If you’d like proof that soft-spoken, considerate, gently witty and basically self-effacing workers with words can still succeed—both as writer and editor—let me introduce you to Charles L. Grant.
There are, however, two terms I omitted in describing Grant and each has, I’m sure, been instrumental to what he’s achieved: taste, and an intimate kind of individualistic talent.
Where taste is concerned—a connoisseur’s knowledge and approach to what he reads; a clear perception of what he wants that sidesteps the adamantine and settles upon advocacy—Charlie’s has been good enough to win a World Fantasy Award for the first in his series of anthologies called Shadows.
Where intimate, individualistic talent is involved, again Grant’s record speaks for itself: one Nebula for best short story, another for best novelette; a World Fantasy Award for a novella, another for Nightmare Seasons, a collection of his own understated, alarmingly real short fiction. Stephen King, commenting on the 42-year-old Grant’s novel The Hour of the Oxrun Dead, used two pertinent words in Danse Macabre: “Unsettling stuff” So, you’re about to learn, is “The Old Men Know,” a tale in which the principal characters are so seemingly genuine that you’ll care about them from the start—a truly skilled writer’s way of helping you to accept the numbing development of the story. I don’t want to keep you another minute from learning, to your horror, precisely what “The Old Men Know.”
There was an odd light in the yard in the middle of November. A curious light. And puzzling.
The weather was right for the time of the year: clouds so close they might have been called overcast were it not for the stark gradations of dark and light grey, for the bulges that threatened violence, for the thin spots that promised blue; a wind steady but not strong, damp and cold but only hinting at the snow that would fall not this time but too soon for comfort; the look of things in general, with the grass still struggling to hang onto its green, the shrubs tented in burlap, the trees undecided—some newly bare, others with leaves intact and tinted, colors that didn’t belong to the rest of the land.
Those colors were precious now. They were the only break in desolation until spring, not even the snow promising much more than slush or the mark of passing dogs or the dark tracks of creatures mechanical and living. Those colors were loved, and cherished, and unlike the same ones that filled most of October, these were mourned because they marked the end of the end of change. To see them now meant the air no longer smelled like smoke, that the sunsets would be bleak, that the brown they’d become would fill gutters and driveways with work, not with pleasure.
But the light was curious, and so then were the colors.
From my second story study window I could see a maple tree in the middle of the backyard. It wasn’t tall, but its crown was thick enough to provide ample summer shade, and a pile of leaves big enough for the neighborhood children to leap into after I’d spent an hour raking them up. Its color this year was a yellow laced with red, made all the more brilliant because the tall shrubs and trees behind it had lost their leaves early and provided the maple with a background glum enough to make it stand out.
Now it was almost glowing.
I looked up from my accounts and stared at it, leaned away and rubbed my eyes lightly, leaned forward again and squinted.
“Hey,” I said, “come here and look at this.”
A whispering of skirts, and Belle came to the desk, stood behind me and put her hands on my shoulders. She peered through the window, craned and looked down into the yard as close to the house as she could.
“What?”
“Don’t you see it?” I pointed to the tree.
“Yeah. Okay.”
“Doesn’t it look sort of odd to you?”
“Looks like a tree to me.”
If she had said yes, I would have agreed, watched it a few moments more and returned to paying the bills; if she had said no, I would have pressed her a little just to be sure she wasn’t kidding; but she had been, as she was increasingly lately, flippant without the grace of humor. So I rose, walked around the desk and stood at the window. The sill was low, the panes high, and I was able to check the sky for the break in the clouds that had let in the sun just enough to spotlight the maple. There was none, however, and I checked the room’s other three windows.
“Caz, I think you have a blur on your brain.”
“Don’t be silly.”
She followed me around the room, checked as I did, muttering incomprehensibly, and just low enough to bother me. And when I returned to the desk she sat on it, crossed her legs and hiked up the plaid skirt to the middle of her thighs.
“Sailor,” she said, “you’ve been at sea too long. Wanna have a good time?” Her slippered foot nudged my knee. She winked, and turned slightly to bring my gaze to her chest. “What do you say, fella? I’m better than I look.”
I almost laughed, and didn’t because that’s what she wanted me to do. When we’d met at a party five years ago, I had kept to myself in a corner chair, nursing a weak drink I didn’t want, eavesdropping on conversations I didn’t want to join. I was having fun. I preferred being alone, and I entertained the fantasy of my being invisible, a harmless voyeur of the contemporary scene, unwilling, and perhaps unable, to make any commitments. Then Belle had come over in dark blue satin, pulled up an ottoman and gave me the same lines she’d just spoken in the study. I’d laughed then, and surprised myself by talking to her. All night, in fact, without once thinking we might end up in bed. We exchanged phone numbers and addresses, and I didn’t see or think of her again for another six months. Until the next party I couldn’t get out of. This time we stayed together from the moment I walked in the door, and six months after that she moved in with me.
She didn’t want to get married because she said it would spoil all her best lines; I didn’t want to get married because then I wouldn’t be able to be alone again.
“Caz,” she said then, dropping the pose and readjusting her skirt, “are you okay?”
I shrugged without moving. “I guess so. I don’t know. It’s the weather, I imagine. It’s depressing. And this,” I said with a sweep of my hand to cover the bills, “doesn’t help very much.”
“That is an understatement.” She stood and kissed my forehead, said something about getting dinner ready, come down in ten or fifteen minutes, and left without closing the door. I did it for her. Softly, so she wouldn’t think I was annoyed. Then I went back to the window and watched the maple glow until the glow faded, twilight took over, and the dead of November was buried in black.
The next day, Belle dropped me at the park on her way to work. When I kissed her goodbye, I think she was surprised at the ardor I showed; I certainly was. Generally, I couldn’t wait to be rid of her. Not that I didn’t like her, and not that I didn’t love her, but I still blessed those hours when we were apart. It not only made our time together more important, but it also allowed me time to myself.
To sit on the benches, to walk the paths, to leave the park and head into town. Listening to people. Watching them. Every so often, when I was feeling particularly down, hoping that one of them would come up to me and say, hey, aren’t you Caz Rich, the children’s book guy? They never did, but I sometimes spent hours in bookstores, waiting for someone to buy one of my books.
Well, not really my books.
I don’t write them, I illustrate them. Mostly books about what I call critters, as opposed to creatures—silly monsters, silly villains, silly any bad thing to take the sting out of evil for the little kids who read them.
Some of the shopkeepers, once they’d gotten used to seeing me around, asked what it was like to be a househusband while the wife was out doing whatever she was doing. In this case, it was managing a string of five shops catering to those who bought labels instead of clothes. I used to correct them, tell them I was a commercial artist who worked at home, but when they smiled knowingly and kept it up each time they asked, I gave up and said that I liked it just fine
, and as soon as I figured out what I was going to be when I grew up, my wife could stay home like a good wife should.
They didn’t care much for that and didn’t talk much to me again, but as I often said to Foxy, life in the fast lane has its price too.
I grinned at myself then, and looked around to see if Foxy was out.
He was, with his cronies.
They were sitting on the high step of the fountain in the middle of the park. The water had been turned off a month ago, and the marble bowl was filling with debris from the trees and passersby. Foxy and his men kept unofficial guard on it, to keep the brats from tossing their candy wrappers in it, and to keep the teens from pissing there whenever they had too much beer.
Only one person I know of complained to the police about the harrassment, and the police suggested slyly to Belle that unless she had mischief of her own up her sleeve there was no discernible harm done so please, miss, no offense but get lost.
Foxy grinned when he saw me, stood up and held out his hand. He was at that age when age didn’t matter, and when a look couldn’t tell you what it was anyway. His skin was loose here and tight there, his clothes the same, and his hair was always combed, and always blown by the wind. Unlike the others, he never wore a hat because, he’d once confided, he’d read in a magazine that using one of those things was a guarantee of baldness.
“Caz!” he said cheerily. His grip was firm, his blue eyes bright, his mouth opened in a grin that exposed his upper gums. “Caz, the boys and me were just talking about you.”
The boys numbered five, all of an age, all of a color, and all of them smelling like attics in spring. They grunted their greetings as I walked around the fountain, shaking hands, noting the weather and generally not saying much at all. Chad was busy knitting himself a winter sweater with nimble fat fingers that poked out of fingerless gloves; Streetcar was reading; so were Dick O’Meara and his brother, Denny; and Rene didn’t like me so he hardly acknowledged my presence beyond an ill-concealed sideways sneer. Once done with the formalities, Foxy and I headed off toward the far end of the park, where a hot dog vendor waited patiently under his striped umbrella for the offices to let out so he could feed them all lunch.
“So how’s Miss Lanner?”
“Same. Fine.”
Foxy nodded.
“You?”
Foxy shrugged. He wore a worn Harris tweed jacket buttoned to the chest, a soft maroon scarf that served as a dashing tie, his pants didn’t match and sometimes neither did his shoes. “Could be better, but it’s the weather, you know? Thinking about going to Florida before I get the chilblains.”
“A trip would do you good.”
He laughed. “Sure, when I win the lottery.”
Foxy used to be an attorney, spent it all as he made it, and now lived on his Social Security and what other folks in their charity deemed fit to give him. He didn’t mind charity; he figured he’d earned it. Age, to him, was a privilege, not a curse.
We passed few others as we made our way west. It was raw, and what pedestrians there were rushed along their shortcuts instead of admiring the views. And by the time we reached the stand, made our choices and turned around, the park was deserted except for the boys at the fountain.
“Any inspiration lately?” he asked around a bite of his lunch. “Only that when I see you I want to open a savings account.” He laughed and poked me hard on the arm, shook his head and sighed. “Misspent youth, Caz, m’boy. You’d be wise to take a lesson from your elders.”
Dick and Denny had finished their books by the time we’d returned and were attempting to find ways to keep the cold off their bald pates. Rene was pitching pebbles at the pigeons. Streetcar was dozing. Chad, however, looked up at Foxy, looked at me, and smiled sadly.
“Saw it again, Fox,” he said. His face was more beard than flesh, his coat the newest of the lot. He should have been warm, but his teeth were chattering.
“You’re kidding.”
“While you were gone,” and he pointed over my shoulder. I looked automatically, and saw nothing but the grass, the trees, and a wire litter basket half-filled with trash.
Foxy didn’t move.
“Saw what?” I asked.
“Gonna call?” Foxy said.
“Nope,” Chad told him. “What’s the use?”
“I guess.”
“Saw what?”
Foxy patted his friend’s shoulder and walked me up the path to the corner, stopped and looked back. “It’s sad, Caz, real sad. Chad sees things. More and more of them every day. This week it’s bank robbers.”
“But you can’t see the bank from—” I stopped, ashamed I hadn’t picked it up right away. “Oh.”
He nodded, tapped a temple. “At least he doesn’t bother the police. If he did, I don’t think we’d see him here much longer.” I was sympathetic, but I was also getting cold, so we spoke only a few minutes more before I headed home, taking the shortest route instead of picking streets at random; and once inside, I turned up the furnace to get warm in a hurry. Then I went upstairs and stood at my desk. I knew I should work; there were two contracts at hand, both of them fairly good, and the possibility I might get a chance to do a critter calendar for kids.
There was little enough wealth involved in what I did for a living, but there had been sufficient in the past five years so that Belle wouldn’t have to worry if she ever decided to pack it in and stay home. I didn’t know how I’d handle that, but since there didn’t seem much chance of it, I seldom thought about it—only when I was feeling old-fashioned enough to want her home, with me, the way it had been for my father, and his father before him.
Being a liberated male when you’re ten is easy; when you’re over thirty, however, it’s like mixing drugs—today it’s cool and I don’t mind because it doesn’t limit my freedom or alter my perspectives; tomorrow it’s a pain in the ass and whatever happened to aprons and babies.
And when I get in moods like that, I did what I always do—I worked.
So hard that I didn’t hear Belle come home, didn’t hear though I sensed her standing in the doorway watching for a moment before she went away, leaving me to my critters, and my make-believe children.
An hour later, I went downstairs, walked into the kitchen and saw that it was deserted. Nothing on the stove. Nothing on the table. I went into the living room, and it was empty, and so was the dining room. Frowning, and seeing her purse still on the hall table, I peered through a front window and saw her on the porch. A sweater was cloaked around her shoulders, and she was watching the empty street.
When I joined her she didn’t turn.
“Chilly,” I said.
It was dark, the streetlamps on, the leaves on the lawn stirring for their nightmoves.
“What are we going to do, Caz?”
“Do? About what?”
I couldn’t see her face, and she wouldn’t let me put an arm around her shoulders.
“I had lunch with Roman today.”
Hell and damnation, the writing on the wall. Lunch with Roman today, several times over the past few months, a day-trip into New York to do some buying during the summer. Roman Carrell was the manager of one of her bigger shops, younger than both of us, and hungrier than I. If the husband is always the last to know, I wondered where I fit in. On the other hand, maybe he was only a good friend, and a shoulder to cry on whenever I got into one of my moods.
She pulled the sweater more snugly across her chest. “He says he wants to marry me, Caz.”
“Lots of people do. You’re beautiful.”
Her head ducked away. “I am not.”
“Well, I think you are, and since I’m an artist experienced in these things, you’ll have to believe me.”
Another one of our lines. Dialogue from a bad show that also happened to be my life.
Jesus.
I leaned back against the railing, looking at her sideways. “Do you want to marry him?”
Suddenly, there was gunfire, so muc
h of it I knew it wasn’t a backfiring car or truck. We both straightened and stared toward downtown, then I ran inside and grabbed my wind-breaker from the closet.
“What the hell are you doing?” she demanded, grabbing my arm as I ran out again.
The gunshots were replaced by what sounded like a hundred sirens.
“Nosey,” I said, grinning. “Want to come along?”
“You’ll get hurt, stupid.”
I probably was, but in a town this size the only shots ever heard came from the occasional hunter who thought a Chevy was a deer. This was something else, some excitement, and as I ran down the walk I hoped to hear Belle trying to catch up. She didn’t. I wasn’t surprised.
I reached the park about the same time a hundred others did, and we saw patrol cars slanted all over the street, their hoods aimed at a jewelry store a few doors in from the intersection.
An ambulance was there, and spotlights poked at the brick walls while a dozen cops strode back and forth in flak jackets, carrying shotguns and rifles and pushing the crowd back.
I made my way to the front in about ten minutes, just in time to see two attendants loading a stretcher into the van. There was blood on the sidewalk, and the shop’s glass doors were blown inward. No one had seen anything, but from those I talked to it must have been a hell of a battle.
Belle didn’t say anything when I finally got home; she was already in bed, the alarm clock set, and my pajamas laid out on my side of the mattress.
She left before I woke up.
“Well,” I said to Foxy two afternoons later, “Chad’s crystal ball needs a little polishing, huh?”
He grinned, turned to Dick and Denny who were feeding a lone squirrel from a popcorn bag, and asked if they’d mind holding the fort while he and I took a short walk. They said no, Streetcar was busy plucking leaves from the fountain, and Rene didn’t bother to turn around.
Once we reached the far end of the path, Foxy stopped and faced me. “Chad’s dead,” he said.
“Oh hell, no.”
“Yeah. Bad heart. Last night. His daughter called me. He went in his sleep.”
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