by Jack Finney
We do, do we? What's she like, by the way?
He shrugged, trying to pass that one by, but instead he got mad. She's damn' good-looking, if you want to know! And smart, too; reads all kinds of books. He laughed again.
And you're very much in love with her, no doubt? In the dreams, only, of course.
He didn't answer for a second, then he said, Look, honey, I can't help what I dream, can I?
I didn't answer that; I'd just thought of something. What do you look like in these dreams?
Just the same. Exactly the way I look now.
I nodded. I thought so. That wouldn't change, you can bet on it. Everything different but that.
Charley's still a good-looking man; he's only thirty-three. So am I, for that matter, but hell, I've faced it long ago; I'm twenty-five pounds too heavy, and it wouldn't matter much if I weren't. But Charley has a lean, handsome face, and black, curly hair with one of those wonderful white streaks through it. He's different-looking, too; distinctive, I guess you'd say. I know I've never seen anyone else who looked like him.
I was beginning to get the idea, I thought, whether he did or not, and I was scared. Look, I said, these dreams started fifteen-sixteen years ago, you say. About when you were in high school; around your last year, maybe. Did this man you are in the dreams go to college?
Yes.
You dreamed all that? That you went to college?
Yeah.
Then, look, Charley — I was kind of pleading with him now — don't you see? Don't you realize? You wanted to go on to college after high school — and instead we got married. But you've always wished you could have gone on and been a big success; I've known it for a long time. Well, that's what this man in your dreams has done. Charley. don't you see the reason for your dreams?
For some reason, he hated to admit it, or face it, but he had to. Maybe, he said sullenly.
Listen, Charley, I said softly, was he popular in college? An athlete? Popular with the girls? A campus hot-shot? Did he make swell grades without half trying?
His teeth clenched, Charley said. Yeah.
I nodded. These dreams have got to stop. You see that, don't you? I was anxious. They're not good for you, and they've got to stop. I knew they had to. I don't say our marriage is what it should be; it isn't. But it's better than ending up alone. Did you ever try sleeping pills?
He shook his head.
Why not?
I don't know, he said angrily. I just never did; never thought about it.
Maybe you didn't want to stop them, I said. but he didn't answer. Well, we'll try them. I glanced at the kitchen clock. Don't be late for work, now.
For a month, Charley took a sleeping tablet every night; I saw to that. I got them from our doctor for him, and the dreams stopped. Every morning I'd ask him, and I knew they'd stopped; Charley never lies. He didn't like the whole business, though, I knew. Maybe because I'd solved a problem he hadn't been able to. Or maybe not. At least he couldn't think of any arguments against taking the pills.
A week ago, after Charley left in the morning, I was reading the paper, and I came to the notices and obituaries, and there was Charley's picture. I try to be calm about it now, and I really am, but — oh, my God, there it was. The hair with the white streak, his face, every detail and line of it; it was Charley's picture! I think I moaned or made some kind of sound in my throat and then, the next I knew, I was wandering around the house, kind of crying, with my arms wrapped around my chest, sort of hugging myself. How would you act — if you saw your husband's picture in the death notices ten minutes after he'd the house!
Then I was sick, actually sick to my stomach, and then I fell asleep on the bathroom floor. Because under that picture it said, Carmody — yes, Edward V. Carmody — and it said he was an investment counselor, and his wife's name was Marie, and — oh, all the rest of it, just the way Charley dreamed. The man had been unconscious, in coma for a month, it said, and now he was dead. Oh, my, oh, help me; I've never been so frightened. What's happened. What's happened?
But I'm all right now. I can look at Charley again, at night when we're sitting around the living room, without him asking me what's the matter. It was only a coincidence, is all. It was somebody who looked like Charley and whose name was Carmody, and all the rest of it, and he died. lt was a coincidence, and I'm all right now.
Charley's fine, too. He certainly sleeps we without any pills now — and he never dreams. In fact, he doesn't even move all night long. I've told him — I kind of laugh when I say it, to show I'm just kidding — I've told him that at night now sleeps like a dead man.
Oh, help me.
Collier's, February 2, 1952, 129(5):38
Tiger Tamer
I suppose it'll be Taft or Eisenhower or Kefauver, but it might, it just might, be Charley. There's a one-in-ten chance I'd say, and we could probably do worse. Oh, they say he's a charlatan, a confidence man — and, off the record, they're right. For hard-bitten practicality and gouging in the clinches, he could give odds to a loan shark. But he's a dreamer, too, an artist — and I'm not making a speech — warmed by the fires of genius, a shrewd and shifty poet at heart; and when it comes to pulling rabbits out of the hat, I promise you he'll produce them by litters.
If Charley gets in the running at all, you'll certainly read about his boyhood and see his early photographs till you're sick of them — that thin, composed, alert little face behind tortoise-shell glasses. And you'll see the old newspaper clippings reproduced once more: the stories and several dozen photographs that ran for a week, thirty-odd years ago, in the Galesburg, Illinois, RegisterMail; the follow-up interviews in the big Chicago papers next day; and the page-three wire story from the files of the New York Times. You might, if you can remember Calvin Coolidge, even recall the story yourself. Charley was the boy who hypnotized the tiger.
Yes, he did; don't think I'm remembering through a golden haze. In the things that counted with boys, Charley was unquestionably a genius. One summer vacation, Charley bought for two dollars — every cent he had — an immense, dusty carton of unsold Easter-egg dyes from the grocery store at eight o'clock one Tuesday morning. By eight thirty, using the upstairs telephone at his house, he had instructed five of us to meet in his basement and to bring along the big metal clothes boilers our mothers all used on washdays. By nine, when we met, Charley's mother had gone to the Tuesday-morning sewing group at the church. Ten minutes later, the five of us dispersed at Charley's direction, each to an assigned territory. Within forty minutes we were back, each with at least one, and some with two and three, white or semiwhite neighborhood dogs of all sizes and breeds, two white Angoras, and one mottled-white alley cat.
Charley was ready. The two stationary laundry tubs were filled with warm, sudsy water for the preliminary baths; the clothes boilers were each half full of dye; a section of the basement — the drying area — was neatly paved with newspapers; and Charley, seated above us on the basement stairs, was ready to direct and oversee the fast, efficient, assembly-line operation he had planned.
We were finished on schedule by noon, when the neighborhood was briefly busy with husbands coming home for lunch. Then Charley gave the signal, and — dry and combed now — fourteen excited red, green, violet, vivid yellow, sky-blue, and purple dogs, two sullen scarlet cats, and a final experimental red-white-and-blue one, were simultaneously released on a flabbergasted neighborhood.
This accomplishment had the clean-cut touch of genius, and we knew it. It was a conception so far above the routine traditional mischief of the rest of us that it was beyond envy and only to be admired and accepted with gratitude. Even then, as you can see — call it pump-priming, if you like — Charley never hesitated to spend what was necessary to the largeness of his purposes; he was broke for a week after the episode of the dogs, but it was obviously necessary and worth it. Then, as today, he understood that accomplishment carries its price.
But there was more to Charley than flash. In between his larger specta
cular achievements ran a steady workaday stream of minor though always talented activity. He devised a simple, effective method of dipping the entire supply of school blackboard chalk, stick by stick, into a thinned solution of shellac, coating each with a hard, invisible shell which eliminated blackboard instruction for a day and a half. Charley found the pet cock at the back of an untended pipe down at the pop-bottling plant, which, when turned, released a warm, uncarbonated, delicious stream of grape pop, and we used it at intervals for a week, till Ed Krueger got careless and was caught.
And it was Charley, at the tattooing booth of a traveling carnival, who had a red-and-blue rose-wreathed heart labeled Mother worked onto his chest in genuine tattoo ink — though without the use of the needle — to the awe-struck envy of us all, till it began to wear off and he admitted the hoax.
He made things work. The essence of success ran in his veins — there was the key to Charley's character. And when he showed up, that memorable morning, after breakfast and the mail delivery, with a paper-bound volume of instructions on hypnotism, we all felt in our bones that Charley would become — perhaps already had become — a skilled practicing mesmerist.
There were five of us — four boys and Agnes, the tomboy sister of one — and we had gathered, as we did often that summer, in Mrs. Councilman's back yard. I remember that day, and all those long-ago, deep-summer days in Galesburg, Illinois, with a terrible nostalgia. Already the sky was a hard, hot blue, the air shimmering with sun. The grass under our bare feet was faded and dry, and the tree locusts were sawing their wings for yards and blocks and miles around us.
Today, I suppose, we would have known about the tiger hours earlier and been safe behind doors; radios would have been issuing urgent warnings, and sound trucks would have been touring the streets. But in those days — on that day — news spread slowly and haphazardly, by word of mouth. And at the moment when Charley sat down on the grass to show us the book with the chin-bearded Svengali on the cover, only a handful of circus men knew that a young and thoroughly dangerous tiger was out of his cage and on the prowl.
We discussed Charley's book for a time; then Ken Garver ran up the tree, and we all followed. The tree was the reason we so often gathered in Mrs. Councilman's yard. It was thick-boled and squat, the trunk slanting out from the ground at a forty-five-degree angle, so that with a short running start, a barefooted boy could run right up the trunk to the lowest branches. We sat roosting in the tree and talked desultorily about the circus out at the fairgrounds. I don't remember that we were ever especially excited over a circus, and none of us ever carried water for the elephants. We were taken to the circus every year by our parents, or given money to buy tickets, and we were reasonably interested and talked about it a little.
But mostly, that morning, as at the beginning of every day, we were waiting for something to happen, for some activity, set off by a stimulus from outside or inside our minds, to begin. And the day, filled with promise, stretched far ahead, each hour infinitely longer and richer than any have ever been since.
Mrs. Councilman came out of her house and greeted us pleasantly, and Agnes, lowering her voice sympathetically, said, How's Mr. Councilman? Mrs. Councilman nodded sadly and said, Fine. One or the other of us inquired each day about her husband's health as though he were an invalid, and Mrs. Councilman responded as though he were. Actually, the man — slight, pale, and half his wife's buxom size — went to work every day in a machine shop. But he suffered, whiningly, from a perpetual plague of vague ailments.
Once when Charley and I were in the bathroom of their house — we had the run of the place — the door of a large wooden cabinet on the floor was ajar, and we stood astounded, staring at shelf after shelf crammed with prescriptions and pills, great bottles of tonic and liniment, Nerv-Aid and sleeping tablets, most of them with Mr. Councilman's name on the labels, and for a moment we had a dim awareness of the kind of half-life that poor man lived.
Smiling benignly, Mrs. Councilman stood by our tree, enjoying the sun. Then Agnes, her voice surprised, said, There's a tiger. She shrieked, and sat staring across the yard. There are, or were, no fences or alleys in Galesburg; all the back yards of a block blend into one, and it is possible to walk, as we often did, for block after block through the gardens and back yards of the town. We all turned to look, and there, impossibly, ambling toward us from the next yard, his tail erect and switching slightly, was an enormous tiger.
It was outside of all experience, past belief, yet there, indisputably, was a tiger; and we saw the muscles slide and the white hairs of his chest, just under the shoulders, spread apart and come together with each silent step.
He could have reached Mrs. Councilman in a single leap, killing or maiming her with a swipe of his paw. But instead, just within our yard now, he sat down, a colossal cat with foot-long white whiskers, and returned our stare, gazing at us through the slitted pupils of his immense yellow eyes. For a moment frozen in time, we all simply stared, he at us, we at him. Then the animal's small ears flicked, one at a time, and flattened on his skull. Soundlessly, he opened his mouth, and we saw the great shiny-wet fangs.
In a sudden hoarse whisper, Charley said, Up in the tree! and reached down and grabbed Mrs. Councilman's hair. Then Charley, and in a moment Ed Krueger, Ken Garver and I, clutching the branches with our legs, tugging at Mrs. Councilman's hair and the collar of her dress, tried to drag her up the slanting trunk of the tree. She came to life then, and grasping the trunk, scrambling awkwardly, managed to catch hold of the lowest limb and drag herself, moaning softly all the time, up into the branches with us.
For perhaps a full half minute longer, the tiger sat in the sun, staring up at us with a lively and terrible interest. Agnes began to cry softly, and Mrs. Councilman, climbing higher, managed to reach up and get an arm around her waist to comfort her. Then the tiger's hind end raised, and he trotted to the house, and sat, his back toward us now, staring up at the partly opened first-floor window of Mrs. Councilman's pantry.
Each of us, I'm sure, was certain that in only a moment this impossible situation must end, that, as always in any predicament beyond a child's ability, adult help would be quickly forthcoming. But time passed, and the summer sound of the locusts droned on. Then, incredibly, in the street around at the front of the house, a car door slammed, and we heard a woman's voice call out, Hello, Mrs. Garver. Hot, isn't it? We heard Ken's mother reply cheerily. A screen door banged shut. The car started up; then the sound of its motor diminished, and once again there was no sound but the dry, steady drone of the locusts. It came to us then that the world was going on about its business in blank ignorance of us, and no help was on its way.
Now the tiger stood up, placed his forepaws up on the wood side of the house, straining his neck toward the window, and growled in his throat; and the prickling fright came washing over us.
It was Charley who understood first. The window reminds him of the place he's fed at, he said. At the sound of the voice, the tiger's head turned, and he stared at us over his shoulder for a moment. Then, once more, he strained up toward the window and growled, a deep, terrible sound, and we heard his claws clicking and scratching on the painted clapboards, and knew this was a savage and dangerous beast.
Carefully, Charley planted both feet in the main crotch of the tree, slid off his branch, and crouched, out of reach of Mrs. Councilman's free arm. I think, he announced to us then, that I can hypnotize that tiger.
Charley! Mrs. Councilman shrieked. Don't you move! And again the tiger turned to stare.
Charley didn't answer. From his back pocket he pulled a bandanna and handed it up to me. If he comes running, throw this in his face; it'll confuse him, he told me. He pulled his book out of his pocket, opened it to the first page, and ran a finger down the table of contents. Then, looking up at us, smiling reassuringly, Charley nodded. Yep, he said, there's a chapter on animal hypnotism. He shoved the book in his pocket and dropped from the tree, landing on his feet beside it.
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nbsp; For seconds Charley stood poised, ready to leap for the tree again, but the animal across the yard continued to stare up at the half-open window. Then — not calmly, I'm certain, but coolly — Charley began slowly walking toward the back steps and screen door which led into the kitchen of Mrs. Councilman's house. At the third step, the tiger's head swung toward Charley, and Charley — helpless now, far from safety by several seconds and steps — could only walk on, an undersized ten-year-old boy, staring at a four-hundred-pound tiger a dozen yards away. It sounds like incredible bravery, yet I doubt that courage had anything to do with it. It is simply that, for a mind like Charley's, some opportunities are just too big to lose.
My faith in him wavered and died. This, I knew, was too big, beyond any boy, even Charley. I knew he'd overreached himself, that in the next seconds he might actually be killed before my eyes. But he went up the fourth step, the fifth, and the sixth; then his bare foot touched the porch and suddenly he bolted, stumbling and crashing in through the screen door. Then the kitchen door slammed shut, and we heard the sliding bolt on the inside shoot home. The tiger trotted to the stairs, gazed up them, then returned to his position under the window.
Then it occurred to me — I knew that Charley was a showman, a lover of the hoax, but no fool — that he had no intention of trying any such nonsense as hypnotizing this tiger, and that he was simply going to telephone the police. When he did not appear at the pantry window, I was certain of it, and waited for the sound of the receiver being removed from the wall phone in the kitchen. But seconds passed, and I heard nothing. Then, presently, we heard Mrs. Councilman's icebox open, heard the clink of a milk bottle and the rattle of paper. Then the icebox door slammed shut, and a moment later Charley's composed face appeared at the window.