The Erection Set

XXIV

Five days. In that length of time all the interior and exterior shots of the Barrin complex would be completed and the Fruits of Labor cast and crew could go on to other locations and into their rented studios to wind up the intricate slot structure of the story with closed sets for the nudie scenes and galleries of exuberant spectators for the wide-open stuff. The story was all Barrin-oriented and the local facilities of Linton were enjoying a time of prosperity as if it had never happened before.

Publicity and public relations are terrible professional mind benders, and the smiling faces of the reborn never knew what was happening to them. Barrin Industries were alive again. They thought they knew that. Their talents were needed and they were there. The beehive was open. Suck the flowers, store the honey. The queen was laying her eggs, the drones were in attendance, and they didn’t know the beekeeper was ready with the insecticide.

He didn’t like the taste of the honey.

Someplace the stockholders were home all nestled snug in their beds and the little room was sprinkled with the men carrying the briefcases and folders of efficiency reports. The chair was held by the guy with the scar on his skull who had to kill me and he kept looking down the long table at me with a benign expression I couldn’t quite comprehend, but he had the money to buy the kill if Arnold Bell missed, and even if it never happened, to pay for destruction piece by piece.

The Farnsworth Aviation report was brief. Barrin couldn’t handle its projected output, but certain McMillan plants could.

And the raid was on.

Until the recess when the Farnsworth vice-president asked me over a cup of coffee if I had full title to a certain piece of arid desert land and I told him I did... acres and acres of it. In fact, quite a few square sections of the damn snake-infested place where the tourists took photographs.

Would I sell?

Conditionally, yes.

Leyland Hunter liked to have had a shit hemorrhage.

The picture of the old man was smiling more broadly now. I was taking the big run prior to leaping the chasm and he was waiting for me to fall in because I didn’t quite get up enough speed. All the dirty slob wanted was for me to hit the side and carom down into total disaster knowing I almost made it. And almost isn’t enough.

Pathos didn’t become the old lawyer. Sympathy wasn’t his bag at all, even when it came to me. He could purse his lips and remember the two broads in bed and even old Dubro, but legal sympathy he couldn’t afford. He shook his head politely, took a bite of his tuna fish salad and said, “It isn’t enough to save Barrin, Dog.”

“What do they need?”

“A miracle,” he suggested.

“Money won’t do it?”

“Didn’t a certain Roland Holland tell you the pros and cons of the great fiscal situation?”

“Somewhat, Mighty Hunter, but I’m no mathematician. Numbers come hard to me.”

“Only your dick comes hard to you.”

“Save the dirty talk for the dolls.”

“Your land sale can keep Barrin alive for a month, and that’s only because the public spotlight is on the scene. The minute it’s off... good-bye.”

“You sound depressed,” I said.

“Naturally. I lived through an era. No, an epoch. I hate to see it destroyed. You opened the Pandora’s box and let them all take a peek. They went for the bait and now the world collapses around them.” He paused, looked at me intently, then asked, “How much are you worth in cash?”

“A few million left.”

“Forget it, unless you feel like playing Santa Claus in a town of unbelieving kids. In one day they’re all going to know and go home to broken dreams. I told you the worst thing to do was come back.”

“Horseshit.”

“You’ve lost, Dog.” The way he said it was adamant.

This time I had to fake it. “Bullshit.”

“No matter what animal drops it, the stuff is still feces,” he told me. “I’ll never know why you did it.”

“All I wanted was to come home.”

“You see what happened when you did?”

“Shit.”

“What happened to the animals?”

“Look behind you.”

Bennie Sachs hitched his gun belt up, nodded and took a seat beside my lawyer, but he didn’t bother to even look at him. “We traced the car.”

“I could have told you it was mine,” I said

“Plastics.”

“Uh-huh. On the exhaust pipe. Heat sensor.”

“Pretty smart, aren’t you?”

“Right, friend.”

“I had a call from New York.”

“To be expected.”

“I don’t like you, Mr. Kelly.”

“And I didn’t ask for any admiration, either. What’s your problem now?”

“Certain McMillan personnel are in town.”

“Good for them.”

“They’re guards in his other plant. They seem to have a project in mind.”

“Why haven’t they hit me then? I haven’t been hiding.”

“That’s what I can’t figure out. Yet. But I will.”

“Very nice, Officer. Just remember that you’re here to protect your constituency.”

“Go piss up a stick, Mr. Kelly.”

I said, “I tried that once, but it all ran down on my hand.”

When he left, Leyland said, “I didn’t get that.”

“I didn’t either,” I said. “Let’s go back to the meeting. The raid ought to be about over.”

The legal language sounded like a papal encyclical and it all boiled down to one thing. Cross McMillan owned Barrin Industries and Cross McMillan was committed to destroying Barrin Industries and there was no possible hope of keeping Barrin or Linton alive. The current contracts would be honored, but executed in other factories, leaving Barrin a shell without even a hermit crab to take occupancy.

Inside the building the machines were humming and the operators were smiling, but the crunch was on the way and the lunch buckets and thermos bottles would be just another nostalgic memory of days that almost were. How many times could a guy say “shit!”... so that it was an expletive like saying something when you bashed your finger with a hammer?

Screw the money. They all had their social security, their guaranteed pension, and if the government kept up its comlib policies, they could get even more, except these weren’t the ones to ask for it.

All they had was a hope and I smashed it.

There sure would be a lot of people at my funeral.

Everyone would be laughing.

I lit a cigarette and lounged back against the wall until he came out and when I saw him I said, “Hello, Cross. I hear you want to kill me.”

He stopped, told the two with him to go on and pulled a cigar from his pocket, accepting my light. When he blew the smoke away he said, “Your semantics is lousy, Dog. I merely said I was going to have you killed.”

“No guts, Cross?”

“Plenty, nithead, but why should I pay the big bill when I could have it done for me.”

“Your tense stinks, if you want to play semantics. The shooters should be here now. Have trouble recruiting them?”

Cross smiled and I felt myself stiffen up. If they have to smile, I don’t want any friendly overtones in the way a mouth twists because it means your back isn’t clear like you thought it was and you made the biggest mistake of all. I had my hand on the .45 without taking it out of my jacket and nothing happened except McMillan smiled again and gave me a small pathetic look. “Come on outside,” he said.

I let him get way ahead of me, and when the entrance was clear I followed him out and stood there in the big doorways of Barrin Industries with the man who had just destroyed it, looking out at all the smiling faces who thought the world had come home to roost and they had the lunch pails to collect the eggs in and I knew what I felt like... the stuff you put five pounds of in a two pound bag.

“I called them off,” Cross said.

Hell, I didn’t even pay any attention to him. I heard words and not intent. I took a drag on my butt, flipped it out into the rain and looked right past him when I asked, “Who?”

“The ones that were going to kill you.”

“Balls.”

“Got a cigarette?”

I shook one out of my pack, lit it for him and stepped back. His cigar was still smoldering on the step.

“They could have done it, you know,” he stated.

“Maybe.”

“I could pay for a lot of them.”

“They’d get tired after a while. Expecially after I knocked off their gold mine.”

“Not quite, Dog.”

“Then let them go.” I blew a stream of smoke in his face and he didn’t even blink.

“I like to return favors, my canine compatriot.”

“Talk sense.”

“You get your life... because you gave me a wife.”

“Buddy, you ain’t no Ogden Nash. Stop rhyming.”

He smiled again. His teeth showed too and his head flushed a little so I saw the scar across the bald spot where I had creamed him with the brick. But that was years ago and all I was interested in was the smile. “You’ll live, Dog. But that’s all. Absolutely all. You gave me back something I wanted all my fucking life... a wife I loved who could love me sexually. You knew she was frigid, didn’t you?”

I couldn’t figure where the hell he was driving in this weather. “I thought everybody knew it,” I said. All I wanted was to put a permanent crease in his head and he didn’t know how close he was coming to getting one.

“So they did,” Cross smiled. He took another puff on the cigarette and reached in his pocket. He took out a fat manilla envelope folded carelessly in four sections and handed it to me. “Sheila loves me, Dog. I finally got really laid for the first time. Laid. Hell, that’s not even the term. I got everything out of her I ever wanted and it took you to shake her out of whatever the hell was wrong with her.” He sucked on the cigarette again and let it fall at his feet. “Care to tell me what it was?”

“No.”

I wished all the guys standing out there in the rain would get the hell home.

“How many times did she go down on you, Dog?”

“Not too many.”

Make your play, stupid. I haven’t got time for games. It’s getting dark.

“Fuck her a lot?”

“Enough to round out the evening.”

“Was she good?”

“I had better. She was extremely prolific. Quite a comer.”

Cross nodded.

He was very close to being shot and he still stood there watching the day grow darker and I couldn’t see anybody around who could put me down. I was buried in the deep shadows with one hand on an army-style .45 with a round in the chamber, the hammer cocked and a clip in the handle. Two more full clips were in my pocket and it was going to be a ball when it started. Only nothing wanted to start.

“Sheila finally loved me, you prick. You gave her to me. She always loved me, now she loves me all the way.” The rain suddenly came down in a slashing stream, driving into our faces and neither one of us could care less. “Funny,” he continued, “having you do it. The doctors couldn’t. The headshrinks couldn’t. Nobody could. Then you came along and sexed the hell out of my wife and you did it. You gave me the thing I was never able to buy.”

I just looked at him.

“Pretty silly, isn’t it, but you damn well knew what you were doing, you bastard.”

“Don’t die for wrong words, Cross.”

“Shut up, you silly bastard. I’m not afraid of you. Open that fucking envelope.”

I unfolded the manila packet and thumbed the top back.

“You own all of Barrin, my dick-happy neighbor. My fucking almost-shareholder. I give you a worthless pile of brick, a damn pack of old men trying to extrude aluminum, a house full of horse’s ass relatives, some contracts already assigned to my other companies, a dead city... and your life.”

I threw my cigarette away and put the folder in my pocket. “Maybe I will bust your balls, friend.”

“Don’t try.” Cross said. “You’re in the shadows, but there are two of mine out there waiting too. They’ll kill you before or after. Your choice.”

Hell, I wasn’t even worried about them. I let my hand fall away from my jacket. It was starting to get dark.

Cross McMillan stepped back into the light and looked at the big old-fashioned clock in the tower above him, then glanced back to me and smiled. I owned the biggest pile of garbage in the world because he owned all the access roads and the garbage pile could produce nothing. They were in Grand Sita drunk and hurting, but tomorrow they’d be sober and reconstructed while the living things came out of the garbage pile to devour me for having resurrected it to start with and the worst thing of all would be having to face the faces, the sad, deadened faces that had all the hope in the world there just a few days ago.

The voice behind me said, “You see, Dog, it doesn’t always work out, does it?”

I looked at Sharon, but she still had those deadly eyes that said if she couldn’t kill me, she’d be glad when somebody else did and I automatically reached out my hand and automatically she took it. My fingers ran around hers. She had taken off the ring that used to turn her finger green.

“He’s dead,” she said.

“Aren’t we all?”

“Yes, we are, Dog.”

The guy who walked in the light kept waving for those behind him to step on up and when I saw his face I said,

“Hello, Stanley.”

Stanley Cramer. From way back. There were four more with him.

“Mr. Kelly.” He nodded toward Sharon. “Ma’am.”

“Who’s going to tell them, Stanley?” I asked him.

“Mr. Kelly... we all know. Sort of... well, hell, kid, we’ve been back and forth before you was born, y’know?”

“Sure.”

One by one they all stepped into the light so I could see their faces. Old men, but grinning old men and there was still youth there that read like the old motto, DON’T TREAD ON ME! youth that wasn’t fighting youth, but the youth of knowledge written into the crazy warped smiles and Stanley Cramer, elected the spokesman, said, “We kind of figured what you were looking for. Your cousins couldn’t find it, but they weren’t even sure it ever existed. We thought that package Jason gave old Pat was just a gag until you started the shakedown and we started thinking.”

He held out a box big enough to put a pair of shoes in. “The papers are all in there. They’ll tell you how it works. It ought to keep Barrin going a long, long time.”

“What will, Stanley?”

There was a quiet murmur of laughter and he held out a shiny little ball about an inch around. It gleamed metallically in the dull light, a bluish silver with little rays of refracted yellow bouncing from it. Cramer laughed again and took his hand away.

The ball stayed right there.

He barely tipped it with his fingers and it came drifting toward me.

“The antigravity device,” he explained. “Now we’re in clover.”

Someone farted.

It was Cross McMillan.

And then the old cypress pillar chipped right out between my head and Sharon’s, leaving a tiny .22-sized hole in the wood so close it could have gotten either one of us an inch in either direction and nobody noticed but Sharon and me and I pulled her back inside leaving the chuckles of all the winners standing there in the rain and all I could think of was that word to say again.