mouth which he has brought for Us. Step aside and let him pass. Oh, it is an ugly, stupid Keeper!”

“I have water in my mouth which I have brought for Them,” the One-Eye said. “Step aside and—” He stopped, as they burst into jeers and titters.

The Keeper was not even angry. “There was nothing in your mouth but a lie. Now go.”

Too late, the One-Eye perceived his mistake. “I may sleep,” he muttered.

“Sleep, then. But go.” Keeper bared his teeth. The One-Eye shrank back, and turned and slunk away. Behind him he heard the Mother in her milk-voice say, “It was a stupid One-Eye, Father.”

“And now,” the Father said. The One-Eye heard their mating as he went.

Sometimes he had tried to run away, but everywhere there were others who stopped him. “It is a One-Eye, and too far away. Go to your place, One-Eye. Go to your duty, bring water for the Mothers and Fathers, take Their food to the Keeper, go back, go back, One-Eye, go back,” they cried, surrounding him, driving him from the way he would go.

“I will not be a One-Eye any longer,” he protested.

They jeered and mocked. “Will you grow another eye, then? Back, back: it is The Race which orders you!” And they had nipped him and forced him back.

Once, he had said, “I will see the goldshining!”

There was an old one who said, “Return, then, One-Eye and I will show you the goldshining on the way.” And the old one lifted a round thing and it glittered gold. He cried out with surprise and pleasure.

Then, “I thought it would be bigger,” he said.

“Return, One-Eye, or you will be killed,” the old one said. “Outside is not for you. Return… Not that way! That way is a death thing. Mark it well. This way. Go. And be quick — there may be dogs.”

There was sometimes a new one to instruct, blood wet in the socket, at the place of water, to drink his fill and then fill his mouth and go to the Fathers and Mothers, not to swallow a drop, to learn the long way and the turnings, down and down in the darkness, past the Keeper, mouth to mouth to the Fathers and Mothers. Again and again.

“Why are They bound?” a new one asked.

“Why are we half-blinded? It is The Race which orders. It is The Race which collects the food that other One-Eyes bring to Keeper, and he stores it and feeds Them.”

“Why?”

They paused, water dripping from above into the pool. Why? To eat and drink must be or else death. But why does The Race order Fathers and Mothers to be bound so that they cannot find their own food and water? “I am only a stupid One-Eye. But I think the Fathers and Mothers would tell me… There was mention of a secret thing… The Keeper would not let me listen after that …”

“That is a big Keeper, and his teeth are sharp!”

Water fell in gouts from overhead and splashed into the pool. They filled their mouths and started down. When he had emptied the last drop in his mouth he whispered, “Mother, I would hear the secret thing.”

She stiffened. Then she clutched at him. The other Fathers and Mothers ceased speaking and moving. At the entrance the Keeper sat up. “What is it?” he called. There was alarm in his voice, and it quavered.

“A strange sound,” said a Father. “Keeper, listen!” Then—“Slaves?” he whispered.

The Keeper moved his head from side to side. The Fathers and Mothers were all quite still. “I hear nothing,” Keeper said, uncertainly.

“Keeper, you are old, your senses are dulled,” the deep-voiced Father said. “We say there is a strange noise! There is danger! Go and see — go now!”

The Keeper became agitated. “I may not leave,” he protested. “It is The Race which orders me to stay here—”

Fathers and Mothers together cried out at him. “The Race! The Race! We are The Race! Go and find out the danger to Us!”

“The One-Eye-where is the One-Eye? I will send him!” But they cried that the One-Eye had left (as, indeed, one of them had), and so, finally, gibbering and muttering, he lumbered up the passageway.

As soon as he had left, the milk-voiced Mother began to caress and stroke the One-Eye, saying that he was clever and good, that his breath was sweet, that—

“There is no time for that, Mother,” she was interrupted. “Tell him the secret. Quick! Quick!”

“Before you were made a One-Eye and were set apart to serve Us, with whom did you first mate?” she asked.

“With the sisters in my own litter, of course.”

“Of course…for they were nearest. And after that, with the mother of your own litter. Your sire was perhaps an older brother. After that you would have mated with daughters, with aunts …”

“Of course.”

The Mother asked if he did not know that this incessant inbreeding could eventually weaken The Race.

“I did not know.”

She lifted her head, listened. “The stupid Keeper is not returning yet. Good… It is so, One-Eye. Blindness, deafness, deformation, aborting, madness, still-births. All these occur from time to time in every litter. And when flaw mates with flaw and no new blood enters the line, The Race weakens. Is it not so, Fathers and Mothers?”

They answered, “Mother, it is so.”

The One-Eye asked, “Is this, then, the secret? A Father told me that the secret was a good thing, and this is a bad thing.”

Be silent, They told him, and listen.

In her milk-rich voice the Mother went on, “But We are not born of the same litter, We are not sib, not even near kin. From time to time there is a choosing made of the strongest and cleverest of many litters. And out of these further selections. And then a final choosing — eight, perhaps, or ten, or twelve. With two, or at most, three males to be Fathers, and the rest females. And these, the chosen of the best of the young, are taken to a place very far from the outside, very safe from danger, and a Keeper set to guard them, and One-Eyes set apart to bring them food and water …”

A Father continued the story. “It is of Ourselves that We are talking. They bound Us together, tied Us tightly with many knots, tail to tail together, so that it was impossible to run away. We had no need to face danger above, no need to forage. We had only to eat, to drink, to grow strong — and you see that we are far larger than you — and to mate. All this as The Race has ordered.”

“I see… I did not know. This is a good thing, yes. It is wise.”

The Mothers and Fathers cried out at this. “It is not good!” They declared. “It is not wise! It is not right! To bind Us together when We were young and unknowing was well, yes. But to keep Us bound now is not well. We, too, would walk freely about! We would see the goldshining and the slaves, not to stay bound in the dimness here!”

“One-Eye!” They cried. “You were set apart to serve Us—”

“Yes,” he muttered. “I will bring water.”

But this was not what They wanted of him. “One-Eye,” They whispered, “good, handsome, clever, young, sweet-breathed One-Eye. Set Us free! Unloose the knots! We cannot reach them, you can reach them—”

He protested. “I dare not!”

Their voices rose angrily. “You must! It is The Race which orders! We would rule and We will rule and you will rule with Us!”

“…mate with Us!” In his ear, a Mother’s voice. He shivered.

Again, they spoke in whispers, hissing. “See, One-Eye, you must know where there are death places and food set out which must not be eaten. Bring such food here, set it down. We will know. We will see that Keeper eats it, when he returns. Then, One-Eye, then—”

Suddenly, silence.

All heads were raised.

A Father’s deep voice was shrill with fear. “That is smoke!”

But another Father said, “The Race will see that no harm comes to Us.” And the others all repeated his assurance. They moved to and fro, in Their odd, circumscribed way, a few paces to each side, and around, and over each other, and back. They were waiting.

It seemed to the One-Eye that the smoke grew thicker. And a Mother said, “While We wait, let Us listen for Keeper and for the steps of those The Race will send to rescue Us. Meanwhile, you, One-Eye, try the knots. Test the knots, see if you can set Us free.”

“What is this talk of ‘try’ and ‘test’ and ‘see’?” a Father then demanded. “He has only to act and it is done! Have We not discussed this amongst Ourselves, always, always? Are We not agreed?”

A second Mother said, “It is so. The One-Eye has freedom, full freedom of movement, while We have not; he can reach the knots and We can not. Come, One-Eye. Act. And while you set Us free, We will listen, and when We are free, We will not need to wait longer for Keeper and the others. Why do they not come?” she concluded, querulous and uncertain.

And they cried to him to untie Them, set Them free, and great things would be his with Them; and, “If not,” They shrilled, “We will kill you!”

They pushed him off and ordered him to begin. The smell of the smoke was strong.

Presently he said, “I can do nothing. The knots are too tight.”

“We will kill you!” they clamored. “It is not so! We are agreed it is not!” And again and again he tried, but could do nothing.

“Listen, Mothers and Fathers,” the milk-voiced one said. “There is no time. No one comes. The Race has abandoned Us. There must be danger to them; rather than risk, they will let Us die and then they will make another choosing for new Mothers and Fathers.”

Silence. They listened, strained, snuffed the heavy air.

Then, screaming, terrified, the others leaped up, fell back, tumbling over each other. A Mother’s voice — soft, warm, rich, sweet — spoke. “There is one thing alone. Since the knots will not loose, they must be severed. One-Eye! Your teeth. Quickly! Now!”

The others crouched and cringed, panting. The One-Eye sank his teeth into the living knot, and, instantly a Father screamed and lunged forward, cried stop.

“That is pain!” he whimpered. “I have not felt pain before, I cannot bear it. Keeper will come, the others will save Us, The Race—”

And none would listen to the Mother.

“Mother, I am afraid,” the One-Eye said. “The smoke is thicker.”

“Go, then, save yourself,” she said.

“I will not leave without you.”

“I? I am part of the whole. Go. Save yourself.”

But still he would not, and again he crept up to her.

They came at last to the end of the passage. They could not count the full number of the dead. The smoke was gone now. The Mother clung to him with her fore limbs. Her hind limbs dragged. She was weak, weak from the unaccustomed labor of walking, weak from the trail of thick, red blood she left behind from the wound which set her free.

“Is this outside?” she asked.

“I think so. Yes, it must be. See! Overhead — the goldshining! The rest I do not know,” the One-Eye answered.

“So that is the goldshining. I have heard — Yes, and the rest, I have heard, too. Those are the houses of the slaves and there are the fields the slaves tend, and from which they make the food which they store up for Us. Come help me, for I must go slowly; and we will find a place for Us. We will mate, for We are now The Race.” Her voice was like milk. “And our numbers will not end.”

He said, “Yes, Mother. Our numbers will not end.”

With his single eye he scanned Outside — the Upper World of the slaves who thought themselves masters, who, with trap and terrier and ferret and poison and smoke, warred incessantly against The Race. Did they think that even this great slaughter was victory? If so, they were deceived. It had only been a skirmish.

The slaves were slaves still; the tail-tied ones were kings.

“Come, Mother,” he said. And, slowly and painfully, and with absolute certainty, he and his new mate set out to take possession of the world.

The Price of a Charm; or, The Lineaments of Gratified Desire INTRODUCTION BY HENRY WESSELLS

Astronomers had speculated about the existence of Pluto long before the planet was discovered in 1930: Even while it remained unseen, its influence on comets could be observed. “The Price of a Charm; or The Lineaments of Gratified Desire” is the story of one of the key events of the twentieth century, and it is all the more powerful for being extremely subtle. It is the account of a meeting between Old Steven, a maker of charms for success in the hunt or in love, and a younger man, Gabriel (or Gavrilo), who is a…fanatic. This brief, shattering tale (first published as “Price of a Charm” in 1963) is right at the core of an issue that is very much in the public eye (again) as I write this in 1996. The story will always be unsettling and timely, whatever the headlines may read.

The paradox of Avram Davidson’s writing is that the unspoken, unwritten words matter as much as those actually on the page. In “There Beneath the Silky-Tree and Whelmed in Deeper Gulphs Than Me,” there is a wonderful description of Jack Limekiller’s first response to the peculiar economy of British Hidalgo:

… and he had the flashing thought that somehow he might help fill those holes; he was a while in finding out that this amounted to hoping to fill the holes in a piece of lace: the holes were part of the pattern.

This is also a description of Avram’s writing. His strategy of narration by omission is nowhere so clear as in this story (only “Naples” comes close). Avram doesn’t use the overheated rhetoric of the horror writer; his omissions have nothing in common with latter-day minimalists whose world is narrow and monotone. What Avram writes is enough: he demands of us that we make connections he himself made, so that we reach the point where we know why his one or two clues are sufficient to evoke the entire history of Europe. I am not writing an explanation of this story, so I too must omit two or three words that Avram chose to leave out; for explanations, see my comprehensive survey, “A Preliminary Annotated Checklist of the Writings of Avram Davidson” in the Bulletin of Bibliography (vol. 53, issues 1 & 2 [1996]).

THE MOUNTAIN AIR WAS clear and sweet, scented with wild herbs, and although the young man had come quite a distance, he was not at all tired. The cottage — it was really little more than a hut — was just as it had been described to him; clearly, many people in the district had had occasion to visit it.

At one side a tiny spring poured over a lip of rock and crossed the path beneath a rough culvert. At the other side was a row of beehives. A goat and her kid grazed nearby, and a small black sow ate from a heap of acorns with a meditative air.

A man with white hair got up from the bench and held out his hand. “A guest,” he said. “A stranger. No matter — a guest, all the same. Everyone who passes by is my guest, and the toll I charge is that I make them drink with me.”

He laughed; his laugh was infectious, and the young man laughed too — though his sallow, sullen face was not that of one who laughed often.

The hand he shook was hard and callused. “I am called Old Stevan,” the peasant said. “It used to be Black Stevan, but that was a long time ago. Even my mustache is white now—” he stroked its length affectionately—“except for here, in the middle. I am always smoking tobacco. Smoking and drinking, who can live without them?”

He excused himself, and returned almost at once with bottle, two glasses, and cigarettes.

“I do not usually—” the young visitor began, with a frown which seemed familiar to his face.

“If you do not smoke, you do not smoke. But I allow only Moslems to refuse a drink. One drink — a mere formality.”

They had one drink for formality, a second drink for friendship, and a third drink to show that they did not deny the Trinity.

Stevan wiped his mustache between his index finger and thumb, thrust in a cigarette, lit it, and smiled contentedly.

“A good thing, matches,” he said. “When I was a boy we had to use tinderboxes. How the world does change! You came for a charm?”

The young man seemed relieved now that the preliminaries of his visit were over. “I did,” he said.

“Your name?”

“Gavrillo.”

Old Stevan repeated it, nodding, blowing out smoke. “I am, of course, well-known for my charms,” he said complacently. “I refer to those I make, not those with which Providence endowed me — although there was a time… Well, well. My hair was black in those days. I can make quite a number of charms, although some of them are not in demand any longer. I don’t remember the last time I supplied one to keep a woman safe from Turks. Before you were born, I’m sure. On the other hand, charms to help barren women conceive are as much called for as ever.”

Gavrillo said, scowling, that he was not married.

“My charges are really quite reasonable, too. I can guarantee you perfect protection against ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and the evil spirits of the hills and forests — their cloven hoofs and blood-red nails—”

“I am not afraid of those. I have my crucifix.” His hand went to the neck of his open shirt.

“Very well,” Old Stevan said equitably. “I’ve nothing to say against that. I also prepare an excellent charm for success in the hunt …”

“Ah.”

“And an equally excellent one for success in love.”

“Yes.”

Old Stevan nodded benignly. “That’s it, then, is it? The love charm?”

Gavrillo hesitated, then scowled again.

“Which one means more to you? Or, putting it another way, at which are you more proficient? Take the charm for the other.”

The young man threw out his hands. “I am good at neither! And it is important to me that I must excel in one of them.”

Stevan lit another cigarette. “Why only one? Take both. The price—”

But Gavrillo shook his head. “It’s not the price.” He looked out on the wide-spread scene, the deep and dark-green valleys with their forest of oak and beech and pine, the mountains blue with distance, the silvery river. “It’s not the price,” he repeated.

“As far as you can see on all sides,” the old man said quietly; “in fact, farther, my reputation is known. People have come to me from across the frontier. If it is not the price, take both.” He saw Gavrillo shake his head, but continued to speak. “The hunt. A day like today. You take your gun and go off in the woods with a few friends. The road is dusty, but in the woods, in the shade, it is cool. Your friends want to go to the right, but you, you have the charm, you know that the way to turn is to the left. They may protest, but you are so confident that they follow. Presently you see something out of the corner of your eye. The others have not noticed it at all, or perhaps assume it is the branch of a dead tree. But you know better. Your eye is clear, you turn swiftly, your arm and hand are quick as never before, the bird flushes, you fire! There it is, at your feet — a fine woodcock. Eh?”

Gavrillo nodded, eyes gleaming.

“Or it might be a red doe, or a roebuck. A fine stag! You can hardly count all the points! Everyone admires you… Perhaps in the winter the peasants come to you. ‘Master, a wolf. No one is such a hunter as you are. Come, save our flocks.’ They have not even seen the beast when your shot brings it down. You wait while they fetch it. They drag the creature along, shouting your praise: ‘Only one shot, and at that distance, too!’ they cry, and kiss your hand. ‘Brave one, hero,’ they call you.

A dreamy smile played on Gavrillo’s face, and he slowly, slowly nodded.

Old Stevan waited a few moments; but when his visitor said no word, he went on. “Then there is love. What can compare to that? A man who does not enjoy the love of women is only half alive — if even so much. No doubt there is a young woman on whom you have looked, often, with longing, but who never returns that look. She has long black hair. How it glistens, how it gleams! Her lips are soft and red, and sometimes she wets them with her red little tongue. Inside her bodice the young breasts grow, ripe and sweet as fruit …”

The young man’s eyes seemed glazed. He did not stop the slow nodding of his head.

“You return, the love charm is in your pocket, against your heart, here. There is a dance, you join in, so does she. Presently you come face to face. She looks at you — as if she has never seen you before. How wide her eyes grow! Her mouth opens. Her teeth are small and white. You smile at her and instantly she smiles back, then looks away, shyly — but only for an instant — and you dance together.

“Soon the stars come out and the moon rises. The old women are drowsing, the old men are drunk. You take her hand in yours and the two of you slip away. The moment you stop, she throws her arms around you and puts her mouth up to be kissed. The night is warm, the grass is soft. The night is dark and deep, and love is sweet.”

Gavrillo made a sound between a sigh and a groan. Slowly he reached into his pocket, took out his purse, and began to slide its contents into his hand.

“You have made up your mind?” the old man asked. “Which is it to be, then?” There was no answer. Something caught the old man’s eye. “This one is a foreign coin,” he said, touching it with his finger. “But never mind, I will take it: it is gold.”

Gavrillo’s eyes fell to his hand. He picked up the coin, and an odd look came at once over his face. The dreamy, undecided expression vanished immediately. His eyelids became slits, his lips turned down in an ugly fashion, something like a sneer.

After a moment the old man said, “You have made up your mind?”

“Yes,” Gavrillo said. “I have made up my mind.” …

There was only an old woman before him at the ticket window. He had crossed the river just a few minutes before. The contents of his small suitcase had not engaged the attention of the customs officials for long; and from there it was only a short walk to the railroad station.

The old woman went away, and Gavrillo stepped up to the window. On the wall of the tiny office, facing him, were two framed photographs, side by side. The likeness of the older man was the same one that had been on the coin which had caught Old Stevan’s attention; but Gavrillo knew the younger man’s face, too — knew it very well, indeed. Once again the odd, ugly, strangely determined expression crossed his face.

The station agent looked up. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Where to?”

“One ticket, one way.” Gavrillo kept looking at the faces in the photographs.

“Very well, sir, a one-way ticket — but where to? Trieste, Vienna?” He was a self-important little man, and his tone grew a trifle sarcastic. “Paris? Berlin? St. Petersburg?”

Slowly Gavrillo’s eyes left the picture. He did not seem to have noticed the sarcasm.

“No,” he said. “Just to Sarajevo.”

Sacheverell INTRODUCTION BY SPIDER ROBINSON

I discovered Avram Davidson the summer I invented masturbation.

(That’s right: I invented masturbation. It was 1963; I must ask you to take my word that absolutely the only hints offered to even inquisitive Catholic teenagers in that era were that a behavior called “touching oneself impurely” existed and that those who practiced it were both depraved and doomed. Armed solely with these clues, I intuited the region of the body that must be involved, constructed experiments, and in due time invented the wheel. What matter if I was not the first? Elisha Gray’s invention of the telephone is no less admirable merely because A. G. Bell beat him to the Patent Office by twenty-four hours. I was quite proud of my invention, and all my memories of the summer of 1963 are [vividly] colored by it.)

A week later, in fact, when I brought home the Ace paperback edition of The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: 14th Series and read its first story—“Sacheverell”—I was feeling so (I won’t even pretend to apologize for this one) cocky that for a glorious moment or two I actually believed I had invented Avram, too. Like the stoned character in John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, gaping at the TV news and saying, “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got!” I had the solipsistic sensation that I had somehow caused Avram to appear in the Universe, out of an artistic necessity. Please, laugh with me at this youthful arrogance of mine, that I thought I bad the power to invent an Avram Davidson. Even God only managed that once.

Fortunately, it was not necessary to invent him, only to discover him. And then to bicycle to the public library, ask why there were no Davidson titles on the shelves, and correct that condition. (I was vaguely aware that there were magazines that published sf, but they weren’t offered for sale anywhere within bike range of my house.)

That particular anthology was truly excellent — I mean, it included Zelazny’s “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” alright? Yet to this day, the story that lingers longest and deepest in my mind from that book is the first one: “Sacheverell.” The second thing I asked the librarian was to order anything she could get with “Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction” in the title, and in time I hunted down all the worthy predecessors of and successors to that volume…but out of all that excellent sf, it’s “Sacheverell” I can still quote large portions of from memory.

I marveled at it, at the time. I had just reached the age at which I was beginning to see how writers worked at least some of their magic, to spot a few of the more common professional tricks — but “Sacheverell” defeated me. I understood why my mother liked it, when I showed it to her — but I couldn’t quite figure out why I found it so memorable. I tried, that summer, to understand the source of the story’s power, to explain to myself its impact on me…with such poor success that I’m still at it thirty-three years later, sitting here typing this. Avram worked that trick often: effortlessly pushed buttons nobody else has been able to locate. A very hard writer to reverse-engineer…and therefore an immortal.

Here’s my current best take on the source of “Sacheverell” ’s intense, layered emotional impact: maybe Avram captured, in an absolute minimum of words, what it is like to be a youth bright enough to read science fiction for pleasure.

Even masturbation doesn’t help…enough. You need friends.

THE FRONT WINDOWS OF the room were boarded up, and inside it was dark and cold and smelled very bad. There was a stained mattress on which a man wrapped in a blanket lay snoring, a chair with no back, a table which held the remains of a bag of hamburgers, several punched beer cans, and a penny candle which cast shadows all around.

There was a scuffling sound in the shadows, then a tiny rattling chattering noise, then a thin and tiny voice said, tentatively, “You must be very cold, George …” No reply. “Because I know I’m very cold …” the voice faded out. After a moment it said, “He’s still asleep. A man needs his rest. It’s very hard …” The voice seemed to be listening for something, seemed not to hear it; after an instant, in a different tone, said, “All right.”

“Hmm?” it asked the silence. The chattering broke out again for just a second, then the voice said, “Good afternoon, Princess. Good afternoon, Madame. And General — how very nice to see you. I wish to invite you to a tea-party. We will use the best set of doll dishes and if anyone wishes to partake of something stronger, I believe the Professor—” the voice faltered, continued, “—has a drop of the oh-be-joyful in a bottle on the sideboard. And now pray take seats.”

The wind sounded outside; when it died away, leaving the candleflame dancing, there was a humming noise which rose and fell like a moan, then ended abruptly on a sort of click. The voice resumed, wavering at first, “Coko and Moko? No — I’m very sorry, I really can’t invite them, they’re very stupid, they don’t know how to behave and they can’t even talk …”

The man on the stained mattress woke in a convulsive movement that brought him sitting up with a cry. He threw his head to the right and left and grimaced and struck at the air.

“Did you have a bad dream, George?” the voice asked, uncertainly.

George said, “Uhn!” thrusting at his eyes with the cushions of his palms. He dropped his hands, cleared his throat and spat, thickly. Then he reached out and grabbed the slack of a chain lying on the floor, one end fastened to a tableleg, and began to pull it in. The chain resisted, he tugged, something fell and squeaked, and George, continuing to pull, hauled in his prize and seized it.

“Sacheverell—”

“I hope you didn’t have a bad dream, George—”

“Sacheverell — was anybody here? You lie to me and—”

“No, George, honest! Nobody was here, George!”

“You lie to me and I’ll kill you!”

“I wouldn’t lie to you, George. I know it’s wicked to lie.”

George glared at him out of his reddened eyes, took a firmer grip with both hands, and squeezed. Sacheverell cried out, thrust his face at George’s wrist. His teeth clicked on air, George released him, abruptly, and he scuttled away. George smeared at his trouser-leg with his sleeve, made a noise of disgust. “Look what you done, you filthy little ape!” he shouted.

Sacheverell whimpered in the shadows. “I can’t help it, George. I haven’t got any sphincter muscle, and you scared me, you hurt me …”

George groaned, huddled in under his blanket. “A million dollars on the end of this chain,” he said; “and Om living in this hole, here. Like a wino, like a smokey, like a bum!” He struck the floor with his fist. “It don’t make sense!” he cried, shifting around till he was on all fours, then pushing himself erect. Wrapping the blanket around his shoulders, he shambled quickly to the door, checked the bolt, then examined in turn the boarded-up front windows and the catch on the barred and frost-rimmed back window. Then he did something in a corner, cursing and sighing.

Under the table Sacheverell tugged on his chain ineffectually. “I don’t like it here, George,” he said. “It’s cold and it’s dirty and I’m dirty and cold, too, and I’m hungry. It’s all dark here and nobody ever comes here and I don’t like it, George, I don’t like it here one bit. I wish I was back with the Professor again. I was very happy then. The Professor was nice to me and so was the Princess and Madame Opal and the General. They were the only ones in on the secret, until you found out.”

George swung around and looked at him. One eye sparked in the candlelight.

“We used to have tea-parties and Madame Opal always brought chocolates when she came, even when she came alone, and she read love stories to me out of a magazine book with pictures and they were all true. Why can’t I be back with the Professor again?”

George swallowed, and opened his mouth with a little smacking sound. “Professor Whitman died of a heart-attack,” he said.

Sacheverell looked at him, head cocked. “An attack …”

“So he’s dead! So forget about him!” the words tore out of the man’s mouth. He padded across the room. Sacheverell retreated to the end of his chain.

“I don’t know what the hell Om gunna do… In a few weeks now, they’ll tear this rotten building down. Maybe,” he said, slyly, putting his foot down on the chain, “I’ll sell you to a zoo. Where you belong.” He bent, grunting, and picked up the chain.

Sacheverell’s teeth began to chatter. “I don’t!” he shrilled. “I don’t belong in a zoo! The little people they have there are stupid—they don’t know how to behave, and they can’t even talk!”

George closed one eye, nodded; slowly, very slowly, drew in the chain. “Come on,” he said. “Level with me. Professor Whitman had a nice little act, there. How come he quit and took off and came here?” Slowly he drew in the chain. Sacheverell trembled, but did not resist.

“We were going to go to a laboratory in a college,” he said. “He told me. It was a waste to keep me doing silly tricks with Coko and Moko, when I was so smart. He should have done it before, he said.”

George’s mouth turned up on one side, creasing the stubble. “Naa, Sacheverell,” he said. “That don’t make sense. You know what they do to monkeys in them labs? They cut ‘em up. That’s all. I know. I went to one and I asked. They pay about fifteen bucks and then they cut ’em up.” He made a scissors out of his fingers and went k’khkhkhkh… Sacheverell shuddered. George set his foot on the chain again and took hold of him by the neck. He poked him in the stomach with his finger, stiff. It had grown colder, the man’s breath shown misty in the tainted air. He poked again. Sacheverell made a sick noise, struggled. “Come on,” George said. “Level with me. There’s a million dollars inside of you, you dirty little ape. There’s gotta be. Only I don’t know how. So you tell me.”

Sacheverell whimpered. “I don’t know, George. I don’t know.”

The man scowled, then grinned slyly. “That’s what you say. I’m not so sure. You think I don’t know that if They found out, They’d take you away from me? Sure. A million bucks…how come I’m being followed, if They don’t know? First a guy with a beard, then a kid in a red snow-suit. I seen them together. Listen, you frigging little jocko, you better think, I’m telling you — you better think hard!” He poked again with his stiff and dirty finger. And again. “I always knew, see, I always knew that there was a million bucks waiting for me somewhere, if I only kept my eyes open. What the hell is a guy like me doing unloading crates in the fruit market, when I got plans for a million? And then—” His voice sank and his eyes narrowed. “—this Professor Whitman come along and put up at the Eagle Hotel. I caught his act in the sticks once, I been around. First I thought he was practicing ventriloquism, then I found out about you — you was the other voice in his room! And that’s when I—”

Abruptly he stopped. The outside door opened with a rusty squeal and footfalls sounded in the hall. Someone knocked. Someone tried the knob. Someone said, “Sacheverell? Sacheverell?” and George clamped his hairy, filthy hand over the captive’s mouth. Sacheverell jerked and twitched and rolled his eyes. The voice made a disappointed noise, the footfalls moved uncertainly, started to retreat. And then Sacheverell kicked out at George’s crotch. The man grunted, cursed, lost his grip—

“Help!” Sacheverell cried. “Help! Help! Save me!”

Fists beat on the door, the glass in the back window crashed and fell to the floor, a wizened old-man’s face peered through the opening, withdrew. George ran to the door, then turned to chase Sacheverell, who fled, shrieking hysterically. A tiny figure in a red snow-suit squeezed through the bars of the back window and ran to pull the bolt on the door. Someone in boots and a plaid jacket and a woolen watch-cap burst in, melting snow glittering on a big black beard.

“Save me!” Sacheverell screamed, dashing from side to side. “He attacked Professor Whitman and knocked him down and he didn’t get up again—”

George stooped, picking up the chair, but the red snow-suit got between his legs and he stumbled. The chair was jerked from his hands, he came up with his fists clenched and the bearded person struck down with the chair. It caught him across the bridge of the nose with a crunching noise, he fell, turned over, stayed down. Silence.

Sacheverell hiccupped. Then he said, “Why are you wearing men’s clothing, Princess Zaga?”

“A bearded man attracts quite enough attention, thank you,” the Princess said, disengaging the chain. “No need to advertise… Let’s get out of here.” She picked him up and the three of them went out into the black, deserted street, boarded-shut windows staring blindly. The snow fell thickly, drifting into the ravaged hall and into the room where George’s blood, in a small pool, had already begun to freeze.

“There’s our car, Sacheverell,” said the man in the red snow-suit, thrusting a cigar into his child-size, jaded old face. “What a time—”

“I assume you are still with the carnival, General Pinkey?”

“No, kiddy. The new owners wouldn’t reckernize the union, so we quit and retired on Social Security in Sarasota. You’ll like it there. Not that the unions are much better, mind you: Bismarkian devices to dissuade the working classes from industrial government on a truly Marxian, Socialist-Labor basis. We got a television set, kiddy.”

“And look who’s waiting for you—” Princess Zaga opened the station wagon and handed Sacheverell inside. There, in the back seat, was the hugest, the vastest, the fattest woman in the world.

“Princess Opal!” Sacheverell cried, leaping into her arms — and was buried in the wide expanse of her bosom and bathed in her warm Gothick tears. She called him her Precious and her Little Boy and her very own Peter Pan.

“It was Madame Opal who planned this all,” Princess Zaga remarked, starting the car and driving off. General Pinkey lit his cigar and opened a copy of The Weekly People.

“Yes, I did, yes, I did,” Mme. Opal murmured, kissing and hugging Sacheverell. “Oh, how neglected you are! Oh, how thin! We’ll have a tea-party, just like we used to, the very best doll dishes; we’ll see you eat nice and we’ll wash you and comb you and put ribbons around your neck.”

Sacheverell began to weep. “Oh, it was awful with George,” he said.

“Never mind, never mind, he didn’t know any better,” Mme. Opal said, soothingly.

“The hell he didn’t!” snapped Princess Zaga.

“Predatory capitalism,” General Pinkey began.

“Never mind, never mind, forget about it, darling, it was only a bad dream …”

Sacheverell dried his tears on Mme. Opal’s enormous spangled-velvet bosom. “George was very mean to me,” he said. “He treated me very mean. But worst of all, you know, Madame Opal, he lied to me — he lied to me all the time, and I almost believed him — that was the most horrible part of all: I almost believed that I was a monkey.”

The House the Blakeneys Built INTRODUCTION BY URSULA K. LE GUIN

Science fiction often paints a hopeful history of colonists and castaways on far planets. They not only survive, they thrive in their isolation; they keep all their skills, they remember how to operate the sawmill, how to program the computer, how to maintain liberty and justice for all. And when the Federation finds them after five hundred years, they talk just the way the Feds talk.

Avram didn’t share the rationalist’s faith that reason, once established, will prevail. I doubt he believed that reason had ever been established anywhere for more than about five minutes. In the incredibly fertile darkness of his imagination, rational behavior is the gleam of a flashlight for a moment in a midnight thunderstorm in a tropical forest.

The Blakeneys could well be a Heinlein survivalist scenario five centuries later, the offspring of a couple of masterful polygamist studs, the children of Reason.

This profoundly disturbing story comes on as light as a meringue. Avram’s ear for weird ways of talking was wonderful, and his Blakeneys are very funny, mumbling on and going “Rower, rower.” It’s hard not to start talking like them, funnyfunny, a hey. But Avram’s ear was also for the precise meanings of words; he wrote with a very rare accuracy of usage. Late in the story we realize that the Blakeneys have no plural for the word house. “Houses?”—“No such word, hey.” And the whole story lies in that reply.

The funnyfunniest thing about them, to me, is that they don’t have cows. They have freemartins. I suspect Avram of throwing this in to see if anybody knew what a freemartin is, and if so, if they’d wonder how the Blakeney cattle reproduce. A hey.

FOUR PEOPLE COMING DOWN the Forest Road, a hey,” Old Big Mary said.

Young Red Tom understood her at once. “Not ours.”

Things grew very quiet in the long kitchenroom. Old Whitey Bill shifted in his chairseat. “Those have’s to be Runaway Little Bob’s and that Thin Jinnie’s,” he said. “Help me up, some.”

“No,” Old Big Mary said. “They’re not.”

“Has to be.” Old Whitey Bill shuffled up, leaning on his canestick. “Has to be. Whose elses could they be. Always said, me, she ran after him.”

Young Whitey Bill put another chunk of burnwood on the burning. “Rowwer, rowwer,” he muttered. Then everyone was talking at once, crowding up to the windowlooks. Then everybody stopped the talking. The big food-pots bubbled. Young Big Mary mumbletalked excitedly. Then her words came out clearsound.

“Look to here — look to here — I say, me, they aren’t Blakeneys.”

Old Little Mary, coming down from the spindleroom, called out, “People! People! Three and four of them down the Forest Road and I don’t know them and, oh, they funnywalk!”

“Four strange people!”

“Not Blakeneys!”

“Stop sillytalking! Has to be! Who elses?”

“But not Blakeneys!”

“Not from The House, look to, look to! People — not from The House!”

“Runaway Bob and that Thin Jinnie?”

“No, can’t be. No old ones.”

“Children? Childrenchildren?”

All who hadn’t been lookseeing before came now, all who were at The House, that is — running from the cowroom and the horseroom and dairyroom, ironroom, schoolroom, even from the sickroom.

“Four people! Not Blakeneys, some say!”

“Blakeneys or not Blakeneys, not from The House!”

Robert Hayakawa and his wife Shulamith came out of the forest, Ezra and Mikicho with them. “Well, as I said,” Robert observed, in his slow careful way, “a road may end nowhere, going in one direction, but it’s not likely it will end nowhere, going in the other.”

Shulamith sighed. She was heavy with child. “Tilled fields. I’m glad of that. There was no sign of them anywhere else on the planet. This must be a new settlement. But we’ve been all over that—” She stopped abruptly, so did they all.

Ezra pointed. “A house—”

“It’s more like a, well, what would you say?” Mikicho moved her mouth, groping for a word. “A…a castle? Robert?”

Very softly, Robert said, “It’s not new, whatever it is. It is very much not new, don’t you see, Shulamith. What—?”

She had given a little cry of alarm, or perhaps just surprise. All four turned to see what had surprised her. A man was running over the field towards them. He stopped, stumbling, as they all turned to him. Then he started again, a curious shambling walk. They could see his mouth moving after a while. He pointed to the four, waved his hand, waggled his head.

“Hey,” they could hear him saying. “A hey, a hey. Hey. Look to. Mum. Mum mum mum. Oh, hey …”

He had a florid face, a round face that bulged over the eyes, and they were prominent and blue eyes. His nose was an eagle’s nose, sharp and hooked, and his mouth was loose and trembling. “Oh, hey, you must be, mum, his name, what? And she run off to follow him? Longlong. Jinnie! Thin Jinnie! Childrenchildren, a hey?” Behind him in the field two animals paused before a plow, switching their tails.

“Mikicho, look,” said Ezra. “Those must be cows.”

The man had stopped about ten feet away. He was dressed in loose, coarse cloth. Again he waggled his head. “Cows, no. Oh, no, mum mum, freemartins, elses. Not cows.” Something occurred to him, almost staggering in its astonishment. “A hey, you won’t know me! Won’t know me!” He laughed. “Oh. What a thing. Strange Blakeneys. Old Red Tom, I say, me.”

Gravely, they introduced themselves. He frowned, his slack mouth moving. “Don’t know them name,” he said, after a moment. “No, a mum. Make them up, like children, in the woods. Longlong. Oh, I, now! Runaway Little Bob. Yes, that name! Your fatherfather. Dead, a hey?”

Very politely, very wearily, feeling — now that he had stopped — the fatigue of the long, long walk, Robert Hayakawa said, “I’m afraid I don’t know him. We are not, I think, who you seem to think we are…might we go on to the house, do you know?” His wife murmured her agreement, and leaned against him.

Old Red Tom, who had been gaping, seemed suddenly to catch at a word. “The House! A hey, yes. Go on to The House. Good now. Mum.”

They started off, more slowly than before, and Old Red Tom, having unhitched his freemartins, followed behind, from time to time calling something unintelligible. “A funny fellow,” said Ezra.

“He talks so oddly,” Mikicho said. And Shulamith said that all she wanted was to sit down. Then—

“Oh, look,” she said. “Look!”

“They have all come to greet us,” her husband observed.

And so they had.

Nothing like this event had ever occurred in the history of the Blakeneys. But they were not found wanting. They brought the strangers into The House, gave them the softest chairseats, nearest to the burning; gave them cookingmilk and cheesemeats and tatoplants. Fatigue descended on the newcomers in a rush; they ate and drank somewhat, then they sank back, silent.

But the people of the house were not silent, far from it. Most of them who had been away had now come back, they milled around, some gulping eats, others craning and staring, most talking and talking and talking — few of them mumbletalking, now that the initial excitement had ebbed a bit. To the newcomers, eyes now opening with effort, now closing, despite, the people of the house seemed like figures from one of those halls of mirrors they had read about in social histories: the same faces, clothes…but, ah, indeed, not the same dimensions. Everywhere — florid complexions, bulging blue eyes, protruding bones at the forehead, hooked thin noses, flabby mouths.

Blakeneys.

Thin Blakeneys, big Blakeneys, little Blakeneys, old ones, young ones, male and female. There seemed to be one standard model from which the others had been stretched or compressed, but it was difficult to conjecture what this exact standard was.

“Starside, then,” Young Big Mary said — and said again and again, clearsound. “No elses live to Blakeneyworld. Starside, Starside, a hey, Starside. Same as Captains.”

Young Whitey Bill pointed with a stick of burnwood at Shulamith. “Baby grows,” he said. “Rower, rower. Baby soon.”

With a great effort, Robert roused himself. “Yes. She’s going to have a baby very soon. We will be glad of your help.”

Old Whitey Bill came for another look to, hobbling on his canestick. “We descend,” he said, putting his face very close to Robert’s, “we descend from the Captains. Hasn’t heard of them, you? Elses not heard? Funny. Funnyfunny. We descend, look to. From the Captains. Captain Tom Blakeney. And his wives. Captain Bill Blakeney. And his wives. Brothers, they. Jinnie, Mary, Captain Tom’s wives. Other Mary, Captain Bob’s wife. Had another wife, but we don’t remember it, us, her name. They lived, look to. Starside. You, too? Mum, you? A hey, Starside?”

Robert nodded. “When?” he asked. “When did they come from Starside? The brothers.”

Night had fallen, but no lights were lit. Only the dancing flames, steadily fed, of the burning, with chunks and chunks of fat and greasy burnwood, flickered and illuminated the great room. “Ah, when,” said Old Red Tom, thrusting up to the chairseat. “When we children, old Blakeneys say, a hey, five hundredyear. Longlong.”

Old Little Mary said, suddenly, “They funnywalk. They funnytalk. But, oh, they funnylook, too!”

“A baby. A baby. Grows a baby, soon.”

And two or three little baby Blakeneys, like shrunken versions of their elders, gobbled and giggled and asked to see the Starside baby. The big ones laughed, told them, soon.

“Five hundred …” Hayakawa drowsed. He snapped awake. “The four of us,” he said, “were heading in our boat for the Moons of Lor. Have you — no, I see, you never have. It’s a short trip, really. But something happened to us, I don’t know…how to explain it…we ran into something…something that wasn’t there. A warp? A hole? That’s silly, I know, but — It was as though we felt the boat drop, somehow. And then, after that, our instruments didn’t work and we saw we had no celestial references…not a star we knew. What’s that phrase, ‘A new Heaven and a new Earth?’ We were just able to reach her. Blakeneyworld, as you call it.”

Sparks snapped and flew. Someone said, “Sleepytime.” And then all the Blakeneys went away and then Hayakawa slept.

It was washtime when the four woke up, and all the Blakeneys around The House, big and little, were off scrubbing themselves and their clothes. “I guess that food on the table is for us,” Ezra said. “I will assume it is for us. Say grace, Robert. I’m hungry.”

Afterwards they got up and looked around. The room was big and the far end so dark, even with sunshine pouring in through the open shutters, that they could hardly make out the painting on the wall. The paint was peeling, anyway, and a crack like a flash of lightning ran through it; plaster or something of the sort had been slapped onto it, but this had mostly fallen out, its only lasting effect being to deface the painting further.

“Do you suppose that the two big figures could be the Captains?” Mikicho asked, for Robert had told them what Old Whitey Bill had said.

“I would guess so. They look grim and purposeful… When was the persecution of the polygamists, anybody know?”

Current social histories had little to say about that period, but the four finally agreed it had been during the Refinishing Era, and that this had been about six hundred years ago. “Could this house be that old?” Shulamith asked. “Parts of it, I suppose, could be. I’ll tell you what I think, I think that those two Captains set out like ancient patriarchs with their wives and their families and their flocks and so on, heading for somewhere where they wouldn’t be persecuted. And then they hit — well, whatever it was that we hit. And wound up here. Like us.”

Mikicho said, in a small, small voice, “And perhaps it will be another six hundred years before anyone else comes here. Oh, we’re here for good and forever. That’s sure.”

They walked on, silent and unsure, through endless corridors and endless rooms. Some were clean enough, others were clogged with dust and rubbish, some had fallen into ruin, some were being used for barns and stables, and in one was a warm forge.

“Well,” Robert said at last, “we must make the best of it. We cannot change the configurations of the universe.”

Following the sounds they presently heard brought them to the washroom, slippery, warm, steamy, noisy.

Once again they were surrounded by the antic Blakeney face and form in its many permutations. “Washtime, washtime!” their hosts shouted, showing them where to put their clothes, fingering the garments curiously, helping them to soap, explaining which of the pools were fed by hot springs, which by warm and cold, giving them towels, assisting Shulamith carefully.

“Your world house, you, a hey,” began a be-soaped Blakeney to Ezra; “bigger than this? No.”

Ezra agreed, “No.”

“Your — Blakeneys? No. Mum, mum. Hey. Family? Smaller, a hey?”

“Oh, much smaller.”

The Blakeney nodded. Then he offered to scrub Ezra’s back if Ezra would scrub his.

The hours passed, and the days. There seemed no government, no rules, only ways and habits and practices. Those who felt so inclined, worked. Those who didn’t…didn’t. No one suggested the newcomers do anything, no one prevented from doing anything. It was perhaps a week later that Robert and Ezra invited themselves on a trip along the shore of the bay. Two healthy horses pulled a rickety wagon.

The driver’s name was Young Little Bob. “Gots to fix a floorwalk,” he said. “In the, a hey, in the sickroom. Needs boards. Lots at the riverwater.”

The sun was warm. The House now and again vanished behind trees or hills, now and again, as the road curved with the bay, came into view, looming over everything.

“We’ve got to find something for ourselves to do, Ezra said.”These people may be all one big happy family, they better be, the only family on the whole planet all this time. But if I spend any much more time with them I think I’ll become as dippy as they are.”

Robert said, deprecatingly, that the Blakeneys weren’t very dippy. “Besides,” he pointed out, “sooner or later our children are going to have to intermarry with them, and—”

“Our children can intermarry with each other—”

“Our grandchildren, then. I’m afraid we haven’t the ancient skills necessary to be pioneers, otherwise we might go…just anywhere. There is, after all, lots of room. But in a few hundred years, perhaps less, our descendants would be just as inbred and, well, odd. This way, at least, there’s a chance. Hybrid vigor, and all that.”

They forded the river at a point just directly opposite The House. A thin plume of smoke rose from one of its great, gaunt chimneys. The wagon turned up an overgrown path which followed up the river. “Lots of boards,” said Young Little Bob. “Mum mum mum.”

There were lot of boards, just as he said, weathered a silver gray. They were piled under the roof of a great open shed. At the edge of it a huge wheel turned and turned in the water. It, like the roof, was made of some dull and unrusted metal. But only the wheel turned. The other machinery was dusty.

“Millstones,” Ezra said. “And saws. Lathes. And…all sorts of things. Why do they — Bob? Young Little Bob, I mean — why do you grind your grain by hand?”

The driver shrugged. “Have’s to make flour, a hey. Bread.”

Obviously, none of the machinery was in running order. It was soon obvious that no living Blakeney knew how to mend this, although (said Young Little Bob) there were those who could remember when things were otherwise: Old Big Mary, Old Little Mary, Old Whitey Bill—

Hayakawa, with a polite gesture, turned away from the recitation. “Ezra… I think we might be able to fix all this. Get it in running order. That would be something to do, wouldn’t it? Something well worth doing. It would make a big difference.”

Ezra said that it would make all the difference.

Shulamith’s child, a girl, was born on the edge of a summer evening when the sun streaked the sky with rose, crimson, magenta, lime, and purple. “We’ll name her Hope,” she said.

“Tongs to make tongs,” Mikicho called the work of repair. She saw the restoration of the water-power as the beginning of a process which must eventually result in their being spaceborne again. Robert and Ezra did not encourage her in this. It was a long labor of work. They pored and sifted through The House from its crumbling top to its vast, vast colonnaded cellar, finding much that was of use to them, much which — though of no use — was interesting and Intriguing — and much which was not only long past use but whose very usage could now be no more than a matter of conjecture. They found tools, metal which could be forged into tools, they found a whole library of books and they found the Blakeney-made press on which the books had been printed; the most recent was a treatise on the diseases of cattle, its date little more than a hundred years earlier. Decay had come quickly.

None of the Blakeneys were of much use in the matter of repairs. They were willing enough to lift and move — until the novelty wore off; then they were only in the way. The nearest to an exception was Big Fat Red Bob, the blacksmith; and, as his usual work was limited to sharpening plowshares, even he was not of much use. Robert and Ezra worked from sunrise to late afternoon. They would have worked longer, but as soon as the first chill hit the air, whatever Blakeneys were on hand began to get restless.

“Have’s to get back, now, a hey. Have’s to start back.”

“Why?” Ezra had asked, at first. “There are no harmful animals on Blakeneyworld, are there?”

It was nothing that any of them could put into words, either clearsound or mumbletalk. They had no tradition of things that go bump in the night, but nothing could persuade them to spend a minute of the night outside the thick walls of The House. Robert and Ezra found it easier to yield, return with them. There were so many false starts, the machinery beginning to function and then breaking down, that no celebration took place to mark any particular day as the successful one. The nearest thing to it was the batch of cakes that Old Big Mary baked from the first millground flour.

“Like longlong times,” she said, contentedly, licking crumbs from her toothless chops. She looked at the newcomers, made a face for their baby. A thought occurred to her, and, after a moment or two, she expressed it. “Not ours,” she said. “Not ours, you. Elses. But I rather have’s you here than that Runaway Little Bob back, or that Thin Jinnie… Yes, I rathers.”

There was only one serviceable axe, so no timber was cut. But Ezra found a cove where driftwood limbs and entire trees were continually piling up; and the sawmill didn’t lack for wood to feed it. “Makes a lot of boards, a hey,” Young Little Bob said one day.

“We’re building a house,” Robert explained.

The wagoner looked across the bay at the mighty towers and turrets, the great gables and long walls. From the distance no breach was noticeable, although two of the chimneys could be seen to slant slightly. “Lots to build,” he said. “A hey, whole roof on north end wing, mum mum, bad, it’s bad, hey.”

“No, we’re building our own house.”

He looked at them, surprised. “Wants to build another room? Easier, I say, me, clean up a no-one’s room. Oh, a hey, lots of them!”

Robert let the matter drop, then, but it could not be dropped forever, so one night after eats he began to explain. “We are very grateful for your help to us,” he said, “strangers as we are to you and to your ways. Perhaps it is because we are strange that we feel we want to have our own house to live in.”

The Blakeneys were, for Blakeneys, quiet. They were also uncomprehending.

“It’s the way we’ve been used to living. On many of the other worlds people do live, many families — and the families are all smaller than this, than yours, than the Blakeneys, I mean — many in one big house. But not on the world we lived in. There, every family has its own house, you see. We’ve been used to that. Now, at first, all five of us will live in the new house we’re going to build near the mill. But as soon as we can we’ll build a second new one. Then each family will have its own …”

He stopped, looked helplessly at his wife and friends. He began again, in the face of blank nonunderstanding, “We hope you’ll help us. We’ll trade our services for your supplies. You give us food and cloth, we’ll grind your flour and saw your wood. We can help you fix your furniture, your looms, your broken floors and walls and roofs. And eventually—”

But he never got to explain about eventually. It was more than he could do to explain about the new house. No Blakeneys came to the house-raising. Robert and Ezra fixed up a capstan and hoist, block-and-tackle, managed — with the help of the two women — to get their small house built. But nobody of the Blakeneys ever came any more with grain to be ground, and when Robert and Ezra went to see them they saw that the newly-sawn planks and the lathe-turned wood still lay where it had been left.

“The food we took with us is gone,” Robert said. “We have to have more. I’m sorry you feel this way. Please understand, it is not that we don’t like you. It’s just that we have to live our own way. In our own houses.”

The silence was broken by a baby Blakeney. “What’s ‘houses’?” he asked.

He was shushed. “No such word, hey,” he was told, too.

Robert went on, “We’re going to ask you to lend us things. We want enough grain and tatoplants and such to last till we can get our own crops in, and enough milk-cattle and draft-animals until we can breed some of our own. Will you do that for us?”

Except for Young Whitey Bill, crouched by the burning, who mumbletalked with “Rower, rower, rower,” they still kept silence. Popping blue eyes stared, faces were perhaps more florid than usual, large, slack mouths trembled beneath long hook-noses.

“We’re wasting time,” Ezra said.

Robert sighed. “Well, we have no other choice, friends… Blakeneys… We’re going to have to take what we need, then. But we’ll pay you back, as soon as we can, two for one. And anytime you want our help or service, you can have it. We’ll be friends again. We must be friends. There are so many, many ways we can help one another to live better — and we are all there are, really, of humanity, on all this planet. We—”

Ezra nudged him, half-pulled him away. They took a wagon and a team of horses, a dray and a yoke of freemartins, loaded up with food. They took cows and ewes, a yearling bull and a shearling ram, a few bolts of cloth, and seed. No one prevented them, or tried to interfere, as they drove away. Robert turned and looked behind at the silent people. But then, head sunk, he watched only the bay road ahead of him, looking aside neither to the water or the woods.

“It’s good that they can see us here,” he said, later on that day. “It’s bound to make them think, and, sooner or later, they’ll come around.”

They came sooner than he thought.

“I’m so glad to see you, friends!” Robert came running out to greet them. They seized and bound him with unaccustomed hands. Then, paying no attention to his anguished cries of “Why? Why?” they rushed into the new house and dragged out Shulamith and Mikicho and the baby. They drove the animals from their stalls, but took nothing else. The stove was now the major object of interest. First they knocked it over, then they scattered the burning coals all about, then they lit brands of burnwood and scrambled around with them. In a short while the building was all afire.

The Blakeneys seemed possessed. Faces red, eyes almost popping from their heads, they mumbled-shouted and raved. When Ezra, who had been working in the shed came running, fighting, they bore him to the ground and beat him with pieces of wood. He did not get up when they were through; it seemed apparent that he never would. Mikicho began a long and endless scream.

Robert stopped struggling for a moment. Caught off-guard, his captors loosened their hold — he broke away from their hands and his bonds, and, crying, “The tools! The tools!”, dashed into the burning fire. The blazing roof fell in upon him with a great crash. No sound came from him, nor from Shulamith, who fainted. The baby began a thin, reedy wail.

Working as quickly as they could, in their frenzy, the Blakeneys added to the lumber and waste and scraps around the machinery in the shed, soon had it all ablaze.

The fire could be seen all the way back.

“Wasn’t right, wasn’t right,” Young Red Bob said, over and over again.

“A bad thing,” Old Little Mary agreed.

Young Big Mary carried the baby. Shulamith and Mikicho were led, dragging, along. “Little baby, a hey, a hey,” she crooned.

Old Whitey Bill was dubious. “Be bad blood,” he said. “The elses women grow more babies. A mum mum,” he mused. “Teach them better. Not to funnywalk, such.” He nodded and mumbled, peered out of the window-look, his loose mouth widening with satisfaction. “Wasn’t right,” he said. “Wasn’t right. Another house. Can’t be another house, a second, a third. Hey, a hey! Never was elses but The House. Never be again. No.”

He looked around, his gaze encompassing the cracked walls, sinking floors, sagging roof. A faint smell of smoke was in the air. “The House,” he said, contentedly. “The House.”

The Goobers INTRODUCTION BY JAMES GUNN

Avram Davidson had an eye for the curious and the obscure. Not for the sort of absurdity that appears nowadays under the heading of “News of the Weird,” but those oddities of human behavior that get fossilized in language or in myth. Every now and then a postcard would materialize on my desk, dropped, as it were, from some invisible observer, with a report from Avram about some strangeness he had come across.

“Do you know,” one said, “that Gunn is the horse of MacDonald?” I think it was MacDonald; it could have been some other Scottish name.

That sensitivity to language was evident from his first published story, “My Boy Friend’s Name Is Jello,” and it was evident in everything he wrote, including the story at hand, “The Goobers.” “The Goobers” is unusual, however, in that it is narrated by a language-challenged boy and cannot display Avram’s customary virtuosity. But Avram was the master of his trade, and he could adapt his vocabulary when the story called for it — he could sound like a country boy.

The story was unusual, too, in being published in a place different from his favorite science fiction and fantasy magazines, particularly the magazine he edited for a time, Fantasy & Science Fiction. Swank was one of those men’s magazines that flourished for a season after the success of Playboy. But “Goobers” was typically Avram in its sly introduction of the fantastic into the everyday, and the startling impact of the figurative become literal.

WHEN I WAS A boy I lived for a while after my folks both died with my grandfather and he was one of the meanest, nastiest old men you’d ever want to know, only you wouldn’t’ve wanted to’ve known him. He had a little old house that there was nothing in the least cute or quaint about and it smelled of kerosene and bacon grease and moldy old walls and dirty clothes. He must’ve had one of the largest collections of tin cans filled up with bacon grease around there in those parts. I suppose he was afraid there might be a shortage of this vital commodity some day and he was sure as Hell going to be prepared for it.

The dirty old kitchen had two stoves, one wood and one kerosene, and although the thicket out behind the house had enough dead brush and timber in it to heat the place for years he was too damned lazy to swing an axe. Same thing with the clothes. Rather than pay a woman to do a laundry or perish forbid he should actually do it himself, he just let the clothes accumulate and then he’d go through it and use the least dirty ones all over again. Finally every so often it would get so bad that none of the other kids wanted to sit next to me and the teacher’d talk to the neighbors and then one or the other of them who happened to have a gasoline power washing-machine of the old-fashioned sort would come by with one of her kids and a wagon and a couple of bushel baskets.

“I don’t know how you let things get into such a condition, Mr. Harkness,” she’d say, wrinkling up her nose and breathing through her mouth. “You load these things up and I’ll wash’m for you, for pity’s sake, before they fester on you! You’ll both wind up in the pest house before you know it. Mercy!”

And the old turd would hobble around trying to look debilitated when actually he was as limber as a blacksnake when he wanted to be, frowning and making motions at me to get busy and trot the clothes out, and all the while he’d be whining things like, “I sure do thank you, Miz Wallaby …” or whatever in the Hell her name was, “I don’t know what we’d do without our neighbors, as the Good Book says. I’m just a poor sick old man and this Boy is too much for me, it’s not right I should have such a burden thrust upon me in the decline of my life, I haven’t got the strength for it, no I haven’t ma’am, he’ll be the death of me I predict, for he won’t work and he won’t listen and he won’t obey,” and so on and so forth.

Then, once she was out of sight and hearing, he’d sit back in his easy chair that had the bottom sprung out of it and he’d smirk and laugh and carry on about how he’d sure gotten the best of that deal, all right.

“Just set and wait long enough and let the word get around and sure enough, Boy, some damn fool will turn up and do the work! Well, I’m willing. Let’m. Good for their souls.” And he’d cackle and hee-haw and dribble Apple Twist tobacco juice onto his dirty old moustache.

He had no shame and he had no pride. Send me begging for food. He’d do that, although he had money for the bootlegger. And he’d send me to steal, too. “Don’t tell me you don’t want to, Boy. It’s the easiest thing there is. You got that big old hole in your overcoat pocket, alls you got to do, Boy, is just drop in a can of pork’n-beans or a box a sardines, let ’m fall into the lining, then just walk out as easy as you please with your two hands in plain sight, Boy, your two hands in plain sight. So don’t tell me you don’t want to, Boy. You want to eat, don’t you?”

He had it all figured out. It was a perfectly good sort of thing to steal from the A & P, because the A&P was a monopoly. And it was a perfectly good thing to steal from Ah Quong, because Ah Quong was a Chinaman. “Live on a fish-head and handful of rice a day, Boy, and that’s the reason us Americans can’t compete with ’m.”

He talked this way all around town and one day when I was “shopping” in the E Light Grocery Store, old Ah Quong waved me over. I was so afraid, I almost messed myself. I was sure old Ah Quong was going to brain me with a hatchet, having caught on to me, but all he did was to hand me a package. “You give you gland-fodda,” he said. I took it and all but ran.

What was there inside of it but a bag of fish-heads and a bag of rice.

You think he was ashamed?

“By grannies, Boy,” he said, running his tongue over his gummy old mouth, “we’ll make chowder. Nothing makes a better chowder than fish-heads. Rice is nice, too. Rice is a thing that settles mighty easy on the stomach.”

He claimed he’d been wounded in the Spanish and American War but was cheated out of a pension by the politicians. He claimed he’d been to the Yukon for gold. He claimed he’d been a railroad engineer and he claimed this and that and the other thing, but as I got older I come to realize that they were all lies, just lies. He’d rather work hard at a lie than tell the easy truth. But I was a while in catching on to this.

When I say he was mean, I mean he was mean. I don’t mean he’d ever actually beat me. He wanted to for sure, he’d almost tremble with eagerness to do it sometimes, pulling at his belt and yelling and swearing. But he was too afraid to, because even though I was only about ten years old I was mighty big for my age and getting bigger all the time, and I had all my teeth, too. He knew that in a few years I’d be big enough to take him on and stamp all over him.

So he’d threaten. Mean, nasty threats. “Won’t go to get an old man’s medicine just because it’s mizzling a few drops,” he’d yell — meaning, Won’t go pick up my booze when it’s raining fit to drown kittens. “I’ve had enough. Boy, hear me now! I’ve had enough! I’m turning you over to the Authorities! The County can take care of you from now on! We’ll see how you like it in the orphanage asylium from now on! Water mush three meals a day and the cat-o’-nine-tails if you look down your nose at it. I’m going now, I’m going now, do you hear me? To tell’m to come pick you up…”

He bundled himself up and skettered out, rain and all. Of course he was just going to get his pint of moon, but I didn’t know that. I spent that night moving from one hiding spot to another, my teeth chattering. And finally fell asleep under the bed.

It was after the Authorities started never coming that he began with other threats. “Boy, I don’t know what I’m going to do with you. Yes, I do know. I’m going to sell you, Boy—I’m going to sell you to the Goobers!”

Well, I didn’t know if the Goobers lived in the next township or if they were the name of a foreign power. All I knew was, they weren’t good. If they’d’ve been good my grandfather would sure’ve never’ve mentioned them. Nobody ever heard him threaten to put me with some family which would dress me right and keep me clean and feed me decent, that’s for sure. He’d even threatened once to feed me to the hogs — not our hogs, we never kept hogs, it would’ve been too much of a work to slop them — but there were plenty of hogs kept in the town — and everybody knew that hogs have been known to eat children, though of course not of my size and age, just babies, but I didn’t know that then.

“What’re Goobers?” I asked after a little while. Maybe they could’ve been a kind of animal, I thought, but in a minute I realized no they couldn’t, animals couldn’t buy anything, they had to be people. Maybe the Goobers was their name — like we were the Harknesses.

“You’ll wish you never come to know,” was his answer. He made his mean little eyes all small, then he opened them so wide that the whites showed all around and the red under lids. “That’s what you’ll wish! When I sell you to the Goobers! Which I’ll do by the Ever-Living Lord of Heaven and Earth…” He never went to church or said a prayer, mind you and he didn’t finish, just sucked in his scabby lower lip and nodded at me.

Maybe they were another kind of Authorities. State, maybe, instead of County. Mr. Smith, Chief Goober of the State…? And of course his helpers. Anyway, whatever it was they might want to buy me for, it couldn’t be good. I knew that. But I wanted to know more. So I asked Rodney Sloat. He wasn’t a friend of mine, I had no friends, but he was a non-enemy at least, and he was known to read books.

“Rodney, is there any such a thing as Goobers?”

He nodded his head. “They live in holes in the ground,” he said.

It must’ve been about ten years ago that all of a sudden it came to me that what he must’ve been thinking of was, of course, gophers—and I spilled my coffee all over myself and scalded my legs. All that time it was a mystery what he had in mind. But right just then, when he told me they lived in holes in the ground, it never occurred to me that this was the thing he meant. They lived in holes in the ground! Oh, this was worse than anything ever imagined.

The old dog saw how he’d gotten to me, and it was like the smell of blood. He never let up. It was, Do this, Do that, Don’t you dast do this or that, or I’ll sell you to the Goobers, sure as I’m alive… And I went about in fear of my life, almost, because although he’d never said that the Goobers would kill me — or even harm me — why, how did I know they wouldn’t? They lived in holes in the ground, didn’t they?

The old man didn’t have any friends any more than I had friends, but he had cronies, which was more than I had. One of them was a big ruined old hulk of a man with a long fat face all sunken in the middle and white stubble on it, but two little clumps of black eyebrow like curled-up caterpillars. And his name was Barlow Brook. Never just Barlow and never Brook or Mr. Brook.

I broke a plate.

“Got the dropsy,” said Barlow Brook.

Grandfather went into his song and dance. “Barlow Brook, the Boy is a torment to me by day and by night.”

“Take the hide off of him.”

“I swear, Boy, my patience is running out. There’s a show-down coming, do you hear me, Boy? It’s coming to that. I won’t whip you like Barlow Brook says, nooo. I’m too soft-hearted for that. But I warn you, Boy, and I call Barlow Brook to my witness, unless you mend your ways and mighty quick, I will sell you to the Goobers.”

Barlow Brook hooked open the door of the cold old dusty wood stove with his foot and spit into it. “George Wolf used to talk about the Goobers.” He reached himself a hunk of bread and one of our six hundred cans of bacon grease and smeared it on with his fingers and gobbled at it.

“George Wolf,” said my grandfather. “He was a bad one.”

“Bad as they come. Used to talk about the Goobers. Remember that girl at George Wolf’s?”

“Sassy girl?”

“Sassy as they come. You can’t make me, used to say. You ain’t my father, used to say. Ain’t even married to my mother. Try to catch her, he would. Couldn’t do it. Take care, he’d tell her. The Goobers will get hold of you one a these days.” Bread crumbs, greasy bread crumbs, coming out of his mouth, but I never missed a word, thick as he was speaking, about the sassy girl at George Wolf’s.

Barlow Brook washed down his dinner from the smoky-looking bottle, didn’t wipe it or his mouth either.

“She says to him, there ain’t no such of a thing as any Goobers. Goobers is peanuts, she says to him. George Wolf, he told her. That’s why they call’m Goobers, he says, they look like that. Only not so small. Not near so small. Got wrinkled old shells on. Dirty yellow colored. Even sometimes a couple of hairs. Watch out, sassy. They’ll git ahold of you. George Wolf.”

Barlow Brook put his moldering shoes up to the kerosene stove.

“You hear, now, Boy,” said my grandfather, smirking at me.

I swallowed. I asked what, what happened to the sassy girl at George Wolf’s. A quick, secret look passed between those two evil old men. Something had happened to her, I knew that. I know it now. And I’ve got my own idea as to what. But, then… When Barlow Brook said, “Came and got her,” I had no idea except for sure that the Goobers were the they.

You can be sure that I did my best not to break any more plates. I fetched and I carried. When my grandfather said “Come here, Boy,” I came a running. But he was a bully, and there is no satisfying of bullies. He knew I was in mortal terror of being sold to the Goobers and he never let up. There were hickory trees back in the thicket and one day he sent me to get some nuts. I didn’t mind at all and I went quick.

And I came back quick. There was a bad family by the name of Warbank lived outside of town, so bad that even my grandfather didn’t want anything to do with them. They were meaner than he was and they had a bunch of big yellow dogs meaner than they were. When I got to the hickory trees with my bucket, there was Ding Warbank and Cut Warbank with their own buckets, and their dogs.

“You get the Hell out of here,” said Ding.

“It ain’ your thicket,” I said.

“Get him,” said Cut. The dogs came after me and I ran. One of them got hold of my pants and it came away in his teeth. Behind me, Cut called them back.

“We better not see you here again,” yelled Ding.

My grandfather took on fierce. No trashy Warbanks, he yelled, were going to tell him he couldn’t have nuts from “his own” thicket.

“You go on back there,” he ordered. “Go on, now.”

I didn’t move.

“Go on, I tell you! Go on, go on, go on! You want me to sell you to the Goobers?”

Oh, I was afraid of that, all right. I was afraid of the Goobers. But I’d never really seen any. And I had seen those Warbanks’ yellow dogs, felt their white shiny teeth pulling that bite out of my pants legs. And I wouldn’t go.

He yelled and he raged. Then, all of a sudden, he quit. “All right, Boy,” he said. “All right, then. I am through warning you. In one hour’s time, as I live and as my name’s Dade Harkness, in one hour’s time I swear that I will sell you to the Goobers. Now git out my sight — but don’t you leave the yard!”

What he figured on, I guess, was that the Warbanks would be gone by then and I’d rush out and get his old hickory nuts and then he’d pardon me…for the time being.

I stumbled away. “It’s four o’clock,” he yelled after me. “They’ll be here at five. Don’t bother packing — you won’t need nothing!”

An hour like that, I never want to pass again. I hid here and hid there, till I was sweaty and dirty as never before. But I didn’t trust any place. By and by I got so thirsty that I had to come out and get to the pump. I could hear the old man muttering to himself.

His warning about not leaving the yard didn’t matter to me worth a poke of peas — he, well, what could he’ve done to me for disobeying? Sell me to the Goobers? He was going to do that anyway…he said. Of course, he’d said it before and he’d changed his mind before, too. I knew only one thing for sure, and that was that I couldn’t stand any more of it. Anything was likely to be better.

I’d never been to George Wolf’s place, but I knew where it was, and it wasn’t all that far away. About a mile or so off, on the old dirt road along the creek. It was an ugly old shack, never had a lick of paint on it, I guess, though I barely noted that any more than I did the broken windows or the roof falling in on one side and the weeds and underbrush choking up the front yard.

If George Wolf had been the original local acquaintance of the Goobers, then the Goobers couldn’t’ve lived too far away from his place. That was the way my thoughts were running — and I was running, too — right into the woods and down the hill and almost into the swamp that stopped me going further.

“Goobers!” I yelled. “Goobers! You old Goobers! You hear me?” I screamed.

There was nothing but the echo of my voice. It was darkish there, and clammy, and it smelled bad and I was hot and cold and sweaty and I took a big breath and went on yelling again.

“I don’t care if he sells me! I don’t care if you buy me! He isn’t going to go on scaring me like this! You want to buy me? You just come on and do it!”

Something was buzzing when I stopped again. Maybe just a dragon fly. Something moved in the gray underbrush. Maybe just the wind. I could see a hole in the ground not far off. Maybe it was just a plain, ordinary hole. But I didn’t wait to find out about any of this. I turned and ran and stumbled away.

Where? Why, where but back to the old man’s house, back to the only sort of home I knew. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I knew it was going to happen there. It had to.

I slowed down to a soft walk before I got to the yard. Probably he didn’t even know I’d gone, didn’t think I’d’ve dared to. And I could still hear him muttering to himself for a while. Then, suddenly, he stopped.

So did I. Stopped breathing, I mean. I guess. The bell in the old church was striking, and while I’d missed the start, there was no need for me to count the chimes. It only struck the hours. So it had to be five o’clock.

I darted a quick look at the vines hiding his chair from where I was standing. Chair, no, I couldn’t see it. But I could see him—see his head, anyway, for he’d gotten up, sort of and had poked his face forward. It had gone the most horrible ugly sort of putty color. His eyes had a glaze over them like cold fried eggs. I had to turn to see what he was looking at, though of course I knew.

There were the Goobers, coming up the back path.

They were under my height. There were three of them and they had dirty yellow-colored wrinkled old shells on, with even a few hairs. And dirt was clinging to them.

“Where Boy?” asked the first.

“Here Boy,” said the second.

“You sell Boy?” asked the third.

They walked up and squeezed my arms and felt my legs. They pulled on my nose and grabbed hold of my tongue. They spun me around and thumped me on the back. Then they quit.

“No,” said the first.

“No good,” said the second.

“No buy Boy,” said the third.

They turned around and walked off. I watched them go, not even turning around when I heard my grandfather keel over and thump the porch floor.

After that, of course, I made his life a living Hell until I ran off two years later at the age of twelve, and there wasn’t a damned thing the old bastard could do about it.

The Power of Every Root INTRODUCTION BY THOMAS M. DISCH

In 1964, having been an official SF writer for all of two years, I set off for Mexico to write my first novel. There I moved into the shell lately emptied by my sometime editor at F&SF, Avram Davidson. I had never met Avram, but having inherited his home, garden, landlady, and friends in Mexico City, I came to feel a peculiar intimacy, quite as though I were leading his life as much as my own, a sense that would be heightened when, later, I learned in a letter from Avram that a young woman who’d been his traveling companion in Belize had run off with Tony, a dashing young con man whom I’d earlier befriended at a beach on the Pacific coast, where he was selling solid gold watches to gas station attendants.

Like Avram, I fell in love with the raffishness of the Mexico that opened its doors and its cantinas to visiting gringos. Unlike Avram, I never became so well assimilated that I could make that love yield an homage as affectionate and closely observed as “The Power of Every Root.” Reading it again, now that my expatriate days are over (and Avram’s, too), I can smell all the spices and fetors of the marketplace he inventories so lovingly in this tale — and remember the heady freedoms of being a penny-a-word writer living high off the hog in a lush garden between two great volcanoes.

CARLOS RODRIGUEZ NUÑEZ, A police officer of the municipality of Santo Tomas, sat in the private waiting room of Dr. Olivera considering his situation. Perhaps he ought not to be there at all.

Not the private waiting room in particular: it was usually empty except during the week following major fiestas, when it was likely to be much occupied by the younger sons of prosperous families who had (the younger sons) visited the Federal Capital, touring the libraries and theaters and museums and other buildings of the national patrimony…but never, never las casitas. The reason, therefore, why they were here?

“A strain, Sir Doctor. Without doubt, nothing more than a strain …! Woe of me, Sir Doctor! What an enormous needle! Surely — just for a tiny, little strain?”

The physician would smile benignly, speak soothingly, continue charging his syringe with penicillin.

None of this was applicable to the police officer Carlos. In fact, it was not applicable to the younger sons of the non-prosperous families, who — for one thing — could only afford to visit the District Capital (or, at most, the State one) on fiestas; and — for another — did not take their subsequent difficulties to a physician: they took them to the curandero. Carlos now wondered if he should not do the same. No… No… The social status of a government employee, a civil servant, might be imperiled by visiting a native herbalist and wizard. Besides, the physician’s public waiting room was just that: public. Let him be seen there, word would get around, Don Juan Antonio would ask questions. Don Juan Antonio was jefe de policia, and it seemed to Carlos that his superior’s manner to him of late had lacked cordiality. But, then, it seemed to Carlos that everybody’s attitude toward him of late lacked cordiality. He could not understand why this should be. He was a very gentle policeman; he took only the customary little bites of graft; he did not hit drunks hard; he gave cigarettes to prisoners. Often.

Why, therefore, people should — suddenly, sometimes only for matters of a few seconds — change, become hideous, diabolical, when they looked at him, he could not know. Their faces would swell, become even more horrible than those of the masked moros or the judases in the fiesta parades had seemed to him as a child. The air would become hot; voices would croak and mutter ugly things; he had difficulty breathing, sometimes. And his head—

A large, tinted oval photograph of old Doña Caridad, Dr. Olivera’s mother, glared at him from the wall. Her lips writhed. She scowled. Carlos got up hastily. Doña Caridad’s unexpected and totally unprovoked hostility was more than he could stand. He had his hand out to open the outer door when the inner door opened and the physician himself stood there — momentarily surprised, immediately afterwards urbane as always. Bowing him in. Doña Caridad was as immovable and expressionless as before.

There was a formal exchange of courtesies. Then silence. Dr. Olivera gestured toward a publication on his desk. “I have just been reading,” he said, “in the medical journal. About eggs. Modern science has discovered so much about eggs.” Carlos nodded. Dr. Olivera placed his fingertips together. He sighed. Then he got up and, with a sympathetic expression, gestured for Carlos to drop his trousers.

“Ah, no, Sir Medico,” the officer said hastily. “No, no, it isn’t anything like that.” Dr. Olivera’s mouth sagged. He seemed to hesitate between annoyance and confusion. Carlos breathed in, noisily, then said, all in a rush, “My head is bursting, I have dizziness and pains, my eyes swell, my chest burns, my heart also, and — and—” He paused. He couldn’t tell about the way people’s faces changed. Or about, just now, for example, Doña Caridad. Dr. Olivera might not be trusted to keep confidence. Carlos choked and tried to swallow.

The physician’s expression had grown increasingly reassured and confident. He pursed his lips and nodded. “Does the stomach work?” he inquired. “Frequently? Sufficiently frequently?”

Carlos wanted to tell him that it did, but his throat still was not in order, and all that came out was an uncertain croak. By the time he succeeded in swallowing, the señor medico was speaking again.

“Ninety percent of the infirmities of the corpus,” he said, making serious, impressive sounds with his nose, “are due to the stomach’s functioning with insufficient frequency. Thus the corpus and its system become poisoned. Sir Police Officer — poisoned! We inquire as to the results — We find—” he shook his head rapidly from side to side and he threw up his hands “—that pains are encountered. They are encountered not only in the stomach, but in,” he enumerated on his fingers, “the head. The chest. The eyes. The liver and kidneys. The urological system. The upper back. The lower back. The legs. The entire corpus, sir, becomes debilitated.” He lowered his voice, leaned forward, half-whispered, half-hissed, “One lacks capacity …” He closed his eyes, compressed his lips, and leaned back, fluttering his nostrils and giving short little up-and-down nods of his head. His eyes flew open, and he raised his brows. “Eh?”

Carlos said, “Doctor, I am thirty years old, I have always until now been in perfect health, able, for example, to lift a railroad tie. My wife is very content. Whenever I ask her, she says,¿Como no? And afterwards she says, ¡Ay, bueno! I do not lack—” A baby cried in the public waiting room. Dr. Olivera got up and took out his pen.

“I will give you a prescription for an excellent medication,” he said, making a fine flourish and heading the paper with a large, ornate, Sr. C. Rodriguez N. He wrote several lines, signed it, blotted it, handed it over. “One before each alimentation for four days, or until the stomach begins to function frequently… Do you wish the medicine from me, or from the farmacia?”

Discouraged, but still polite, Carlos said, “From you, Doctor. And… Your honorarium?”

Dr. Olivera said, deprecatingly, “With the medication…ten pesos. For you, as a civil servant. Thank you…ah! And also: avoid eggs. Eggs are difficult to digest — they have very, very large molecules.”

Carlos left via the private waiting room. Doña Caridad looked away, contemptuously. Outside, those coarse fellows, woodcutters, the cousins Eugenio and Onofrio Cruz, nudged one another, sneered. Carlos looked away.

He crossed the plaza, vaguely aware of its smells of grilling, crisp pork carnitas, ripe fruit, wood smoke. His head and eyes and throat were misbehaving again. He remembered that the Forestal authorities had forbidden woodcutting for a month as a conservation measure and that he had meant to look out for possible violations. A toothless old Indian woman with bare, gray feet, padded by, mumbling a piece of fried fish. Her face twisted, became huge, hideous. He shut his eyes, stumbled. After a moment he felt better and went on up the steps of the covered market and into the excusado. As always he received mild pleasure from not having to pay the twenty centavos charge. He closed the door of the booth, dropped the pills in the bowl, flushed it. So. Saved twenty centavos, spent — wasted — ten pesos. On the wall was a new crop of graffiti. A harlot is the mother of Carlos Rodriguez N. read one. Ordinarily he would have read it without malice, even admiring the neat moderation of the insult — by crediting him with two family names, albeit reducing one to the formal initial, the writer had avoided accusing him of illegitimacy. Or he might have remarked to himself the effects of enforcing the lowered compulsory school entrance age: the obscenities were increasingly being written lower and lower on the walls.

But now — now—

Incoherent with rage, he rushed, shouting, outside. And almost ran into his superior, Don Juan Antonio, the chief of police. Who looked at him with the peculiar look so familiar nowadays, asked, “Why are you shouting?” And sniffed his breath.

Accepting this additional insult, Carlos muttered something about boys begging in the market. Don Juan Antonio brushed this aside, gestured toward the other end of the plaza. “Twenty auto-buses of students from the high schools and colleges of the State Capital are stopping over here before they continue on to the National Youth Convention. Must I direct traffic myself while you are chasing beggar boys?”

“Ah, no, señor jefe!” Carlos walked hastily to where the yellow buses were slowly filing into the plaza and began directing them to the somewhat restricted place available for parking — the rest of the space being already occupied by vendors of black pottery marked with crude fish, brown pottery painted with the most popular women’s names, parrot chicks, Tabasco bananas, brightly colored cane-bottom chairs, pineapples sliced open to reveal the sweet contents, shoes, rubber-tire-soled sandals, holy pictures and candles, rebozos, mantillas, pear-shaped lumps of farm butter, grilled strips of beef, a hundred varieties of beans, a thousand varieties of chili peppers, work shirts, bright skirts, plastic tablecloths, patriotic pictures, knitted caps, sombreros: the infinite variety of the Latin American marketplace — he called out to the bus driver, banging his hand on the bus to indicate that the vehicle should come back a little bit more…a little bit more…a little bit—

Crash!

He had backed the bus right into the new automobile belonging to Don Pacifico, the presidente municipal! The driver jumped out and cursed; the mayor jumped out and shouted; the students descended; the population assembled; the police chief came running and bellowing; Señorita Filomena — the mayor’s aged and virginal aunt — screamed and pressed her withered hands to her withered chest; her numerous great-nephews and great-nieces began to cry — Carlos mumbled, made awkward gestures, and that ox, the stationmaster, a man who notoriously lacked education, and was given to loud public criticism of the police: he laughed.

The crowd became a mob, a hostile mob, the people of which continuously split in two in order to frighten and confuse the miserable police officer with their double shapes and now dreadful faces. It was horrible.

Lupe’s body, one was always aware, was altogether independent of Lupe’s dress. It did not depend upon it for support, nor did it quarrel or struggle to escape from it, but, firm and smooth and pleasant, it announced both its presence and its autonomy and, like the dress itself, was always bright and clean and sweet. Others might doubt the fidelity of a comely wife, but not Carlos.

Lupe was the best thing about the ranchito Rodriguez, but there were other good things about it — everything, in fact, about it was good. The large brown adobe bricks of the walls were well-made, well-cured, well-set in their places; the tiles of the roof neither cracked nor leaked nor slipped. Pajaritos hopped about from perch to perch in their wooden cages, chirping and singing, outdone in their bright colors only by the dozens of flowering plants set in little pots or cans. Carlos and Lupe never had to buy corn to make nixtamal, the dough for tortillas or tamales; they grew their own, and this supplied them as well with husks to wrap and boil the tamales in, and when the cobs had dried they made good fuel. There was an apple tree and a great tall old piñole which supplied them with blue-gray nuts whose kernels were as sweet as the apples. The goat had always fodder enough, the pig was fine and fat, and half a dozen hens relieved them of any need to depend upon the chancy eggs of the market women. Not the least of the ranchito’s many amenities was its stand of fleshy maguey cactus whose nectar gave an aguamiel from which, mixed with the older and stronger madre de pulque, came the delicious and finished milk-colored drink which made it unnecessary for either Carlos or Lupe to patronize the bare and shabby, sour-smelling, fly-ridden pulquerias.

True, there were no children, but they had only been married two years. It was Carlos’s experienced observation that it sometimes took longer than that before children started arriving, and that once they did start, they generally continued in sufficient quantity.

The ranchito was good; it was very, very good — but there was all the difference in the world between being a civil servant with a country place and being a peasant. Lupe’s figure, with its small but lovely curves, would become stooped and stringy and prematurely old. Carlos would wear the patched, baggy cottons of the campesino instead of his neat gabardines. That is, if he merely lost his job. What costume they wore, those unfortunates in the Misericordia, the great walled hospital for the mentally infirm, he did not know.

This institution, long since secularized, had been originally of religious foundation, and Carlos, remembering that, considered the possibility of discussing his problem with the local priest. He did not consider it long. True, Carlos was a believer, and wore no less than two medals on a golden chain against his strong chest. He never went to church: also true. For one thing, it was not very male to go to church. That was for women. And old men. For another, it was regarded that servants of the secular state should neither persecute nor patronize religious functions. Also, the priest, that amiable and gregarious man, might accidently let slip a wrong word in a wrong ear. Of course it was not to be thought for a moment that he would betray the seal of the confessional. But this — this horror of Carlos’s days of late — this was no matter to confess. It was not a sin, it was a misfortune. He could seek the cura’s friendly counsel no more. That worthy man mingled much with the caciques, those of political importance. A single sympathetic reference to “poor Carlos,” and “poor Carlos” might find himself displaced in office by a cacique’s nephew, cousin, brother-in-law — the precise degree of relationship hardly mattered.

Not with Don Juan Antonio’s warning words still in his ears.

“One more mistake, young one! Just one more—!”

Carlos blinked. He hadn’t realized he’d come so far from town. Behind and to his left was the Holy Mountain, the high hill on which had stood the pyramid in pagan times, from which now sounded the discordant bells of the little church. Behind and to his right was the concrete circle of the bullring. Ahead, the footpath he had for some reason been following broke into a fork. The one to the right led to the little house of his maternal aunt Maria Pilar, a woman of strong personality, who inclined to take advantage of his infrequent visits by asking him to mend her roof or say the rosary or perhaps both. He did not desire to see Tia Maria Pilar. Certainly not now. Why, then, was he here?

The path to the left, where did it lead? Eventually to the tiny hamlet of San Juan Bautista. Before that? It paralleled the railroad tracks a long while. It provided access to a well. A small river frequented by washer-women and occasional gringo artists. Various tracts of woodland. Cornfields. And the isolated house of Ysidro Chache, the curandero.

Carlos took off his cap and wiped his forehead. Cautiously, he looked from form side to side. Casually, very casually. Far, far off, a tiny figure toiled across the fields leading a laden burro. It was entirely possible that the burro carried a combustible — charcoal, made from illegally cut wood. Or, more simply, the wood itself. Those fellows were so bold! But it was too far away, and besides, that whole matter would wait for another time. What was immediately of concern was that no one, apparently, was observing him, Carlos.

He replaced his cap. Then, still casual — bold, in fact — he turned and took the path to the left.

Ysidro Chache was a wiry, ugly little man with one bad eye, the subject of occasional and uneasy low-toned talk. Could he see out of it, or not? Some held that he could, that, indeed, he could turn his eyes in different directions at once, like a mule. It was also remarked how popular, despite his ugliness, Ysidro Chache was among women. Not ugly ones alone, either. True, he was male. He was very male. In fact, a certain Mama Rosa, shameless, had been heard to say, “Don Ysidro is a bull, and the other men are merely oxen! And he is generous, too …”

But the other men had a different explanation. “It is his charms, his love-potions,” was the whispered consensus. Often, after such a conversation, more than one man, himself loudly and boastfully male in his cantina conversation, would sneak off to the lone small house in the countryside where the healer lived by himself with no steady company except a parrot reputed to be older than the Conquest and to speak all languages; as well as an odd-looking dog which could speak none. Someone, once, had been absurd enough to maintain that this dog came from a breed of barkless ones — but it was known that the man’s father had been a foreigner (a Turk, or a Lutheran, or a gringo, or a Jew), and this had added to the absurdity of his contention.

It stood to obvious reason that Ysidro Chache’s magic had deprived the dog of his bark in order to demonstrate how clearly he had no need of it to warn him. It was not even fierce! What ordinary person in the world would keep a dog for any other purposes? It was enough to make one shiver!

The path cut into the shoulder of a sloping hill and passed, slowly, by still sturdy though much overgrown stone walls, from the sunlight into the shadow. It was cool in the woods. Perhaps it was no more silent here, perhaps only suddenly it seemed so. Almost, he could wish for the thudding sound of an illicit axe and its flat echo. But he heard none. Only the stealthy movement of something in the underbrush. Then, suddenly, he was at the house. The ancient parrot muttered something, the dog looked up, then down, indifferently. The police officer approached, slowly, announced himself without confidence. No one answered. From somewhere came the sound of a high, weak voice chanting or crooning. The parrot scowled, suddenly became two scowling parrots, but this lasted for only an eye-blink. Carlos was encouraged rather than otherwise…it did seem as though the potent influence of the curandero and his house was itself sufficient to diminish whatever was wrong with him. He announced himself again and pushed open the door.

The house was dim (naturally, properly) and smelled (not at all dimly) of wood smoke, herbs, rum, and a number of other things, including — recognized at once although for the first time — Ysidro Chache himself.

Who was squatting on the floor, singing his strange song, scattering his colored seeds from a painted gourd onto the floor and examining the pattern in the single thin shaft of sunlight, then scooping up the seeds to cast them down again. Abruptly his song ceased. “Abuelita Ana must die,” he said, matter-of-factly. His voice no longer high and weak, but deep and strong.

Carlos tensed. Was the curandero intending — Then he remembered who Abuelita Ana was, and relaxed. “She has been dying for as long as I can remember her,” he said. Grandma Ana, with her twenty layers of garments, her tray of pills and salves and lotions and elixirs, palms and beads and holy pictures, her good luck charms and her patent medicines with the likenesses and signatures of grave and bearded Spanish doctors…and most of all, her long and thick and filthy yellow-gray and black fingernails.

Ysidro Chache nodded. “I have been keeping her alive,” he said. “But I can’t do it any longer. Perhaps today… Perhaps tomorrow …” He shrugged. “Who knows?”

“And how are you, Sir Healer?”

“I? I am very well. The Lord and the saints love me.” He snickered.

Remembering that he was a policeman and that the good offices of a policeman were not despised, Carlos said, “No one has been bothering you, I hope.”

The medicine man opened his good and bad eyes very wide. “Bothering me? Who would dare?” he said, “but someone has been bothering you.”

Carlos Rodriguez Nuñez stared. He sighed, and his sigh broke into a sob. With his voice not always under control, he told the healer of his troubles…the ugly voices heard, the ugly faces seen, the pains of body and head, dizziness, doubling of vision, unfriendliness and enmity of people, and — finally — fear that he might lose his job.

Or worse.

The curandero’s expression, as he listened and nodded was not totally dissimilar from that of Doctor Olivera. “Pues… I don’t think we have to deal here with the results of impiety,” he said slowly, with a reflective air. “You’re not a hunter or a woodcutter; you’d have little occasion to offend the Deer people or the Small People…even if you had, this is not the way in which they generally take revenge. I say, generally. But — for the moment — this is something we’ll leave to one side.

“What then? The Evil Eye? One hears a lot of nonsense about it. As a matter of fact, grown men are very rarely the victims of the Evil Eye: it is the children whom one must look out for …”

He discussed various possibilities, including malfunctioning of the stomach, or its functioning with insufficient frequency, a difficulty for which he, Ysidro Chache, had many excellent herbs. “But—” the policeman protested, “it is not that. I assure you.”

Chache shrugged. “What do you suspect, yourself, then?”

In a low, low voice, Carlos murmured, “Witchcraft. Or, poison.”

Chache nodded, slowly, sadly. “Eighty percent of the infirmities of the corpus,” he admitted, “proceed from one or the other of these two causes.”

“But who—? But why—?”

“Don’t speak like an idiot!” the medicine man snapped. “You are a police officer, you have a hundred thousand enemies, and each one has a hundred thousand reasons. Why is a little consequence; as for who, while it would be helpful if we knew and could lay a counter-curse, it is not essential. We do not know who, we only know you, and it is with you that we must concern ourselves.”

Humbly, Carlos muttered, “I know. I know.”

He watched while Chache cast the seeds again, made him a guardero out of shells and stones and tufts of bright red wool, censed him with aromatic gum and fumed him with choking herbs, and performed the other rituals of the healer’s arts, concluding his instructions with a warning to be exceedingly careful of what he ate and drank.

The officer threw up his head and hands in despair. “A man with a thousand eyes could be taken off guard for long enough — If I turn my head in the cantina for a second, someone could drop a pinch of something into my food or drink—”

“Then eat only food of your wife’s preparing, and as for drink, I will give you a little charm which will protect you for either rum or aguardiente.”

Vague about the amount of his honorario, Chache would say only that the cost of the first visit was twenty pesos, including the two charms. He directed that the next visit be in three days. Carlos walked away feeling partly reassured and partly re-afraid. The smell of the magic infumations was still in his nostrils, but, gradually, in the vanishing day, it was succeeded by others. A haze hung over everything. Despite official exhortations in the name of science and patriotism, the ignorant small farmers, and the people of the Indian ejidos, whose lands ringed around the municipality had begun the annual practice of burning their fields and thickets to prepare for the corn crop. It was perhaps not the best season, this one chosen by the Forestal, to have forbidden illicit wood cutting and burning; it would be difficult to distinguish one smoke from another at any distance — or, at night, one fire from another. It was a season when the land seemed to have reverted, in a way, to pagan times; there was fire all around, and always fire, and not infrequently some confused and terrified animal would find itself cut off, surrounded, and would burn to death. But these offenses against, say, the Deer People, Carlos left to the offending Indios, and to the curandero.

Another and lighter haze hung over the town and its immediate environs. It was present twice daily, at early morning and at dusk: the haze of wood and charcoal fires which bore the faint but distinctive odor of tortillas, reminiscent of their faint but distinctive flavor, toasting on griddles. And the pat-pat-pat of the hands of the women making them.

Carlos had come to prefer the darkness. In it he could see no hostile, no distorted faces. Seeing fewer objects, he would be disturbed by fewer objects malevolently doubling themselves. If only at such times his irregular pains and distress would diminish as well… They seemed to, a little. But a little was not enough. Perhaps the things the curandero Ysidro Chache had done would diminish them much. Hastily, furtively, in the gathering darkness, Carlos fell to his knees and said a short, quick prayer to La Guadalupana.

It was in his mind that his wife’s full name was, after all, Maria de Guadalupe.

“Tu cafe,” she said, pouring it as soon as he entered; hot and strong and sweet. “¿Tu quieres una torta?”

He proceeded cautiously with his supper at first. But although his sense of taste was distorted, imparting a faintly odd flavor to the food, it seemed that tonight his throat at least would give him no difficulty. Afterwards, as she finished washing the dishes, he approached and embraced her, one arm around her waist, one hand on her breast, and thoughtfully and gently took her ear between his teeth. She said, “¿Como no?” as usual.

But afterward she did not, as usual, say, “¡Ay, bueno!”

And afterward, also, in the bitterness of failure and the fatigue of despair, turning his thoughts to other things, he had his idea.

Surely, if he were to pull off a great coup — arrest someone besides a troublesome borracho for a change, for example — surely this would restore his so-greatly fallen credit with the police department, to wit, Don Juan Antonio. At least so he reasoned. He had the vague notion that the plan was not perfect, that, if he considered it carefully, he might find flaws in it. But he didn’t wish to consider it that carefully; the effort was too great; there were too many voices muttering ugly things and distracting and bothering him, and besides, if he were to decide against the plan, he would have no reason for getting up. His pains were worse, and he knew he could not get back to sleep again. Therefore he should get up, and if he got up, there was nothing to do but leave the house.

And therefore he might as well try to carry out his plan.

He rose and dressed, buckled on his gun-belt, reassured himself of his flashlight, and went outside.

Dawn was yet not even a promise on the horizon. The stars were great white blazes in the black sky. He searched for Venus, hugest of all, remembering stories of how important she had been in the old religion, before the Conquest — but either she had not yet risen to be the morning star, or he was looking in the wrong place, or some tree or hill obscured her—

He did not need his flashlight yet, knowing the way hereabouts as well as he did his own house, or his own wife. He knew the very tree stump which, suddenly, unkindly…but, somehow, not unexpectedly…began to croak, “Carlo’ el loco. Carlo’ el loco. Soon you will be encountered in the Misericordia. ¡Ja ja! ¡Loco Carlo’!”

The officer drew his gun, then thrust it back. A bullet was undoubtedly of no use. “Wait,” he said. “As soon as it is day and I have finished with my other duty, I will return and cut you up and pour petroleo on you and burn you up. Wait.”

The tree trunk fell silent at once and tried to hide itself in the blackness. But Carlo knew very well where it was, and passed on, giving many grim nods as he thought of it. He strained his ears but heard nothing of what he hoped he might. Doubtless the malefactors had done their original work kilometers away, back in the wooded slopes of the mountains. Deer poachers worked the same territory, usually in pairs, one to hold the bright light to attract and fascinate the animal, and one to shoot it as it stood exposed. One man could carry half a deer easily enough. Such poachers needed neither roads nor paths either coming or going; it was useless to attempt to catch them.

Not so, however, with the woodcutters, those thieves of natural resources and national patrimony, denuding the forested hills and leaving them a prey to erosion! The more he thought of them, the more he realized the iniquity of their crimes. Moreover, look what great rogues they were even when in town — Consider how those cousins Eugenio and Onofrio Cruz (a choice pair!) had sneered and gibbered at him only the day before, in the plaza. In fact, on reflection, not only yesterday, either. And why? For no reason. So, clearly, Carlos’s previous attitude had been wrong. Woodcutters were not mere poor devils toiling hard to earn their bread, and currently forbidden even to toil by burócratas intent on their own devious ends; merely to confront the axe-men and issue warnings was not enough. The darkness of the woods became overshot with red, scarlet and crimson. They needed to be taught one good lesson, once and for all. Ladrones. Hijos de putas.

But even two men could not carry on their backs enough wood from forest to town to make it worth the effort. A woodcutter required a horse, or a mule, or, at very least, a burro. Which confined him largely to paved or at any rate beaten thoroughfares. There were at least twenty such on this side of the town, but the nearer they approached to town the more they combined, so that, for the practical purposes of the moment, there were only five to be considered. The San Benito road led into the main highway too far south; daylight would find them in the open. The road of the old convent led past a checkpoint. A third was too long and winding; a fourth had in recent months become identical with one of the local creeks. Carlos was not very strong on arithmetic, but he felt fairly certain that this left but one road. To his surprise, he realized that he had, presumably while calculating, reached just that one. It now remained to consider exactly, or even approximately, where on that road might be the best place for his emboscada. Too close to the woods, the criminals might escape back into them. Too near the town, they might find refuge in house or patio. An ideal situation would be a place where the road was not only sunken but surrounded by walls on either side, not too near and not too far. Such a situation was not only ideal, it was actual, and it contained, moreover, a niche in which had once reposed an image of La Guadalupana before the Republic was secularized. Carlos snickered, thinking of the astonishment of the rogues as he sprang out upon them from that niche, pistol in hand!

He was still snickering when something seized hold of his foot and sent him sprawling.

The fall jarred his back and all his other bones. It sickened him, and all his quiescent pains flared up. Voices hooted and gibbered and mocked; faces made horns and spat at him. He lay there in the road, fighting for breath and for reason, sobbing. By and by he was able to breathe. The darkness was only darkness once again. He groped about, his fingers recoiled from what they found, then groped again and found the flashlight. He gave a long, high cry of anguish and of terror at what the yellow beam disclosed lying there in the road: the body of a man lying on its back in a pool of blood. It had shirt and pants and hands and feet, all as a man should.

But where a man’s head should be, it had no head.

Slowly, slowly, the sky lightened. Mist mingled with the smoke and obscured the sun. Carlos Rodriguez N., with burning and smarting eyes, paced back and forth in the road. He had been doing so for an hour, two hours, three — who knows how long? He dared not sleep. Suppose someone were to steal the body? He had not dared return to town and report the killing, for the same reason. He had been sustained in his vigil by the certain knowledge that daylight would bring people out on the road, and that he could send one of them into town with his message — preferably one of a group of mature and respectable ciudadanos whose testimony about the body would be incontrovertible. But as it happened, the first ones along the road were a pair of boys taking four cows out to pasture.

Or one boy taking two cows. It was no longer possible for Carlos to be sure if he were seeing single or double. One boy and two cows. Two boys and four cows. One body with no head. Two bodies with no heads. The sky was gray and cold and the treacherous sun feared to show itself. Eventually he was satisfied there were two boys, for one of them agreed to run back with the message and Carlos could see him running at the same time he could see the other boy drive the cows off the road so as to get them past the body. Life or death, the cows must eat. The boys were out of sight, the cattle, too, and someone was shouting, still shouting, had been shouting forever. With a shock, he recognized his own voice, and fell silent.

Flies began to settle on the blood and on the body. Very soberly, very tiredly, Carlos observed the corpse. He did not recognize it. It looked neither familiar nor strange; it looked merely at rest, with no more problems. It didn’t even seem so odd any more — one had heard before of murderers removing the heads of their victims in order to destroy or at least delay identification… Rest. And no problems. How long would it take the boy to get back to town? — and how long for Don Juan Antonio to arrive? And then? And what then? Would he commend Carlos? Curse him? Discharge him? Arrest him? Commit him?

The man’s arms and legs began to tremble. He tried to repress the tremors, failed, seated himself on a stone, placed his back against the side of the roadside wall, placed his revolver in his lap, and without volition or premonition immediately fell asleep. His head jerked back and he jumped forward and upward with a cry of alarm, thrusting his hands forth to catch the revolver. He did not catch it, neither did he see it fall, neither could he find it. His shout and motion startled the flies and they rose from the drying blood with an ugly, thrumming buzz. Carlos pitched forward onto his hands and knees, stared stupidly at the dark pool with its blue lights. The blood was still there.

But the body was gone.

Everything whirled around and around, and Carlos whirled with it, staggering along the road with arms outstretched to keep from falling. He had slept, he had slept, after the hours of keeping awake to guard the body in the darkness, he had fallen asleep in the earliest daylight! Now he was worse off than ever, for now Don Juan Antonio knew there was a body — and how would Carlos be able to account for its loss? Weeping, sobbing, cursing, stumbling along, he knew that he could account for that no more than for the loss of his revolver. He was certainly doomed.

Unless — Unless — he provided another body, so no one would know the difference.

Below him he saw the railroad tracks. Half-sliding, he descended the slope and ran along the rails. He knew who had, who must have done this to him! Who else but the woodcutters, those thieves and sons of harlots? Why else but to take revenge upon him for his intended capture? — and to prevent his ever doing so! But he would show them, now and forever. They had incited the entire poblacion against him, but he would show them… He came to a switch and just a short distance away was the equipment shed of the maintenance crew, with its weathered inscription: This Edifice And Its Entire Contents Is The Property Of The Republic. With his shoulder skewed around he burst it open, seized up the first grass-machete he saw, and rushed out again. He had time? Would he be in time? Would Don Juan Antonio have been awake? Been elsewhere? How soon would he start out? Carlos prayed for time to stand in between Don Juan Antonio and the barbarous plot of the woodcutters.

And luck was with him. The mists parted as he came back over the slope and there down below was a man leading a burro laden with wood. Cautiously and carefully, so shrewdly that he was obliged to smile to himself and to stifle his own laughter, Carlos approached bent over and on crouching knees. The burro approached, the burro passed, Carlos rose to his feet and darted forward on his toes. The machete swung. The body fell, spouting blood. Carlos kicked the fallen head like a football, watched it drop into the underbrush. He threw the body over his shoulder and ran and ran and ran and ran.

“Carlos,” said Don Juan Antonio. “Carlos! Do you hear me? Stop that! Stop that and listen to me! Do you hear—”

“No use, jefe,” said his assistant, Raimundo Cepeda. “It’s the shock — the shock. He won’t come out of it for a while.”

Don Juan Antonio wiped his face with an impeccably ironed and cologne-scented handkerchief. “Not he alone… I am also in such a situation. Dreadful. Horrible. People do not realize—”

“Poor young man,” sighed the elderly jailor, Uncle Hector, shaking his head. “Only consider—”

Don Juan Antonio nodded vigorously. “By all means let us consider. And let us consider the whole case. Thus I reconstruct it:

“We have the precious pair, the coarsely handsome cousins Eugenio and Onofrio Cruz. Ostensibly and even occasionally woodcutters. On the side — drunkards, when they had the money; thieves…and worse…when they had the chance. Partners against the rest of the world, fighting often between themselves. Last night they go out to cut wood, illegally. And on the way back a quarrel breaks out. Who knows why? For that matter, perhaps Eugenio merely decided on the spur of the moment to kill Onofrio. At any rate, he does kill him, with a blow of his axe. Then, to conceal the identity of the corpus, with the same axe he decapitates it. And returns to his hut, carrying the head. Also, the defunct’s wallet.

“Once there, the thought occurs to him that he should not have left the body. With daylight coming, it will soon be found. So he prepares a pile or pyre of wood. With all the burning of fields and thickets, one more smoke will hardly be observed. Should anyone smell anything, they will assume it to be a trapped deer. And he goes back to gain the body. But meanwhile the police have not been idle. Officer Carlos Rodriguez Nuñez is not only up and around, but he has also located the corpus and is guarding it. Eugenio conceals himself. By and by the sun begins to rise, the little brothers Santa Anna approach, and Carlos sends one of them with a message to me. But the child is, after all, only a child; he doesn’t go to the right place, wanders around, time is lost. Meanwhile Carlos, content that all will soon be well, sits down and falls asleep. Erroneously,” he added, with emphasis, “but — understandably. Understandably.

“Out from his place of concealment creeps the criminal murderer Eugenio Cruz. He steals both Carlos’s service revolver and the corpus, loads it on the horse which he had brought with him and also concealed at a distance, returns to his hut. There he decides that he has not enough wood to incinerate the victim. So he conceals the corpus inside the hut and goes out for more wood. Meanwhile the unfortunate and valiant Carlos awakens, discovers his loss. By dint of the faculty of ratiocination so highly developed in our police, he deduces who the killer must be and where he must have gone. He tracks him down, securing, along the way, a machete. He confronts the arch-criminal. He kills him. Again, I must say: erroneously. And again I must say: understandably. Doubtless the murderer Cruz would have attempted to escape.

“At any rate, this second slaying is witnessed by the much respected citizen and veteran of the Revolution, Simon-Macabeo Lopez—”

The much respected citizen and veteran of the Revolution, Simon-Macabeo Lopez, snapped his sole remaining arm into a salute, and nodded solemnly.

“—who had risen early in order to go and cultivate the piece of land granted him by the grateful Republic. Veteran Lopez immediately and properly proceeds to inform me, arriving at the same time as the little brother Santa Anna. The police at once move to investigate, and we find — that which we found. A body here, a body there, here a head, and there a head, Carlos in a state of incoherent shock. So. Thus my reconstruction. What do you think of it?”

There was a silence. At length the assistant head of the police said, “Masterful. Masterful.”

“Thank you.”

“It is such a reconstruction, so neat, so lucid, so full of clarity, as is usually to be met with only in the pages of criminal literature. But…señor jefe…it is not the truth. No, I must say, it is not the truth.”

Don Juan Antonio snapped, “Why not?”

Cepeda sighed, gestured to the unfortunate Rodriguez. “Because, señor jefe, you know and I know and almost everybody in town knows why. That bitch, that strumpet, Lupe de Rodriguez, was cuckolding poor Carlos with the cousins Eugenio and Onofrio Cruz, too. One man was not enough for her. And Carlos was blind to all.”

“Truth,” said the jailor, sighing.

“Truth,” said the veteran, nodding.

“Truth,” said the other policemen, shaking their heads, sadly.

Don Juan Antonio glared. Then his expression relaxed, and he lowered his head. “It is the truth,” he said, at last. “Ay, Carlos! ¡Woe of me! ¡Hombre! The husband is always the last to learn. For weeks, now, I have scarcely been able to look him in the face. Why, the very honor of the police was imperiled. How the railroad men were laughing at us. Mother!

“So, my poor Carlos — You finally found out, eh? Nevertheless!” Don Juan Antonio all but shouted at the others. “It is my reconstruction which must stand, do you agree? Carlos has suffered enough, and moreover, there is the honor of the police.”

“Oh, agreed, agreed, senor jefe,” the other officers exclaimed, hastily and heartily.

“We may depend upon the discretion of the Veteran Lopez, I assume?”

The old man placed his hand over his heart and bowed. “Securely,” he said. “What Carlos did may have been, in some sense, technically illegal; I am no scholar, no lawyer. But it was natural. It was male.”

“It was male, it was very male,” the others all agreed.

Don Juan Antonio bent over, took the weeping Carlos by the shoulder, and tried to reassure him. But Carlos gave no sign of having heard, much less understood. He wept, he babbled, he struck out at things invisible, now and then he gave stifled little cries of alarm and fright and scuttled backwards across the floor. The chief and the others exchanged looks and comments of dismay. “This commences to appear as more than temporary shock,” he said. “If he continues like this, he may finally be encountered in the Misericordia, may God forbid. You, Gerardo,” he directed the youngest officer, “go and solicit Dr. Olivera to appear as soon as convenient. He understands the techniques of modern science… Take no care, Carlos!” he said, encouragingly. “We shall soon have you perfectly well… Now… There was something in my mind… Ah, Cepeda.”

“Yes, Sir Chief?”

“You said, ‘…with Eugenio and Onofrio Cruz, too.’ Too. Who else? Eh? What other man or men — I insist that you advise me of their names!”

Rather reluctantly, the assistant said, “Well…sir… I know of only one other. Ysidor Chache. The curandero.”

Astounded, first, then outraged, then determined, Don Juan Antonio arose to his full height. “The curandero, eh. That mountebank. That whore-monger. That charlatan.” He reached over and took up his cap. “Come. We will pay a call upon this relic of the past. Let us inform him that the police have teeth. Eh?”

The jailor, old Hector, shook his head vigorously. The even older veteran of the Revolution put out his hand. “No, no, patron,” he said, imploringly. “Do not go. He is dangerous. He is very dangerous. He knows all the spirits and the demons of the woods. He can put a fearful curse upon you. No, no, no—”

“What!” cried Don Juan Antonio, scornfully. “Do you think for a moment that I put stock in such superstition?” He stood brave and erect, not moving from his place.

Old Hector said, “Ah, patron. It is not only that. I, after all, I, too, am a civil servant. I do not — But, sir, consider. The curandero knows the power of every root and herb and leaf and grass. He is familiar with each mushroom and toadstool. Consider, consider — a single pinch in food or drink (and what man has a thousand eyes?) — Consider the result of such poison! Sterility, impotence, abortion, distortion of vision, paralysis of the throat, imaginary voices, dizziness, pain, swelling of the eyes, burning of the chest and heart, hallucinations, wasting away, insanity, and who knows what else? No, patron, no, no.”

“He traffics with the devil,” old Lopez muttered, nodding.

“Hm, well,” said Don Juan Antonio. “This commences to sound like a matter for the priest, then, would you say?”

“Securely, the priest! If not, indeed, the bishop!”

Instantly the chief of police returned his cap to its place. “Obviously, then, it would be unfitting for a servant of the secular Republic to mix in such a matter. I thank you for calling this to my attention. We shall not dignify the old fraud with our presence.”

His eye at that moment was looking out the window. He seemed startled. “Speaking of the — Heh-hem. Did I not mention the good priest? Look.” The good priest was indeed at that moment crossing the plaza, his technically illegal cassock covered by an unobjectionable overcoat for most of its length. Preceding him was his sacristan, bearing the small case in which, all knew, were carried the vessels for the administering of last sacrament.

“Hector — do me the favor, go and enquire, who has died? — and then go and see what is keeping the doctor. jAy, Carlos, hombre!”

Hector trotted out. A moment later he returned close enough to call a name before proceeding to the physician’s office.

“What did he say?” Don Juan Antonio inquired. “Who?”

“Sir, Abuelita Ana. You know, the—”

“What?” Don Juan Antonio was surprised. “Grandmother Ana? Who would have expected it? She had been dying as long as I can remember her. Well, well, well …” His mouth still astonished, he lifted his right hand and slowly crossed himself.