by Jerry
Bernie and his tape recorder were interviewing Busky Kimp.
“What’s this about the Awaiters taking off on a comet?” Bernie asked. “ ‘Off on a Comet’—that’s a Jules Verne title.”
“Some of us had folks who remembered when the comical star came and went,” Busky said. “Before the first war.”
“Comical star?”
“They called it that. A comet is what it was. Nobody got aboard then.”
“You mean 1910? Halley’s Comet?”
“That was the comical star, I guess. But we got a different one coming for us. Shozo-Ryder.”
“Thank you, Lord,” said a voice in the background. “Interpretate to us, Busky lamb,” another member of the flock said. “Tell it like we like to hear.”
“Last year in the Orient a Japanese astronomer named Shozo found a new comet,” Busky said. “About the same time in the Occident an Englishman named Ryder, another amateur, discovered it was coming this way. They called it Shozo-Ryder.”
“Praise the Lord,” the background voice said. “We gonna ride the Ryder.”
“You can’t live on a comet,” Bernie said. “It’s too small, for one thing.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Busky said. “The comet’s our transportation, not our destination. But it’s big enough to take the bunch of us, and then some, to a planet called Panacea.”
“Panacea?”
“A land that’s largely ocean and tropical in clime,” Busky said in a kind of sing-song. “It’s a union of island countries clustered close, happy in their harmony. Their people invited us there, in their charity and compassion.”
“And that’s why you call it Panacea?” Bernie asked. “Because ‘pan’ means all together and ‘ocean’ is another word for ‘sea’ ?”
“You could say that,” Busky told him. He sounded smugger than usual. “You could also say it’s because two of our people from Florida wanted to name it, and it’s a nice name. They’re from Panacea, south of Tallahassee.”
“Oh,” Bernie said. Tally could have told him that. Rubbing it in, Busky informed him: “Panacea means a cure for all ills. Webster.”
Doggedly, Bernie pressed on: “And how do you plan to get to this paradise?”
“Shozo-Ryder’s gonna accelerate itself past Jupiter and go on to Panacea. It’s all part of the Ironstine Theory. The Panaceans are great navigators, you know.”
“I know what you tell me, Mr. Kimp. What will you live on during your flight? Have you got enough supplies?” One of the Awaiters said: “Tell him about the soup.”
“Soup?”
“Primordial soup,” Busky said. “The stuff that nurtured our early ancestors.”
“So you’re going first class with the Panaceans flying your comet and feeding you too,” Bernie said.
“It’s the way to go. They know how to ladle it out. And there’s plenty. Maybe it’s what the ravens fed Elijah. It’s the stuff the old astronomers thought replenishes the sun. Did you forget your science, Bernie? It travels with the comets. And like some French wine, it travels well.”
Busky was full of zingers today.
((Hello. Let me introduce myself. No, I am not Mitchell MacSwan. I am Omniscient Observer, or O.O., and you will hear from me again, inside these distinctive double parentheses, in the course of this chronicle. I am here to observe your particular activities on this particular segment of Earth at this particular time, whatever time is. Remind me to tell you the story of Time and the Pig. Unlimited by time or space I range the ages, sopping up your peculiar ways, giving you the once-over, the double-o, as befits an Omniscient One.
My mission also is to set the record straight where it touches what some of you call the Benign Visitors, your optimistic euphemism for They Who May Not Be Named, to paraphrase H. Rider Haggard. You may ask what I am doing here in the primitive memory vaults of Mitchell MacSwan, chronicler of unlikely events. I reply that his way of looking at things—may I call it MacSwan’s Way?—is parochially his, and by extension yours. I do not think of us as policing you, however. We are more akin to passive watchers, but because we are not watching but listening to MacSwan’s tapes, perhaps aural passive is a more descriptive term. Still, it is my duty to correct mistaken impressions, explain our point of view, defend our motives. Thus we are more observers than regulators, although we might do a bit of a fixup here and there for the convenience of listeners to come.
((A colleague sees my task as presiding over the cradle of Terrestralian civilization, endlessly mocking, for you are an infant race and I am old and wise. But my colleague is unfair. I am no cynic, although I often am forced to take you less seriously than you take yourselves. Enough now. I will speak here again as may be necessary.))
To the imaginative, even the name of our county conjures up visions of the desert. St. Lawrence; Lawrence of Arabia; North Arabia. In its own way it stretches unbounded, back through an infinity of time to another era of humankind to whom it was not a desert but an inland sea on whose edges they lived and left their mark.
I said to Pirt: “What about the great warm sea?”
“What about it?” he said warily.
“Did you ever sit beside it and think future thoughts?”
“Who, me?”
“And think that one day you’d return to it, thousands of years later?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? Someone says you did and she’d like to bake you an apple pie.”
“For an apple pie I’d lie,” Pirt said. “With cinnamon?”
“I’m sure. And a big glass of milk.”
“For that I’d be anything she wanted me to be,” he said. “Maybe I did what she said. I haven’t synched in yet, entirely. Maybe an inhibiting factor clouds my communication with you because you’re so old.”
“If you sat on the shore of the great warm sea, as Miss Loretta said, you’re my elder by far. Are you my ancestor?”
“I guess I’m synching in, gradually. I seem to remember a sandy shore. A sea with no horizon. A warm sun that stayed overhead a long time. I was thinking thoughts too big for me. Thinking I’d come back later but not realizing I’d be no bigger or wiser.”
“But you are. Not bigger but wiser. Wiser than me, if not Miss Loretta.”
“I’d like to eat her apple pie but I’ve got bigger things to do.”
“Like what?”
“I’ve got to communicate. I’m not the only one who sat on that ancient shore, you know. There were hundreds of us then.”
“How many of you are there now?”
“Just me here. But I can’t stay. There’s something I must do.”
He looked so lonely that my instinct was to grab him up in a hug but he wandered off into the night, his forehead wrinkled in thought.
He’d talked like this before and I’d always listened seriously to what I took to be childish fantasies. I assumed the make-believe compensated for the fact that he’d been shortchanged in stature and looks. Probably, avoided by kids his own age, he’d had plenty of time to peer into mirrors and reflect on who he was.
I had lots to think about, especially after the call from Loretta LaJoie. Was she fantasizing too? Or was she vox populi, reflecting what others in the village were saying?
Tally said at breakfast: “I woke up and found you gone. Then I looked in on Pirt and he was gone. I was worried and couldn’t sleep for a long time. Finally I thought that you and he must be together. Then I slept. Were you?”
“Yes,” I said, and no more.
“Good. Eat your breakfast.”
“Is Pirt home?”
“Yes. He’s sleeping. Eat.”
“He’s funny, you know,” Tally said. “He’s not the boy he seems.”
“Oh?” I said, buttering toast.
“Not your average child. He’s strange.”
Did she know more than I did? “Strange how?”
“More intelligent than you’d expect him to be. Haven’t you noticed?”
&nbs
p; I added marmalade to the toast. “He’s a city kid. They mature quicker down there.” I ate slowly. Tally was having only tea.
“I wonder about him,” she said.
An amphibian serenade told of the annual carnival, circus and field day of the volunteer fire department. It’s a late summer event, advertised and promoted for weeks in advance in the pages of the Northland News and on the air of WNOR-AM-FM.
The firemen’s launch, war-surplus Duck with a Dixieland band aboard, plied the waters of Higley Flow at dusk each night for a week. You’d hear it first from afar. Muskrat Ramble, Bill Bailey, Sage Hen Strut.
Then you’d see it, outlined by its strings of colored lights, gliding at low throttle along the darkening shore. Between the jazz numbers one of the firemen would man the loud hailer—a bottle was passed during the break—to invite the cottagers to spend a dollar admission for adults, half price for kids, babes-in-arms free. Come one, come all; join the fun. Then the jazz again, more ragged but more expressive. I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate, Beale Street, The Saints.
It was a great day when the convoy of trucks of the Great Northern, Dominion and International Combined Shows Carnival rolled in.
The gaudy semis with their trailer cages stopped at the three-way intersection north of Higley Road and let out the tamer animals and the colorfully-dressed performers. First came the elephants (two) with their mahouts. Clowns capered around them.
Then came the Ringmaster, elegant, top-hatted, snapping his long whip.
Then the trick car that reared like a skittish horse and backfired twenty times to the minute.
Then the plumed steeds with bareback riders on their rumps; skilled, smiling horsewomen.
Then more clowns, tricking each other, joking with kids along the way.
Then the cages of lions (three) and tigers (two), pulled by zebras (four).
Then the Tiny Princess and the Tall Man, walking side by side, she a perfectly proportioned three-footer and he well over seven feet tall, with a conical hat that soared him to eight.
Pirt watched at the corner of Big Rock Road. I watched him from my place among a small working group—photographers, reporters, deputy sheriffs and field day committee people. Pirt was a detached observer until he saw the Tiny Princess. Something about her seemed to reach his heart. He saw her before she saw him. Her height was a little less than his. She looked more mature than he and I imagined him wishing he weren’t dressed like the kids his size, that he might present an appearance to stop her glance.
She did look at him and it was more than a glance. She held his eyes and smiled and turned her head to keep him in view as the parade went by. He ran at the side of the road till he caught up with the clowns and waited for her to come by again.
She must have been pleased. She gave him a little wave. The way she moved her mouth (was she telling him something? Blowing him a kiss?) told him she knew he was more than a kid.
The Tall Man beckoned to him. “Come on, kid, join the parade.”
The Tiny Princess smiled and Pirt got in step with them, the Tall Man between him and the little woman. She said: “Hi, Pal. Two of us almost make one of him.”
The Tall Man said: “Hup, two, three, four. Smile for the people. Hot, ain’t it, kid? What I’d give for a cold beer.”
The Tall Man smiled at the people and the Tiny Princess bent forward around him to smile at Pirt as they paraded toward the fairgrounds.
She talked to him four feet below the Tall Man’s ears. She said: “You look older than you look. Are you a midget?”
He didn’t know how to reply but had to say something, not to lose her. “I’m a lot older than I look. Where can I see you later?”
The Tall Man smiled and called to the people. The Tiny Princess said to Pirt: “Back of the fortune teller—that’s the tent with the hands on it. I’m behind it, in the camper.”
“I’ll find you,” Pert said. “When?”
“Before the show and after. Before the show I’ll take you around. After the show you take me to town or wherever.” Pirt said he knew a place. Then the Tall Man tapped him on the head and said: “Smile for the people, kid. It’s part of the show. Smile. You too, Tina.” It was the first time he’d heard her name.
Before the show he made his way through the trailers and semis and cages and tents to the palmist’s place and thus to Tina’s. “So long, kid,” the Tall Man had said. “Thanks for swelling out the procession. Pardon me while I get a cold beer.”
They had a slide-in camper on a Chevy pickup festooned with paint and decals proclaiming that the world’s tiniest beauty dwelt therein. The poster paintings, circus-style, he thought as he knocked on her door, failed to do her justice. She opened to him, smiling. “Come in. I made tea.” They barely had time for tea, much less to talk, before her call came but later, when he’d led her to Big Rock on the shore of the flow above the dam, they had time to say the things they wanted to say. They were honest. How else to be, with time so short? She said she was attracted to him but was married to the Tall Man. Incredibly the marriage worked. Maybe it was the magic of the circus world, the ambience of unlikes who were less unlike than those outside. Therefore she would go on with the show and her husband but tonight was a thing apart. She had her things apart and the Tall Man had his. Maybe tonight the Tall Man’s thing was a dozen beers at the tavern down the road, or maybe he was having himself a time with the fortune teller, a gypsy from Jersey. Nevertheless an understanding existed, otherwise she couldn’t be with Pirt at Big Rock, could she? So everything was all right, now, wasn’t it? It wasn’t often she met a real man her size. And she lay back on the flat upper pare of the rock, dislodging an empty can that clattered down into the water.
I don’t know what happened there on Big Rock. Neither did my informant, who’d heard about the other things from his wife, who’d had it from a woman friend, a retired carny worker in the village who knew Tina from way back.
I didn’t want to hear any more than Pirt himself chose to tell me. He knew I’d seen him join the parade and call on Tina after the show.
“We went down to the water,” Pirt said. “We sat and talked. I got lost for a while but I found my way home.” The owner of the pharmacy on Market Street called me over when I stopped to buy a paper. “Pirt said he’d be in to pay but it’s been more than a month now,” the pharmacist said. “I don’t want to complain—he’s a good boy—but can I put them on your bill just to keep the accounts straight?”
“Sure,” I said. “Do that, of course.” To myself I said “Oh, Lord . . .” Naturally I wondered what the items were. Condoms? Birth control pills? Vaginal foam?
So I said to the pharmacist, laughing ha-ha on the outside: “What were they? Chewing gum? Comic books? Not—ha-ha, one of those magazines?”
“No,” he said. “Nothing literary. He bought four kinds of depilatories.”
“Depilatories?”
“Hair removers. He wanted the best kind for the face.”
I thought. He couldn’t have bought them for Tally, whose facial hair was downy soft and invisible except in bright sunlight.
I said to the druggist: “For Cousin Harriet, probably. Over in Parishville? She gave him a kiss once and he said it was scratchy. Her birthday’s coming. You know how kids are about presents. They fasten on to one thing and don’t think about hurt feelings.”
“Well, if he’d asked me I’d have suggested a box of candy,” the druggist said. “But Pirt’s not much of an asker.”
I didn’t know what to think. A wild vision came to me of caveman hair sprouting all over Pirt’s face and him not trusting himself to use my razor.
Then I thought: Maybe Pirt picked the wrong woman at the circus. Maybe the Bearded Lady would have been more his style. It was an unworthy thought and I banished it. But there lingered in my mind the possibility that Pirt could be comfortable among the people of circuses and carnivals. These people were accepted where outward differences were the norm and identified th
emselves as members of a special fraternity. For the short time he’d visited among them Pirt had become one of the group, the clan. He might have been happier if he’d stayed with them. The home they could share with a lonesome caveman was more compatible, perhaps, than anything Tally and I could offer. Yet Pirt had rejected them to return to us.
I tiptoed into the house because Tally was on the fainting couch. We’d seen the piece at a flea market and she had to have it once the dealer explained. It was a sofa, raised at one end, that Victorian ladies reclined on when they had a touch of the megrims. I wouldn’t have bought it myself but Tally insisted.
Tally wasn’t the kind to give in to her migraine headaches and retire to the bedroom, not unless they were really bad. Now most of the time what she did was draw the blinds and lie down for a while on the fainting couch. This showed that she wasn’t taking the attack too seriously and that I didn’t have to tiptoe around as if she were an invalid. I did anyway, of course.
She sat up when I came in.
“Sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay. I feel better now.”
I’d said nothing to Tally about Pirt’s adventure with the Tiny Princess but I did tell her what the druggist told me about his purchases of depilatories.
“Poor little guy,” she said.
Often when I have a question I can’t find an answer to in the almanac or encyclopedia I ask Prof.
You have to understand about Prof, who’s no academic despite his nickname. He’s eccentric but he’s not the nut some think he is. He reads everything and believes less than half of it, even if it is being said by the world’s greatest authorities. He remembers too many feet of clay, clouded crystal balls, off-target oracles. He should; he’s a former press agent.
Tally says Prof gets his facts from the National Enquirer but she exaggerates. He enjoys the Enquirer because it mirrors what an impressive number of Americans like to read. He has as much fun reading the New York Times for the chinks in its armor of pomposity and infallibility. He loves to bait the Times when it stubs its toe, whether in misspellings, its occasionally inaccurate crossword puzzle definition or its quirky backing of that expedition to find the Loch Ness monster.