Horse of a Different Color

by Howard Waldrop

  I believe this is a rare opportunity to look for the anomalies reported on the Moon in the last century—the signs of light in various areas, possible volcanic activity in the Sinuous Rille from 1879; the blue glow coming from differing areas, and the changes in craters Alphonsus, Hercules, and Eratosthenes.

  It would be wonderful—and scientifically useful—if some small fraction of time—a night each month or two, perhaps just a few hours of that time—could be used for direct or photographic observation of these areas of the Moon.

  Perhaps we can settle the question once and for all, of whether the Moon is a dead world, or is in some way still active, perhaps even with small traces of an atmosphere or the tenuous presence of water vapor deep within the craters—which, until man attempts to go there, can only be answered—perhaps—by using the best equipment available.

  I’m sure time on the wonderful new telescope is heavily booked. But if you, like me, believe we should do this, I would hope you could broach the possibility at the next meeting of the American Planetary Society, and at the International Astronomical Union Satellite Section in March.

  Thank you very much.

  Sincerely,

  Robert Howlin

  #1579

  The great WWII outside was a rumor. The guards got older for a while, or had small disabilities that could keep them out of the Army or Navy, but not out of the staff of Alcatraz.

  The wind blew off the Bay as hard as ever; Angel Island still sat out there, the closest piece of land; San Francisco across the exercise yard looked the same, bright and white in good weather, grey and wet in bad; disappearing completely in the solid-wall fogs so thick you couldn’t see the Industries Building from the boat dock.

  The magazines and books came, the letters went. The days were the same as the years. They were marked only by his monthly trips outside the cell block and down to the old fortress area and the vault for three days of amnesia, weakness, and vertigo.

  On the second of May, 1946, prisoners AZ 415 Coy and AZ 548 Kretzer, using a screw jack they’d built in Industries and smuggled in through the Laundry, got into the gun gallery and overpowered the only armed guard in the cell block. They got M-1 carbines and .45 automatics, and then surprised nine unarmed guards in the block one at a time, including the captain, who’d been wounded back in the big breakout attempt in 1938—and put them all in two cells at the end of D Block.

  They opened cells and let others out.

  The place was chaos a few minutes until the others realized they didn’t have the keys that would get them out of the cell-block building.

  One of the two instigators went berserk and started firing with a .45 auto into the cells full of guards, killing two of them and wounding all the others.

  The youngest prisoner on The Rock went into the cells and told Coy and Kretzer, “They’re all dead.”

  Five or six prisoners, including one named Hubbard, joined the two with the guns. Most of the rest returned to their cells. This had been just a short break in the routine.

  Coy began firing out the windows, indiscriminately, at the rest of the Island.

  The second day of the siege—with another guard dead on the hill outside, and marines from the Presidio, just back after 3½ years of kicking Tojo butt, were on the roof of the cell block, throwing tear gas and hand grenades down into the utility corridors that ran between each row of cells.

  The warden had been on the horn for two days, urging the prisoners to give up.

  Most inmates were hunkered in their cells, their heads down inside their bailed-out toilets, breathing fresh air from there, away from the tear gas that floated like ground fog through the building.

  Word came up to Coy, Kretzer, and Hubbard, who were still firing at anything that moved outside.

  “Howlin wants to talk with you.”

  “I’m busy,” said Coy, shooting toward the exercise yard.

  “I think you better go talk to him.”

  “I better, huh?” said Coy, bringing the carbine around. He coughed, his eyes closed to slits. Snot hung down his chin in a rope.

  “I’m just the messenger,” said the inmate.

  Machine gun bullets ricocheted off the walls above them, fired from the lower hill. What glass was left came down in an avalanche.

  Coy went down to the other end of Broadway, where all the cell blocks junctioned.

  Howlin sat calmly on his bunk, surrounded by his books, tears running down his swollen face. He wiped his face with a sock. He coughed quietly.

  “Yeah?” said Coy.

  “Have you been listening to the warden?” asked Howlin.

  “It’s the usual wind,” said Coy.

  “Those are Marines on the roof. They’re sending Federal Marshals from as far away as Colorado.”

  “You ain’t telling me nothing I don’t know. I ain’t afraid of Marines.”

  “I know you’re not,” said Howlin. “That’s your choice. And I don’t like being in here any more than you do. But it’s not the Marines I’m worried about, either.”

  Hubbard and Kretzer joined them. “It’s quiet,” said Kretzer. “They’ll yell if the soldiers try anything. What’s up?”

  “I don’t know yet,” said Coy. “Get to the point, Howlin.”

  “You don’t have the keys to get out of the cell-block building. There’s no other way out of here. They’ll jackhammer their way in through the roof soon. There’s three, maybe five of you with guns. There’s hundreds of them. It’s pretty much over.”

  “You scared?” asked Hubbard.

  “Yes. But not—”

  The sound of two prisoners having sex in a cell down the way came to them.

  Coy jumped up and fired down Broadway. “You animals disgust me!” he yelled. He wiped his eyes and nose, coughed hard and couldn’t stop.

  “Coy,” said Howlin. “Tonight is the full moon. If this isn’t over before it comes up, and they haven’t got me down to the isolation vault, you, and every prisoner here, will be locked in with me.”

  Hubbard and Kretzer looked at Coy, then back at Howlin, sitting among his books.

  “He’s crazy!” said Hubbard.

  “Maybe. Probably,” said Howlin.

  “Why don’t we kill him now?” asked Kretzer.

  “What’s he done to us?” asked Hubbard. “He’s stuck in here like us, crazy or not. He didn’t break out.”

  Coy rubbed his eyes.

  Howlin lifted his leg off the floor, cupped both hands around his knee. “I thought I would tell you what’s going to happen tonight, since in your excitement you might have forgotten me. You can listen to me, or you can listen to the warden: I don’t care. They’ve got their timetable for dealing with you—I have no idea what that is. I only know mine, and that I can’t help myself, once it starts.

  “If that happens, you might as well eat those guns now. They won’t do you any good. The only ones that’ll work on me are down there in the vault level, and you can’t get there, either. Bars won’t help; I’ll come through them like they were butter. Not only that, I’ll get everyone in the cell-block building, one at a time. Then I’ll start in on the Marines when they get in, and the rest of the Island. Then I’ll take the boat and do in San Francisco.

  “You’ve got eleven hours and fourteen minutes. That’s all I wanted to say.”

  There was more noise from up on the roof, and the three left.

  Six hours later, they threw out the guns and surrendered. The Marines came in and secured the cell blocks. The guards took out the dead and wounded and set up fans to blow away the tear gas.

  It was a few minutes ’til sundown when they got Howlin down to the isolation vault, and the doc in.

  One day in 1953, the new prison doctor, who’d only been there six months, came into the cell vault on the morning after the first night of the full moon.

  He found Howlin sitting up on the bedding of the concrete bunk.

  The doc was taken aback.

  “Are you ok
ay?” he asked.

  “You tell me, Doc. I’m jumpy as hell. But I think I stayed awake the whole night. I don’t think anything happened. I could be wrong about that as about anything else—I could have only imagined I stayed awake. But I think I did.”

  The doc moved a flashlight beam across Howlin’s eyes, then used the stethoscope.

  “Let’s assume you’ve been awake the whole night. I’ll give you your vitamin shot, and a sedative. I’ll be back this afternoon and give you another. Maybe you can sleep through the whole night for the first time in—what?—nineteen years?”

  “What’s happening to me, Doc?”

  “I’m not a guessing man,” said the doctor. “Until I know better, I would say you’re getting old. There’s some tests we can run next week.”

  Howlin looked down at the concrete floor. “Other than the great relief about it, I don’t think I like the idea of getting old, Doc.”

  “Happens to the best of us,” said the doctor, loading up the needle.

  His book—The Moon and Me—came out October 6, 1957, two days after the Sputnik went up. He had gotten copies two weeks before but couldn’t have any kind of celebration. He, and half the prison population, were down with the Asian Flu, brought back by one of the schoolkids on the boat.

  Already they were talking of closing down The Rock. But then, they’d been talking about that since about two days after it opened in 1934.

  “It doesn’t look good,” said the doctor. “If we’d caught it earlier, we could have operated. It’s slow growing. It started in the gonads—I think now that must be why your condition went away. But now it’s spread everywhere. You may have one or two years, or less. It’s a tough break, Bob. I’m sorry as I can be.”

  “To think, Doc—the thing that’s cured me’s going to kill me. There’s your irony.”

  “We’re trying to get you transferred to the prison farm in Missouri,” he said. “The medical board meets next week in Walla Walla.”

  “That would be great, Doc. You know what? If I do get there, I’m going to try to get permission to go out in the night and just look at the full moon. I haven’t seen the Moon all these thirty years. I may see the Moon on the train, but it probably won’t be full. Yeah, that would be great, Doc. I can last that long.”

  They made a movie about his life—The Wolf-Man of Alcatraz—which starred Kirk Douglas, who looked nothing like him, and which was highly fictionalized. Howlin never saw it.

  They came up to the top of the hill, Howlin using one of those new prison farm–issue three-toed canes made of aluminum.

  The hill looked like all of the other ones that stretched away toward Jefferson City over to the east.

  The Moon sailed on the rim of the world like a big, bright ocean liner, or a giant pumpkin. It seemed so close you could touch it.

  “Kids’ll be trick-or-treating next week, won’t they, Captain?” asked Howlin.

  “Suppose so.”

  “Man, you shoulda seen the Moon in the old days. It was really somethin’.”

  The captain shrugged.

  “People are going there someday. I can feel it.”

  “Not anybody from this prison farm.”

  “Just so,” said Howlin.

  They continued to watch until the Moon stood completely up off the jumbled horizon.

  Tomorrow they were letting him fish for bluegills in one of the prison ponds.

  “Thanks, Captain,” said Howlin. He handed the guard a stick of Black Jack gum.

  “Mind your step,” said the guard.

  They went back down the hill toward the barracks, their full-moon-lengthened shadows going before them.

  When he passed away in his sleep, in the prison-farm hospital, he didn’t get much press: he died the same day as Aldous Huxley and John F. Kennedy.

  Afterword The Wolf-Man of Alcatraz

  It’s not hard to come up with snappy, stupid-sounding titles, as here.

  What’s hard is coming up with a story for it that’s not snappy and stupid.

  As here.

  I tried to imagine what it would be like to live in a world where lycanthropy is real, and you could be incarcerated if you committed a crime while in the ur-state.

  (The quote from J. Edgar Hoover is real—real quote was about fellatio, but I changed that.) The story flowed from there on May 9–10, 2004.

  I did lots of research on Alcatraz (the direct-current electrical system was real: a favorite pastime of prisoners was electroplating their underwear in the toilets, because they were bored, and they could.)

  I re-watched The Birdman of Alcatraz to make sure I wasn’t kyping anything from there.

  When I finished this and read it at an ArmadilloCon, Brad Denton came up afterwards and said, “I saw what you were doing there. Writing a werewolf story where the reader is never sure there’s a werewolf or not.”

  You read it here first.

  The Horse of a Different Color (That You Rode in On)

  Thanks, Ms. Emshwiller; and Mikes, Walsh and Nelson.

  A few years before Manny Marks (that’s how he insisted his name be spelled) died at the age of 107, he gave a series of long interviews to Barry Winstead, who was researching a book on the death of vaudeville. Marks was 103 at the time, in the spring of 1990. This unedited tape was probably never transcribed.

  Marks: . . . I know it was, because I was playing Conshohocken. Is that thing on? What exactly does it do?

  Winstead: Are you kidding me?

  Marks: Those things have been going downhill since the Dictaphone. How well could that thing record? It’s the size of a pack of Luckies . . .

  Winstead: Trust me, Mr. Marks.

  Marks: Mr. Marx was my father, Samuel “Frenchy” Marx. Call me Manny.

  W: Let’s start with that, then. Why the name change?

  M: I didn’t want my brothers riding my coattails. They started calling themselves the Four Marx Brothers, after they quit being the Four Nightingales. Milton—Gummo to you—got it out of his system early, after Julius—Groucho to you. Of course, Leo and Arthur had been playing piano in saloons and whorehouses from the time they were ten and eleven. You’ll have to tell me whether you think that’s show business or not . . .

  W: It’s making a living with your talent.

  M: Barely.

  W: You entered show business when?

  M: I was fourteen. Turn of the century. I walked out the front door and right onto the stage.

  W: Really?

  M: There was a three– or four–year period where I made a living with my talent. Like Gene Kelly says, “Dignity, always dignity.” Actually, Comden and Green wrote that—it just came out of Kelly’s mouth. I was in a couple of acts like the O’Connor/Kelly one at Dead Man’s Fang, Arizona, in that movie.

  W: With whom?

  M: Whom? You sound like Julius.

  W: Would I know any of your partners?

  M: In what sense?

  W: Would I recognize their names?

  M: I wouldn’t even recognize their names now. That was almost ninety years ago. Give me a break.

  W: What was the act?

  M: A little of everything. We danced a little, One partner sang a little while I struck poses and pointed. One guy played the bandoneon—that’s one of those Brazilian accordions with the buttons instead of the keys. I may or may not have acted like a monkey; I’m not saying, and I’m pretty sure there aren’t any pictures . . .

  W: Gradually you achieved success.

  M: Gradually I achieved success.

  W: Had your brothers entered show business by then?

  M: Maybe. I was too busy playing four-a-days at every tank town in Kansas to notice. A letter caught up with me a couple years on from Mom, talking about Julius stranded in Denver and Milton doing God knows what.

  W: Did your mom—Minnie Marx—encourage your career as she later did those of your brothers?

  M: I didn’t hang around long enough to find out. All I know is I wanted out of
my home life.

  W: Did Al Shean (of Gallagher and Shean) encourage you?

  M: Uncle Al encouraged everybody. “Kid, go out and be bad. Come back and see me when you get good, and I’ll help you all I can.” Practical man.

  W: Your compatriot George Burns said, “Now that vaudeville is dead, there’s no place for kids to go and be bad anymore.”

  M: What about the Fox network?

  W: You got him there.

  Winstead: So by now you were hoofing as a single.

  Marks: No—I moved a little from the waist up, so it wasn’t, technically, hoofing. To keep people from watching my feet too much, I told a few jokes. Like Fields in his juggling act or Rogers with his rope tricks. Fields used to do a silent juggling bit. He asked for a raise at the Palace and they said: “You’re the highest-paid juggler in the world.” He said, “I gotta get a new act.”

  W: I’ve heard that story before.

  M: Everybody has. I’m just giving you the practicalities of vaudeville. You’re the best in the world and you still aren’t getting paid enough, you have to do something else, too, to get more money. So I was a dancer and—well, sort of a comic. Not a comic dancer—the jokes are in your feet, then. My act: the top part told jokes—the bottom part moved.

  Winstead: What was—who do you think was the best? Who summed up vaudeville?

  Marks: That’s two questions.

  W: Okay.

  M: Who summed up vaudeville? The answer’s the standard one—Jolson, Cantor, Fields, Foy, Brice, Marilyn Miller. They could hold an audience for ten hours if they’d have wanted to. And you can’t point to any one thing they had in common. Not one. There are all kinds of being good at what you do . . .