Horse of a Different Color

by Howard Waldrop

  I really was going to talk to her more but some damnfool uncle came in wearing his hat upside down to make her laugh.

  My sister grew up and. walked again, and except for a slight limp and a sometime windmilling foot (like my aunt’s friend Frances when she was very tired), she got around pretty well, even though she lost most of a year of her life in that bed in Alabama.

  I remember walking with her the first day of school when she had come back to Texas and was starting third grade.

  “Doing okay?” I asked. We lived three whole blocks from school then, but I wanted her to take it slow and not get too tired.

  “Yeah. Sure,” she said.

  I remember the day they handed out the permission forms for the Salk polio vaccine, which was a big shot with a square needle in the meat of your arm.

  My sister laughed and laughed. “Oh, bitter irony!” she said “Oh, ashes and dust!”

  “Yeah,” I said, “well . . .”

  “Have Mom and Pop sign yours twice,” she said. “At least it’ll do you some good.”

  “Once again, Sis, I’m sorry.”

  “Tell that to the school nurse,” she said.

  At some point, when we were in our late teens, we were having one of those long philosophical discussions brothers and sisters have when neither has a date and you’re too damned tired from the school week to get up off your butt and go out and do something on your own, and the public library closed early. Besides, your folks are yelling at each other in their bedroom.

  The Time Machine was one of my favorite movies (they all are). I had the movie tie-in paperback with the photo of Rod Taylor on the back; the Dell Movie Classic comic book with art by Alex Toth, and the Classics Illustrated edition with art by Lou Cameron—it had been my favorite for years before the movie had come out in 1960.

  “What would I do,” I repeated Ethel’s question, “if I could travel in time? Like go see dinosaurs, or go visit the spaceport they’re going to build just outside this popsicle burg?

  “Most people would do just what I’d do: first I’d go to the coin shop, buy ten early 1930s Mercury dimes, then go back to 1938 and buy ten copies of Action Comics #1 with Superman’s first story, and then I’d go write mash notes to Eve Arden.”

  I’d just finished watching reruns of Our Miss Brooks on TV.

  “No,” she said. “I mean, really?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, really.”

  “Wouldn’t you try to stop Oswald?” she asked. “Go strangle Hitler in his cradle?”

  “You didn’t ask ‘What would you do if you could travel in time to make the world a better place?’ You asked ‘What would you do if you could travel in time?’”

  “Be that way,” she said.

  “I am that way.”

  And then she went off to work at some Rhine-like lab in North Carolina. That’s not what she set out to do—what she set out to do was be a carhop, get out of the house and our live local version of the Bickersons. (Bickering=Pow! Sock! Crash!)

  She first worked as a carhop in town, from the time she was fourteen, and then she got the real glamour job over in Dallas at the biggest drive-in cafe there, twenty-five carhops, half of them on skates (not her). She moved in with two other carhops there. A few months later, King and Bobby Kennedy got killed and half the U.S. burned down.

  Something happened at the cafe—I never found out exactly what. But a week later she called home and said this research lab was flying her to North Carolina for a few days (she’d never flown before). And then she left.

  I started getting letters from her. By then our parents had gotten a divorce; I was living in the house with my father (who would die in a few months of heart failure—and a broken heart). My mom had run off with the guy she’d been sneaking around with the last couple of years, and we weren’t talking much. I was in college and seeing the girl I would eventually marry, have a kid with, and divorce.

  My sister told me they were really interested in her; that other institutes were trying to get her to come over to them and that she wasn’t the only polio survivor there. My first thought was—what’s going on? Is this like Himmler’s interest in twins and gypsies, or was this just statistically average? This was the late ’60s; lots of people our age had polio before 1955, so maybe that was it?

  Her letters were a nice break in the college routine—classes, theater, part-time thirty-six-hour-a-week job. Of course I got an ulcer before I turned twenty-two. (Later it didn’t keep me from being drafted; it had gotten better after I quit working thirty hours a week in theater plus the job plus only sleeping between three and six a.m. seven days a week.)

  “The people here are nice,” she said. “The tests are fun, except for the concentration. I get headaches like Mamaw used to get, every other day.” She sent me a set of the cards—Rhine cards. Circle, triangle, star, square, plus sign, wavy horizontal lines. They had her across the table from a guy who turned the cards, fifty of them, randomly shuffled. She was supposed to intuit (or receive telepathically) which cards he’d turned over. She marked the symbol she thought it was. There was a big high partition across the middle of the table—she could barely see the top of the guy’s head. Sometimes she was the one turning the cards and tried to send messages to him. There were other, more esoteric ones—the tests were supposed to be scientific and repeatable.

  From one of her letters:

  I don’t mind the work here, and if they prove something by it, more’s the better. What I do mind is that all the magazines I read here think that if there is something to extrasensory perception, then there also has to be mental contact with UFOs (what UFOs?) and the Atlanteans (what Atlantis?) and mental death rays and contact with the spirit world (what spirit world?).

  I don’t understand that; proving extrasensory perception only proves that exists, and they haven’t even proved that yet. Next week they’re moving me over to the PK unit—PsychoKinesis. Moving stuff at a distance without, as Morbius said, “instrumentality.” That’s more like what happened at the drive-in anyway. They wanted to test me for this stuff first. Evidently I’m not very good at this. Or I’m the same as everybody else, except the ones they catch cheating, by what they call reading the other person—physical stuff like in poker, where somebody always lifts an eyebrow when the star comes up—stuff like that.

  Will write to you when I get a handle on this PK stuff.

  Your sis,

  Ethel

  “You would have thought I set off an atom bomb here,” her next letter began. She then described what happened and the shady-looking new people who showed up to watch her tests.

  Later, they showed her some film smuggled out of the USSR of ladies shaped like potatoes doing hand-schtick and making candles move toward them.

  My sister told them her brother could do the same thing with 2-lb test nylon fishing line.

  “If I want that candle there to move over here, I’ll do it without using my hands,” she’d said.

  And then, the candle didn’t move.

  “They told me then my abilities may lie in some other area; that the cafe incident was an anomaly, or perhaps someone else, a cook or another carhop had the ability; it had just happened to her because she was the one with the trays and dishes.

  “Perhaps,” she had told them, “you were wrong about me entirely and are wasting your motel and cafeteria money and should send me back to Texas Real Soon. Or maybe I have the ability to move something besides candles, something no one else ever had. Or maybe we are just all pulling our puds.” Or words to that effect.

  A couple of days later she called me on the phone. The operator told her to deposit $1.15. I heard the ching and chime of coins in the pay phone.

  “Franklin,” said Ethel.

  She never called me by my right name; I was Bubba to everyone in the family.

  “Yes, Sis, what is it?”

  “I think we had a little breakthrough here. We won’t know til tomorrow. I want you to know I love you.”


  “What the hell you talkin’ about?”

  “I’ll let you know,” she said.

  Then she hung up.

  The next day was my usual Wednesday, which meant I wouldn’t get any sleep. I’d gotten to bed the night before at 2 a.m. I was in class by 7 a.m. and had three classes and lab scattered across the day. At 6 p.m. I drove to the regional newspaper plant that printed all the suburban dailies. I was a linotype operator at minimum wage. The real newspaper that owned all the suburban ones was a union shop, and the guys there made $3.25 an hour in l968 dollars. I worked a twelve-hour shift (or a little less if we got all the type set early) three nights a week, Mon.-Wed.-Fri. That way, not only did you work for $1.25 an hour, they didn’t owe you for overtime unless you pulled more than a sixteen-hour shift one night—and nobody ever did.

  Linotypes were mechanical marvels—so much so that Mergenthaler, who finally perfected it, went slap-dab crazy before he died. It’s like being in a room of mechanical monsters who spit out hot pieces of lead (and sometimes hot lead itself all over you—before they do that, they make a distinctive noise and you’ve got a second and a half to get ten feet away; it’s called a backspill).

  Once all linotype was set by hand, by the operators. By the time I came along, they had typists set copy on a tape machine. What came out there was perforated tape, brought into the linotype room in big, curling strands. The operator—me—put the front end of the tape into a reader-box built onto the keyboard, and the linotype clicked away like magic. The keys depressed, lines of type-mold keys fell into place from a big magazine above the keyboard; they were lifted up and moved over to the molder against the pot of hot lead; the line was cast, an arm came down, lifted the letter matrices up, another rod pushed them over onto an endless spiraled rod, and they fell back into the typecase when the side of the matrix equaled the space on the typecase, and the process started all over. If the tape code was wrong and a line went too long, you got either type matrices flying everywhere as the line was lifted to the molder, or it went over and you got a backspill and hot lead flew across the room.

  Then you had to turn off the reader, take off the galley where the slugs of hot type came off to cool, open up the front of the machine, clean all the lead off with a wire brush, put it back together, and start the tape reader back up. When the whole galley was set and cool, you pulled a proof on a small rotary press and sent it back to the typists, where corrections would come back on shorter and shorter pieces of paper tape. You kept setting and inserting the corrections and throwing away the bad slugs until the galley was okayed; then you pulled a copy of the galley and sent it up to the composing room where they laid out the page of corrected galley, shot a page on a plate camera, and made a steel plate from that; that was put on the web press and the paper was run off and sent out to newsboys all over three counties.

  It was a noisy, nasty twelve-hour hell with the possibility of being hit in the face with molten lead or asphyxiating when, in your copious free time, you took old dead galleys and incorrect slugs back to the lead smelter to melt down and then ladled out molten lead into pig-iron molds which, when cooled down, you took and hung by the hole in one end to the chain above the pot on each linotype—besides doing everything else it did, the machine lowered the lead pigs into the pots by a ratchet gear each time it set a line. No wonder Mergenthaler went mad.

  I did all that twelve hours a night three nights a week for five years, besides college. There were five linotypes in the place, including one that Mergenthaler himself must have made around 1880, and usually three of them were down at a time with backspills or other problems.

  Besides that, there were the practical jokers. Your first day on the job you were always sent for the type-stretcher, all over the printing plant. “Hell, I don’t know who had that last!” they’d say. “Check the composing room.” Then some night the phone would ring in the linotype room; you’d go to answer it and get an earful of printers’ ink, about the consistency of axle grease. Someone had slathered a big gob on the earpiece and called you from somewhere else in the plant. Nyuk nyuk nyuk.

  If you’d really pissed someone off (it never happened to me), they’d wait for a hot day and go out and fill all four of your hubcaps with fresh shrimp. It would take two or three days before they’d really stink; you’d check everywhere in the car but the hubcaps; finally something brown would start running from them and you’d figure it out. Nyuk nyuk nyuk.

  That night I started to feel jumpy. Usually I was philosophical: Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it. Nothing was going on but the usual hot, repetitious drudgery. Something felt wrong. My head didn’t exactly hurt, but I knew it was there. Things took on a distancing effect—I would recognize that from dope, later on. But there was no goofer dust in my life then. Then I noticed everybody else was moving and talking faster than normal. I looked at the clock with the big sweep second-hand outside the linotype room. It had slowed to a crawl.

  I grabbed on to the bed of the cold iron proof-press and held on to it. Later, when I turned fifty or so, I was in a couple of earthquakes on the West Coast, but they were nothing compared to what I was feeling at that moment.

  One of the tape compositor ladies, a blur, stopped in front of me and chirped out “Doyoufeelallright, Frank?”

  “Justa headacheI’llbeokay,” I twittered back.

  I looked at the clock again.

  The sweep-hand stopped. I looked back into the linotype room.

  People moved around like John Paul Stapp on the Sonic Wind rocket sled.

  I looked at the clock again. The second hand moved backward.

  And then the world blurred all out of focus and part of me left the clanging clattering linotypes behind.

  I looked around the part of town I could see. (What was I doing downtown? Wasn’t I at work?) The place looked like it did around 1962. The carpet shop was still in business—it had failed a few months before JFK was shot. Hamburgers were still four for a dollar on the menus outside the cafes. The theater was showing Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus and The Manster, which was a 1962 double feature. Hosey the usher was leaving in his ’58 Chevy; he quit working at the theater in 1964, I knew. I had a feeling that if I walked one block north and four blocks west I could look in the window of a house and see myself reading a book or doing homework. I sure didn’t want to do that.

  Then the plant manager was in front of me. “Hey! You’ve got a backspill on #5, that crappy old bastard, and #3’s quit reading tape.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I just got a splitting headache for a minute. Got any aspirin?” I asked, taking the galley off #5.

  “Go ask one of the women who’s having her period,” he said. “I just took all the aspirin in the place. The publisher’s all over my ass this week. Why, I don’t know. I robbed the first-aid kit: don’t go there.”

  “That would have been my next stop,” I said. I brushed a cooled line of lead off the keyboard and from the seat and up the back of the caster chair in front of the linotype. I closed the machine back up and started it up and went over and pounded on the reader box of #3. It chattered away.

  For a while I was too busy to think about what had happened.

  “Feeling a little weird?” asked my sister, this time on a regular phone.

  “What the hell happened?”

  “Talk to this man,” she said.

  She put on some professor whose name I didn’t catch.

  He asked me some questions. I told him the answers. He said he was sending a questionnaire. My sister came back on.

  “I think they think I gave you a bad dream two thousand miles away,” she said. “That would be a big-cheese deal to them.”

  “What do you think?” I asked. “I saw Hosey.”

  “Either way, you would have done that,” she said.

  “What do you mean, either way? Why are you involving me? Is this fun?”

  “Because,” she said, “you’re my brother and I love you.”

 
“Yeah, well . . . ,” I said. “Why don’t you mess with someone you don’t like? Who’s that guy who left you in Grand Prairie to walk home at 5 a.m.?”

  “I killed him with a mental lightning bolt yesterday,” she said. Then, “Just kidding.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re just kidding, because I just shit my pants. I don’t want to ever feel like I did last night, again, ever. It was creepy.”

  “Of course it was creepy,” she said. “We’re working at the frontiers of science here.”

  “Are you on the frontiers of science there,” I asked, “or . . .”

  She finished the sentence with me: “. . . are we just pulling our puds?” She laughed. “I don’t have a clue. They’re trying to figure out how to do this scientifically. They may have to fly you in.”

  “No, thanks!” I said. “I’ve got a life to live. I’m actually dating a real-live girl. I’m also working myself to death. I don’t have time for hot dates with Ouija boards, or whatever you’re doing there. Include me out.”

  She laughed again. “We’ll see.”

  “No you won’t! Don’t do this to me. I’m—”

  There was a dial tone.

  So the second time I knew what was happening. I was at home. I felt the distancing effect; the speeding up of everything around, except the kitchen clock. It was the kind where parts of numbers flipped down, an analog readout. It slowed to a crawl. The thin metal strips the numbers were painted on took a real long time before they flipped down.

  A bird rocketed through the yard. The neighbor’s dog was a beige blur. I could barely move. My stomach churned like when I was on the Mad Octopus at the Texas State Fair. The clock hung between 10:29 and 10:50 a.m. Then it was 10:29. 10:28. 10:27. Then the readout turned into a high whining flutter.