Horse of a Different Color

by Howard Waldrop

  “What’s the matter, Manfred?”

  “Just reliving the glory days,” I said.

  “These are the glory days,” she said. Maybe for her. She’d just turned fifty.

  Anyway, want to jump ahead to where it really gets interesting?

  W: Sure.

  Marks: It was early 1933—the week before FDR was inaugurated and the week King Kong premiered (that was something people really wanted to see: an ape tearing up Wall Street). We were in LA, making It Goes To Show You. Dybbuk & Wing couldn’t make it and were having their agent return the advance. I’ve been in show business for ninety years, and there are only two reasons for an act not to show up and giving money back: 1) You’re dead; 2) Your partner’s dead. That’s it.

  I got a confirmation it was them sent the cable.

  So no Dybbuk & Wing and no Ham Nag, in their only chance to be filmed. I was more upset about that than about the hole in the movie. We had to get two acts for that—that’s why The Great Aerius is in there as a comic acrobat and Gandolfo & Castell are in as the dance act. Then we lucked out and got Señor Wences, with Johnny and Pedro in the box. It was his first American movie. You haven’t seen weird ’til you’ve seen Señor Wences in 1933 . . .

  Marks: Turn that off a minute.

  Winstead: Why?

  M: I gotta dig up the letter. I’ll read it. It’s better than I could tell it.

  W: Do you know where it is?

  M: Probably it’s with the rest. Maybe . . .

  Marks: Did you like the lunch?

  Winstead: God, I’m stuffed. Did you find the letter?

  M: I think it was written on 1933 flypaper or something. It’s pretty brittle. I think the silverfish have been at it. Yeah, I got it here.

  W: Mr. Marks, I want to know exactly how we got off on this.

  M: You asked about vaudeville. This is about vaudeville.

  W: A letter dealing with Christian kook cults is about vaudeville?

  M: You’d be surprised. Both contain multitudes.

  W: Please read it to me.

  M:

  Thursday, March 23, 1933

  Dear Knowledge-Seeker (they always called me that):

  Sorry about missing the movie deal, and (it turns out) we sure could have used the money. I hope you understand. Who did you get to replace us? I hope they turned out boffo.

  The easiest way to tell you about it is in order the way it happened. We got to Yakima on the hottest tip we’d ever gotten the week of FDR’s inaugural. The tip wasn’t about Yakima; it was further west, but this is the closest big-train passenger depot. We’d just done the week in Spokane. Coming in on our heels were the Flying Cathars (you remember them from the Midwest), who are now in a circus (where they came from and where they are now back). John Munster Cathar gave us a letter—an answer to someone we’d written to from Denver.

  Let’s say it was the most concrete clue we’d ever gotten. Our next booking was in six weeks in Seattle, after we’d supposedly gotten back from doing your movie in Hollywood. We called our agent and had him pick up some one-, two-, and three-nighters between Yakima and Seattle. He cussed us a blue streak for missing the movie and having to send the money back. But he got on the horn and got us enough gigs to cover a month of the six weeks anyway.

  The first was the next day in a place called Easton, Washington. We went there and did a three-a-day, both acts. Then we got on a spur-line train off the B-N and went to a town called Rosslyn. Which is where we wanted to go in the first place.

  An odd thing we noticed as we got there was that there was a priest waiting at the depot. Who he met in fact was another priest, both Catholics. The one he met was young.

  Which is strange, since, believe it or not, most of the priests up here are Orthodox—left over from when the Pacific Northwest was Russian, and a lot of Greeks came here around the turn of the century.

  Well, we went down to the theater, Rennie’s Chateau. We gave the stagehands the drops for the skeleton dance, put our trucks and the horse suit in the dressing room, and asked where we could get breakfast. They told us a block down.

  We walked down there. It was cold. Snow was still two feet high off the sidewalks; guys came by talking about how good the salmon run had been last fall. (The only water we could see was a small creek that went off back down toward the Yakima River to the south of us.)

  Dybbuk noticed that the two priests were back down the board sidewalk behind us, walking the same way we were, talking with animation and blessing people automatically.

  We got to the café, and it was full of lumberjacks, which they call loggers up here. There was a bunch of big tables pushed together in the center of the place, and there were twelve or fifteen of them at it, and they were putting away the grub like it was going out of style. There were plates of biscuits a foot high, and if they had been a family, the guys with the shortest arms would have starved to death.

  We sat at the counter on the stools by the pies and cakes and such. Dybbuk got coffee, ham, and scrambled eggs. I got chipped beef on toast, coffee, and a couple of donuts.

  The waitress yelled to the cook, “Adam and Eve. Wreck ’em. S.O.S. and a couple sinkers. Two battery acids!”

  “Yes, Mabel,” yelled one of the cooks, lost in clouds of steam and smells.

  “More gravy over here, Mabel!” yelled half the table of lumberjacks.

  “Eighty-six the gravy,” said the cook, “Unless you wanna wash up. I’m outta big bowls.”

  “Use that old ’un in the high cabinet,” yelled Mabel.

  The cook went back and rummaged around. The short-order cook moved to his place at the stove; threw water and flour into the giant skillet the bacon and ham had been cooking in. With his free hand he broke six eggs onto the griddle. The main cook came back, moved exactly into the vacated other cook’s place, and stirred the gravy with a big ladle.

  He put it into a battered old silver server and passed it through the order-hole to Mabel.

  Dybbuk paused with his coffee cup halfway to his lips, rolled his eyes, and focused back on the serving bowl.

  Wing (me) followed his gaze. The server was what the ancient Greeks would have called a krater: a large, shallow bowl with handles on two sides. There was figurework on the base which extended up the sides of the bowl—it looked like bunches of grapes.

  Wing (that’s me) nodded to Dybbuk, rolled his eyes, and fixed them on the two priests who had come in and sat down at a window table. They were still talking away and seemed to be paying no attention to anything.

  Mabel put the bowl down; six or eight hands filled with biscuits dipped into it and came out with gobs of gravy.

  “I s’pose now you’ll be wantin’ more biscuits?” she asked.

  “Mmmmff mmmfmmfs,” said the lumberjacks.

  “Two doz. hardtack!” she yelled to the cooks.

  Back at the dressing room, we thought of a plan. We were going to be at the theater for three days. We got the manager’s bill poster to make up a couple of cloth banners advertising the bill. Then we pinned them to both sides of the horse suit. We went out the side door of the theater and up and down the main street, which is called First Street—all the cross-streets are named for states—doing part of the Ham Nag act. We hit the bank, the five-and-dime, the firehouse, the Legion hall; we went past the Masonic Temple across the street from the theater, and of course the café. We went in and bothered Mabel and the cooks. We went back through the kitchen, out the back door, behind the buildings, and back to the theater.

  The young priest, who’d been out in front of the theater, gawked at us with the rest of the town (we had quite the little crowd following us down First Street) but stayed in front of the theater, so we figured he wasn’t waiting for Dybbuk & Wing.

  Later, when we walked back to the hotel on Pennsylvania as ourselves, he followed us as discreetly as a priest can. When we looked outside later, he was still there.

  At the theater, Dybbuk went out between our act and the horse
act and bought the biggest ceramic bowl the five-and-dime had—it was at least two feet across and weighed a ton. We put it in the cemetery stuff the next performance, leaned it against a tombstone.

  The second day the horse suit made more of a nuisance of itself in other parts of town (there were only eight blocks by seven blocks of it, counting Alaska Alley) but ended again annoying the customers and the help at the café.

  Once again they were watching the theater—this time the old priest. There was a local-looking kid with him.

  When we left for the hotel (as us), it was the kid who wandered that way, and it was either him or some other who stayed outside all night, as far as we knew.

  On the third day we took the ceramic bowl with us—me (Wing) carrying it inside his part of the suit. It made for a lumpier horse, I’m sure. After nearly twenty years we move as one, but Dybbuk has to do all the navigating. As they say of huskies, only the lead dog gets a change of scenery.

  So we take off down First Street, and even I can tell we’re gathering a crowd as we go along. We do some shtick with oil cans at the gas station; I dance around in the back a little, and we move on to the Western Auto hardware store, and then we go down to the café.

  This time we came in the back door. “Christ!” says the head cook, “not again!” Dybbuk starts farting with stuff (the laughter was at the Ham Nag flipping pancakes with its front hooves) and rummaging through the cabinets (through the slit in the side of the suit I [Wing] saw everybody in the place up against the counter, looking into the kitchen)—the head cook had taken off and thrown down his apron and walked out into the restaurant in disgust, and then—allez oop!—the ceramic bowl was outside the Ham Nag and the krater was inside, and everybody applauded as we turned and did the double-split bow in the middle of the kitchen floor.

  Then we were outside again, at the front door. All I (Wing) heard was Dybbuk say “Trouble!” and grunt before something knocked me off my feet. I jerked back, and some heavy object flattened the suit right between Dybbuk and me. We jumped up and a fist hit me in the jaw and I fell down again. A hand came in the side of the suit and the silver bowl was jerked out of my hands and was gone.

  Then something knocked us down again, and we got up and opened the suit to make it a fair fight.

  We were surrounded by kids dressed as clowns, including the one I’d seen with the priest. They had what looked like rubber baseball bats and big shoes. There was about half the town around them, clapping and laughing. To them it must have seemed part of the show—the horse suit set on by jokers and clowns. The old priest was standing across from us on the sidewalk, with his hands in his pockets, smiling. He took his hand out and moved it.

  I looked way down First Street, and the young priest was just turning out of sight two blocks away with something shiny under his arm.

  We got back in the suit and wobbled back toward the theater, the clowns whacking us with rubber bats occasionally. But they hadn’t been rubber back in front of the café.

  We got back to the dressing room and out of the Ham Nag suit.

  “The priest was giving us a Masonic hand signal,” Dybbuk said.

  Priests don’t do that, I (Wing) indicated.

  “They do if they’re not just priests,” Dybbuk said.

  We figured, like you did years ago, the kid had doped out we were the Ham Nag too, and the priests laid a plan for us. I’m not sure they knew what we were doing, but someone saw through our misdirection and kept his eye on what was going on.

  As Barrymore said, “Never work with kids or dogs.”

  We almost had it, Knowledge-seeker. Now we’ll have to start all over again. After all this time, what’s a few years more? I mean, the thing has been around for at least one thousand nine hundred and three years . . .

  Here’s hoping you and Susie Cue are in the pink of health. We’ll be here in Seattle at the Summit on Queen Anne Hill from Thursday ’til the end of next month. Heard your radio show last week; it was a pip.

  Yours in knowledge-seeking,

  Dybbuk & me (Wing)

  Winstead: Can you still talk, after reading all that?

  Marks: I think so, after I get some of this stuff down. (drinks) There, that’s better.

  W: I don’t know what to say. That was a long session. I don’t want to wear you out. Will you feel like talking tomorrow?

  M: I think so. You wanna hear about the radio show tomorrow?

  W: Whatever you want to talk about. Do you think they ever got it?

  M: Got the gravy bowl?

  W: The thing they were looking for.

  M: Your guess is as good as mine.

  Manny Marks, the last of the Marx Brothers, died three years later at the age of 107. Barry Winstead’s book—I Killed Vaudeville—was published by Knopf in 1991. Luke H. Dybbuk died in 1942; John P. Wing is still alive, though he retired from performing in the early years of WWII.

  Afterword

  The Horse of a

  Different Color

  (That You Rode in On)

  This is one of the two novelettes I did for CapClave (Baltimore) in 2005.

  Michael Walsh proposed “an Ace Double publication—two stories published back to back and upside down—to be given away as part of the membership to the convention.”

  “If I’m having an Ace Double,” I said, “I want a new Emsh cover.”

  “But . . . ,” said Mike, knowing Ed Emshwiller had died a couple of years before.

  “Do not concern yourself,” I said, like Dan Seymour in To Have and Have Not.

  I fired off a letter to Carol Emshwiller, all around genius writer and Ed’s widow. I’d known they’d met at art school in the 1950s when Carol was floundering around before she realized she was a writer-genius.

  “Hey Carol,” I asked. “Got any of that art stuff of yours lying around?”

  One thing led to another. Eileen Gunn and Pat Murphy, who hike with Carol through Yosemite every summer, made copies of stuff I might use.

  I chose four—two backgrounds and two foreground figures—and sent copies to Walsh, who did an admirable job—or would have if his graphic designer’s building hadn’t gone condo two weeks before the con.

  The Double was published about six months after the convention, and copies mailed out to everyone who’d been there.

  The house (not mine) I was living in at the time was being renovated by people Not Clear on the Concept, like plugging three fifteen-amp radial saws into the single fifteen-amp outside socket and turning them all on at once, and blowing all the breakers every ten minutes or so.

  I wrote this (and its companion) during the carpenter’s free-for-all.

  I never read The Da Vinci Code, but I’d read, years before, the same research Brown had used.

  So here it is; a miniature Da Vinci Code done shorter and better, and with a pantomime horse, too.

  (I’m a big fan of Craig Ferguson’s Late Late Show, with his horse Secretariat who showed up long after this was written.)

  (I’m reminded of Andy Devine’s old quote: “I play the front of the horse, and the other guy just acts natural.”)

  This is probably about the third-densest story I’ve ever written. In the beginning it was going to be about “The Horse of a Different Color You Heard Tell Of” from The Wizard of Oz.

  I didn’t write that, either.

  The King of Where-I-Go

  Dedicated to Ms. Mary Ethel (Waldrop) Burton Falco

  Bray Hodnett, my little sister . . .

  When I was eight, in 1954, my sister caught polio.

  It wasn’t my fault, although it took twenty years before I talked myself out of believing it was. See, we had this fight . . .

  We were at my paternal grandparents’ house in Alabama, where we were always taken in the summer, either being driven from Texas to there on Memorial Day and picked up on the Fourth of July, or taken the Fourth and retrieved Labor Day weekend, just before school started again in Texas.

  This was the first of th
e two times when we spent the whole summer in Alabama. Our parents were taking a break from us for three entire months. We essentially ran wild all that time. This was a whole new experience. Ten years later, when it happened the second time, we would return to find our parents separated—me and my sister living with my mother in a garage apartment that backed up on the railroad tracks, and my father living in what was a former motel that had been turned into day-laborer apartments a half mile away.

  Our father worked as an assembler in a radio factory that would go out of business in the early l960s, when the Japanese started making them better, smaller, and cheaper. Our mother worked in the Ben Franklin 5¢-10¢-25¢ store downtown. Our father had to carpool every day into a Dallas suburb, so he would come and get the car one day a week. We would be going to junior high by then, and it was two blocks away.

  But that was in the future. This was the summer of 1954.

  Every two weeks we would get in our aunt’s purple Kaiser and she would drive us the forty-five miles to our maternal grandparents’ farm in the next county, and we would spend the next two weeks there. Then they’d come and get us after two weeks and bring us back. Like the movie title says, two weeks in another town.

  We were back for the second time at the paternal grandparents’ place. It was after the Fourth of July, because there were burned patches on my grandfather’s lower field where they’d had to go beat out the fires started by errant Roman candles and skyrockets.