Troublemakers: Stories by Harlan Ellison

by Harlan Ellison

  He would shrug. Neither conversation nor life suited him with any ease or grace. “Fine, just fine,” he would say, finally.

  And we would sit in silence again.

  “Would you like a nice piece of coffee cake?” Leona would say. “I made it fresh just this morning.” Or deep dish green apple pie. Or milk and tollhouse cookies. Or a brown betty pudding.

  “No, no, thank you, Mrs. Kinzer; Jeffty and I grabbed a couple of cheeseburgers on the way home.” And again, silence.

  Then, when the stillness and the awkwardness became too much even for them (and who knew how long that total silence reigned when they were alone, with that thing they never talked about any more, hanging between them), Leona Kinzer would say, “I think he’s asleep.”

  John Kinzer would say, “I don’t hear the radio playing.”

  Just so, it would go on like that, until I could politely find excuse to bolt away on some flimsy pretext. Yes, that was the way it would go on, every time, just the same…except once.

  “I don’t know what to do any more,” Leona said. She began crying. “There’s no change, not one day of peace.”

  Her husband managed to drag himself out of the old easy chair and go to her. He bent and tried to soothe her, but it was clear from the graceless way in which he touched her graying hair that the ability to be compassionate had been stunned in him. “Shhh, Leona, it’s all right. Shhh.” But she continued crying. Her hands scraped gently at the antimacassars on the arms of the chair.

  Then she said, “Sometimes I wish he had been stillborn.”

  John looked up into the corners of the room. For the nameless shadows that were always watching him? Was it God he was seeking in those spaces? “You don’t mean that,” he said to her, softly, pathetically, urging her with body tension and trembling in his voice to recant before God took notice of the terrible thought. But she meant it; she meant it very much.

  I managed to get away quickly that evening. They didn’t want witnesses to their shame. I was glad to go.

  And for a week I stayed away. From them, from Jeffty, from their street, even from that end of town.

  I had my own life. The store, accounts, suppliers’ conferences, poker with friends, pretty women I took to well-lit restaurants, my own parents, putting anti-freeze in the car, complaining to the laundry about too much starch in the collars and cuffs, working out at the gym, taxes, catching Jan or David (whichever one it was) stealing from the cash register. I had my own life.

  But not even that evening could keep me from Jeffty. He called me at the store and asked me to take him to the rodeo. We chummed it up as best a twenty-two-year-old with other interests could…with a five-year-old. I never dwelled on what bound us together; I always thought it was simply the years. That, and affection for a kid who could have been the little brother I never had. (Except I remembered when we had played together, when we had both been the same age; I remembered that period, and Jeffty was still the same.)

  And then, one Saturday afternoon, I came to take him to a double feature, and things I should have noticed so many times before, I first began to notice only that afternoon.

  I came walking up to the Kinzer house, expecting Jeffty to be sitting on the front porch steps, or in the porch glider, waiting for me. But he was nowhere in sight.

  Going inside, into that darkness and silence, in the midst of May sunshine, was unthinkable. I stood on the front walk for a few moments, then cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled, “Jeffty? Hey, Jeffty, come on out, let’s go. We’ll be late.”

  His voice came faintly, as if from under the ground.

  “Here I am, Donny.”

  I could hear him, but I couldn’t see him. It was Jeffty, no question about it: as Donald H. Horton, President and Sole Owner of The Horton TV & Sound Center, no one but Jeffty called me Donny. He had never called me anything else.

  (Actually, it isn’t a lie. I am, as far as the public is concerned, Sole Owner of the Center. The partnership with my Aunt Patricia is only to repay the loan she made me, to supplement the money I came into when I was twenty-one, left to me when I was ten by my grandfather. It wasn’t a very big loan, only eighteen thousand, but I asked her to be a silent partner, because of when she had taken care of me as a child.)

  “Where are you, Jeffty?”

  “Under the porch in my secret place.”

  I walked around the side of the porch, and stooped down and pulled away the wicker grating. Back in there, on the pressed dirt, Jeffty had built himself a secret place. He had comics in orange crates, he had a little table and some pillows, it was lit by big fat candles, and we used to hide there when we were both…five.

  “What’cha up to?” I asked, crawling in and pulling the grate closed behind me. It was cool under the porch, and the dirt smelled comfortable, the candles smelled clubby and familiar. Any kid would feel at home in such a secret place: there’s never been a kid who didn’t spend the happiest, most productive, most deliciously mysterious times of his life in such a secret place.

  “Playin’,” he said. He was holding something golden and round. It filled the palm of his little hand.

  “You forget we were going to the movies?”

  “Nope. I was just waitin’ for you here.”

  “Your mom and dad home?”

  “Momma.”

  I understood why he was waiting under the porch. I didn’t push it any further. “What’ve you got there?”

  “Captain Midnight Secret Decoder Badge,” he said, showing it to me on his flattened palm.

  I realized I was looking at it without comprehending what it was for a long time. Then it dawned on me what a miracle Jeffty had in his hand. A miracle that simply could not exist.

  “Jeffty,” I said softly, with wonder in my voice, “where’d you get that?”

  “Came in the mail today. I sent away for it.”

  “It must have cost a lot of money.”

  “Not so much. Ten cents an’ two inner wax seals from two jars of Ovaltine.”

  “May I see it?” My voice was trembling, and so was the hand I extended. He gave it to me and I held the miracle in the palm of my hand. It was wonderful.

  You remember. Captain Midnight went on the radio nationwide in 1940. It was sponsored by Ovaltine. And every year they issued a Secret Squadron Decoder Badge. And every day at the end of the program, they would give you a clue to the next day’s installment in a code that only kids with the official badge could decipher. They stopped making those wonderful Decoder Badges in 1949. I remember the one I had in 1945: it was beautiful. It had a magnifying glass in the center of the code dial. Captain Midnight went off the air in 1950, and though I understand it was a short-lived television series in the mid-Fifties, and though they issued Decoder Badges in 1955 and 1956, as far as the real badges were concerned, they never made one after 1949.

  The Captain Midnight Code-O-Graph I held in my hand, the one Jeffty said he had gotten in the mail for ten cents (ten cents!!!) and two Ovaltine labels, was brand new, shiny gold metal, not a dent or a spot of rust on it like the old ones you can find at exorbitant prices in collectible shoppes from time to time…it was a new Decoder. And the date on it was this year.

  But Captain Midnight no longer existed. Nothing like it existed on the radio. I’d listened to the one or two weak imitations of old-time radio the networks were currently airing, and the stories were dull, the sound effects bland, the whole feel of it wrong, out of date, cornball. Yet I held a new Code-O-Graph.

  “Jeffty, tell me about this,” I said.

  “Tell you what, Donny? It’s my new Capt’n Midnight Secret Decoder Badge. I use it to figger out what’s gonna happen tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow how?”

  “On the program.”

  “What program?!”

  He stared at me as if I was being purposely stupid. “On Capt’n Midnight! Boy!” I was being dumb.

  I still couldn’t get it straight. It was right there, right out in the o
pen, and I still didn’t know what was happening. “You mean one of those records they made of the old-time radio programs? Is that what you mean, Jeffty?”

  “What records?” he asked. He didn’t know what I meant.

  We stared at each other, there under the porch. And then I said, very slowly, almost afraid of the answer, “Jeffty, how do you hear Captain Midnight?”

  “Every day. On the radio. On my radio. Every day at five-thirty.” News. Music, dumb music, and news. That’s what was on the radio every day at 5:30. Not Captain Midnight. The Secret Squadron hadn’t been on the air in twenty years.

  “Can we hear it tonight?” I asked.

  “Boy!” he said. I was being dumb. I knew it from the way he said it; but I didn’t know why. Then it dawned on me: this was Saturday. Captain Midnight was on Monday through Friday. Not on Saturday or Sunday.

  “We goin’ to the movies?”

  He had to repeat himself twice. My mind was somewhere else. Nothing definite. No conclusions. No wild assumptions leapt to. Just off somewhere trying to figure it out, and concluding–as you would have concluded, as anyone would have concluded rather than accepting the truth, the impossible and wonderful truth-just finally concluding there was a simple explanation I didn’t yet perceive. Something mundane and dull, like the passage of time that steals all good, old things from us, packratting trinkets and plastic in exchange. And all in the name of Progress.

  “We goin’ to the movies, Donny?”

  “You bet your boots we are, kiddo,” I said. And I smiled. And I handed him the Code-O-Graph. And he put it in his side pants pocket. And we crawled out from under the porch. And we went to the movies. And neither of us said anything about Captain Midnight all the rest of that day. And there wasn’t a ten-minute stretch, all the rest of that day, that I didn’t think about it.

  It was inventory all that next week. I didn’t see Jeffty till late Thursday. I confess I left the store in the hands of Jan and David, told them I had some errands to run, and left early. At 4:00. I got to the Kinzers’ right around 4:45. Leona answered the door, looking exhausted and distant. “Is Jeffty around?” She said he was upstairs in his room…

  …listening to the radio.

  I climbed the stairs two at a time.

  All right, I had finally made that impossible, illogical leap. Had the stretch of belief involved anyone but Jeffty, adult or child, I would have reasoned out more explicable answers. But it was Jeffty, clearly another kind of vessel of life, and what he might experience should not be expected to fit into the ordered scheme.

  I admit it: I wanted to hear what I heard.

  Even with the door closed, I recognized the program:

  “There he goes, Tennessee! Get him!”

  There was the heavy report of a rifle shot and the keening whine of the slug ricocheting, and then the same voice yelled triumphantly, “Got him! D-e-a-a-a-a-d center!”

  He was listening to the American Broadcasting Company, 790 kilocycles, and he was hearing Tennessee Jed, one of my most favorite programs from the Forties, a western adventure I had not heard in twenty years, because it had not existed for twenty years.

  I sat down on the top step of the stairs, there in the upstairs hall of the Kinzer home, and I listened to the show. It wasn’t a rerun of an old program, because there were occasional references in the body of the drama to current cultural and technological developments, and phrases that had not existed in common usage in the Forties: aerosol spray cans, laserasing of tattoos, Tanzania, the word “uptight.”

  I could not ignore the fact. Jeffty was listening to a new segment of Tennessee Jed.

  I ran downstairs and out the front door to my car. Leona must have been in the kitchen. I turned the key and punched on the radio and spun the dial to 790 kilocycles. The ABC station. Rock music.

  I sat there for a few moments, then ran the dial slowly from one end to the other. Music, news, talk shows. No Tennessee Jed. And it was a Blaupunkt, the best radio I could get. I wasn’t missing some perimeter station. It simply was not there!

  After a few moments I turned off the radio and the ignition and went back upstairs quietly. I sat down on the top step and listened to the entire program. It was wonderful.

  Exciting, imaginative, filled with everything I remembered as being most innovative about radio drama. But it was modern. It wasn’t an antique, re-broadcast to assuage the need of that dwindling listenership who longed for the old days. It was a new show, with all the old voices, but still young and bright. Even the commercials were for currently available products, but they weren’t as loud or as insulting as the screamer ads one heard on radio these days.

  And when Tennessee Jed went off at 5:00, I heard Jeffty spin the dial on his radio till I heard the familiar voice of the announcer Glenn Riggs proclaim, “Presenting Hop Harrigan! America’s ace of the airwaves!” There was the sound of an airplane in flight. It was a prop plane, not a jet! Not the sound kids today have grown up with, but the sound I grew up with, the real sound of an airplane, the growling, revving, throaty sound of the kind of airplanes G-8 and His Battle Aces flew, the kind Captain Midnight flew, the kind Hop Harrigan flew. And then I heard Hop say, “CX-4 calling control tower. CX-4 calling control tower. Standing by!” A pause, then, “Okay, this is Hop Harrigan…coming in!”

  And Jeffty, who had the same problem all of us kids had had in the Forties with programming that pitted equal favorites against one another on different stations, having paid his respects to Hop Harrigan and Tank Tinker, spun the dial and went back to ABC, where I heard the stroke of a gong, the wild cacophony of nonsense Chinese chatter, and the announcer yelled, “T-e-e-e-rry and the Pirates!”

  I sat there on the top step and listened to Terry and Connie and Flip Corkin and, so help me God, Agnes Moorehead as The Dragon Lady, all of them in a new adventure that took place in a Red China that had not existed in the days of Milton Caniff’s 1937 version of the Orient, with river pirates and Chiang Kai-shek and warlords and the naive Imperialism of American gunboat diplomacy.

  Sat, and listened to the whole show, and sat even longer to hear Superman and part of Jack Armstrong, The All American Boy and part of Captain Midnight, and John Kinzer came home and neither he nor Leona came upstairs to find out what had happened to me, or where Jeffty was, and sat longer, and found I had started crying, and could not stop, just sat there with tears running down my face, into the corners of my mouth, sitting and crying until Jeffty heard me and opened his door and saw me and came out and looked at me in childish confusion as I heard the station break for the Mutual Network and they began the theme music of Tom Mix, “When It’s Round-up Time in Texas and the Bloom Is on the Sage,” and Jeffty touched my shoulder and smiled at me, with his mouth and his big brown eyes, and said, “Hi, Donny. Wanna come in an’ listen to the radio with me?”

  Hume denied the existence of an absolute space, in which each thing has its place; Borges denies the existence of one single time, in which all events are linked.

  Jeffty received radio programs from a place that could not, in logic, in the natural scheme of the space-time universe as conceived by Einstein, exist. But that wasn’t all he received. He got mail order premiums that no one was manufacturing. He read comic books that had been defunct for three decades. He saw movies with actors who had been dead for twenty years. He was the receiving terminal for endless joys and pleasures of the past that the world had dropped along the way. On its headlong suicidal flight toward New Tomorrows, the world had razed its treasurehouse of simple happinesses, had poured concrete over its playgrounds, had abandoned its elfin stragglers, and all of it was being impossibly, miraculously shunted back into the present through Jeffty. Revivified, updated, the traditions maintained but contemporaneous. Jeffty was the unbidding Aladdin whose very nature formed the magic lampness of his reality.

  And he took me into his world with him.

  Because he trusted me.

  We had breakfast of Quaker Puffed Wheat Sparkies
and warm Ovaltine we drank out of this year’s Little Orphan Annie Shake-Up Mugs. We went to the movies and while everyone else was seeing a comedy starring Goldie Hawn and Ryan O’Neal, Jeffty and I were enjoying Humphrey Bogart as the professional thief Parker in John Huston’s brilliant adaptation of the Donald Westlake novel SLAYGROUND. The second feature was Spencer Tracy, Carole Lombard and Laird Cregar in the Val Lewton-produced film of Leiningen Versus the Ants.

  Twice a month we went down to the newsstand and bought the current pulp issues of The Shadow, Doc Savage and Startling Stories. Jeffty and I sat together and I read to him from the magazines. He particularly liked the new short novel by Henry Kuttner, “The Dreams of Achilles,” and the new Stanley G. Weinbaum series of short stories set in the subatomic particle universe of Redurna. In September we enjoyed the first installment of the new Robert E. Howard Conan novel, ISLE OF THE BLACK ONES, in Weird Tales; and in August we were only mildly disappointed by Edgar Rice Burroughs’s fourth novella in the Jupiter series featuring John Carter of Barsoom–“Corsairs of Jupiter.” But the editor of Argosy All-Story Weekly promised there would be two more stories in the series, and it was such an unexpected revelation for Jeffty and me that it dimmed our disappointment at the lessened quality of the current story.

  We read comics together, and Jeffty and I both decided–separately, before we came together to discuss it–that our favorite characters were Doll Man, Airboy and The Heap. We also adored the George Carlson strips in Jingle Jangle Comics, particularly the Pie-Face Prince of Old Pretzleburg stories, which we read together and laughed over, even though I had to explain some of the esoteric puns to Jeffty, who was too young to have that kind of subtle wit.

  How to explain it? I can’t. I had enough physics in college to make some offhand guesses, but I’m more likely wrong than right. The laws of the conservation of energy occasionally break. These are laws that physicists call “weakly violated.” Perhaps Jeffty was a catalyst for the weak violation of conservation laws we’re only now beginning to realize exist. I tried doing some reading in the area–muon decay of the “forbidden” kind: gamma decay that doesn’t include the muon neutrino among its products–but nothing I encountered, not even the latest readings from the Swiss Institute for Nuclear Research near Zurich gave me an insight. I was thrown back on a vague acceptance of the philosophy that the real name for “science” is magic.