Horse of a Different Color

by Howard Waldrop

  “Ann,” I asked. “Why are you talking like this? You can teach him how to play. You’ve got a better arm than me!”

  “—and if it’s a girl,” she said, and handed me a crazy-looking doll”—I want you to name her Jill Eve Young and give her this, whose name, I just decided, is Genevive. Can you promise me you’ll do those things?”

  “Of course!” I said. “Of course. But don’t be talking like this. You’re going to be fine. We’ll have as many kids as you want; we’ll make our own baseball team.”

  She put her finger up to my lip. I’d grown my mustache back by then.

  “Just do whichever of those things you need to do, and I’ll be happy. Well, happier. Dreaming of Kong that way made me realize the world goes on forever.”

  “Well, sure it does.” I said. Then she went back to sleep, and I remember just standing there watching over her for a long time.

  That was six years ago (this interview was from 1941). There isn’t an hour that goes by that I don’t think about her and miss her. (I’ll take you out to her grave when you’re through interviewing me.) But of course I have Jill there to remember her—look at them playing . . . I don’t think Joe’s got all his growth yet—he’s going to be a real handful before he gets through.

  I just wish Ann would be here to see all of this. Sometimes I’m sorry I ever brought her here, but then again, I wouldn’t trade what we had for anything. Sometimes I think she was just visiting us here on Earth, and her life was like a dream, rounded with a gorilla on each end.

  You want to come down by the river with me now? It’s really very peaceful there.

  It was her favorite spot.

  [1] But of what single woman on a Marx Bros’. movie set was this not true (with the possible exception of Margaret Dumont)? The best quote was Archie Lee Johnson’s “In the movies, Harpo acted out his libido: on movie sets, Chico acted on his libido.”

  [2] True to Denham’s prediction, the cameraman ran. After filming Kong shaking the sailors off the log, and getting that horrifying pan-shot down into the ravine, the cameraman went with Denham back to the Wall. Denham was filming while Kong was trying to break the gate, then went to help in the futile attempt to stop Kong from breaking through. The guy dropped the camera and bolted for the shore; Denham shot most of the destruction of the village. The cameraman, now by the boats, got the shots of Kong’s gassing.

  [3] Despite what some sources state: he was not, nor related to, the famous bamboo fly rod maker of the same name and era.

  Afterword “The Bravest Girl I Ever Knew . . .”

  “BEING CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR: A PART OF THE TRUE AND TERRIBLE HISTORY OF SF, Or: Why You’re Reading in the All-Original Polyphony a story that was printed Somewhere Else First.[1]

  It all happened back in the long-lost year of 2005, because I was venting to Paul Di Filippo.

  He’d just (as is his wont) sent me a copy of the newest thing he was in, with a story called “The Mysterious Iowans.” The book was The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures, edited by Mike Ashley and Eric Brown.

  “Where’d this come from?” I wrote. “I never heard of this anthology. Why wasn’t I asked be in this anthology? Steven Utley didn’t write a story thirty-five years ago that should be in this book!”

  I reached my apogee. “I used to be asked to be in everything! People haven’t asked me to be in stuff for years! ”

  Well, I knew the answers to that myself. A) For a while there editors were asking me to be in the stupidest-sounding theme anthologies I’d ever heard of, stuff I wouldn’t get near in a million years; stuff so far from what I wrote I was sure they had mistaken me for some other hack. Or, B) They had a deadline so close there was No Way I could do anything for it. See, unless it’s something I’ve ALREADY been thinking about, I need six to eight months or so just to figure out WHAT I want to do.

  So A) and B) got polite notes saying NO. I guess editors got tired of asking.

  Well, Paul must have been feeling goosey that day, or something, or he may have mistaken my tirade against the field for having something to do with him. Or something. What I think happened is that he passed the word on to Karen Haber.

  Karen wrote me inviting me in to Kong Unbound, one of the two King Kong-themed anthologies that year that were to be published in time for Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong, which was to premier in December 2005.

  As soon as she invited me, I knew exactly what I was going to write, and I knew how to do it, right off the bat. Happens about three times a career.

  “Sure thing, Toots,” I wrote back.

  That was late April. In May, I had to be in Taos Ski Valley, New Mexico, as the Wandering Scholar for the second year at the peer-group Rio Hondo Writers’ Workshop run by Walter Jon Williams.

  I stopped off at George R. R. Martin’s house in Santa Fe after a seventeen-straight-hour drive from Austin. (I’m an old man, and seventeen-hour drives aren’t the snap they used to be when I was eighteen.) George and I have been friends since 1963, when we wrote letters to each other so long it took four cents to mail them, he from junior high in Bayonne, New Jersey, and me from 10th grade in Arlington, Texas. A lot of blood has flown under the bridge since then. Anyway, this was Friday night—I had to be in Taos Ski Valley at noon on Sunday. George, Parris, and I had a rollicking dinner (I was rummy-dummy from the drive). Then I went over to sleep in George’s office-house, the one across the street.

  Saturday morning I rolled out of bed, drank two pots of coffee like Popeye eating spinach, flopped myself down in a papa-san chair and wrote “The Bravest Girl I Ever Knew.” Saturday pm I typed it up on my Adler manual portable typewriter and went in while George was clicking away on whatever goddamn doorstop of a Songs novel he was finishing that year, and xeroxed enough copies of the story for the workshop. (If I remembered correctly, there was only one shop with a copier in Taos Ski Valley in the summer, and it was a quarter a pop . . . not the place to do copies for a fifteen-person workshop of your fourteen-page story.)

  Anyway, I drive ninety miles to the workshop on Sunday. Monday morning I take the original of the mss the mile straight up the hill under the ski lift to what passes for the post office in the summer, and mail it off to Karen.

  Thereby dooming the story, for reasons that will quickly become apparent (and having nothing to do with Karen, who was a champ through this whole ordeal).

  Of course when I got back to Austin nine days later there was an acceptance from Karen waiting. She said the contracts would be on the way soon. “Say hi to Bob” I said in my letter back. (That would be Robert Silverberg, her husband.) (This will be important later.)

  Well, along about early June (I think) I get this contract. It’s not from Karen. It’s not from Simon & Shuster, the publisher of Kong Unbound. It’s from Byron Preiss Visual Publications, BPVP for short, who was acting as packager for the book. (I had not known this: I wrote the story for Karen.)

  For thirty-five years I had avoided dealing with BPVP. Once again, I was the square peg in the round hole. First, “The Bravest Girl I Ever Knew” was fiction. Everything else in the book is nonfiction, including swell pieces by Jack Williamson, Silverberg, Di Filippo, and a bunch of others. The contract is set up for nonfiction, so half the clauses don’t apply to the story. There are restrictive clauses, no mention of grants of rights for inclusion in single-author short-story collections, Best of the Year, or awards volumes, which are pretty standard throughout the business. There’s twelve month’s exclusivity, and electronic and worldwide rights, etc. It was the worst contract for a piece of fiction I’d ever seen in my (then) thirty-six years in the business.

  I called Karen. “I can’t sign this,” I say.

  “Cross out the stuff that bothers you,” she says.

  “Then I can sign this,” I say. I fix it up and send it off.

  A week later I get a phone call. It’s BPVP. “Who told you you could change the contract?” they ask. “Karen,” I say. “You know, The Editor
? ”

  “Well, she shouldn’t have told you you could change it. Everybody has to sign the same contract. Or we can’t pay anybody, or take the book.”

  “Mine’s a piece of fiction,” I say. “That’s not what this contract is set up for.”

  “Sign the contract like we sent it to you.”

  I went to the office and found a clean copy of the contract before I’d diddled with it. I made three copies and signed them. Then I wrote the naughtiest letter I’ve ever written to someone where money’s coming from, i.e., Byron Preiss himself, telling him what I thought of his contracts and his business dealings, I xeroxed that, too, and sent the letter and contracts off to him.

  Of course, all this arrived at the office the day Byron Preiss was killed in a car wreck out on Long Island.

  Nobody at the office wanted to deal with me, or my letter. So they asked Karen to call me and find out what was the matter.

  I told her.

  “Well, I can see why you’re upset. I would be, too, if it were my story.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Let me know how things are going, now that I’ve signed the damn thing.”

  That was June. July and August go by. No money. I figure it’s more BPVP bullshit. But no—or at least not officially—Karen sends out emails to everybody else and a letter to me.

  The problem is Peter Jackson. He hasn’t signed off yet on the merchandising rights to King Kong.

  In our case, i.e., Kong Unbound, the merchandising rights in toto consist of a scene from the new movie on the cover, since all the other essays and my story are about either the 1933 or the 1976 versions of the film (in August 2005 no one had seen the new movie yet).

  The way I understand it, Peter Jackson, who’s just been paid $200 million for The Lord of the Rings (and is going to sue for another $100 million, because the studio was dumb enough to give him the figures they worked from, and his accountants said, “They owe you another 100 million simoleons if those figures are right.”). Anyway, this guy has not signed off on the merchandising rights and is keeping all of us from getting our American simoleons. (I’m sure my not getting my three hundred dollars was not keeping him tossing and turning at night.) Not really his fault, either, as he was in post-production on Kong eight thousand miles away.

  Anyway, September-October-November pass. I hear (by rumor) Jackson has finally signed off on the rights, and the flood of merchandise begins. The movie is coming out in December (Lawrence Person and I will in fact review it for Locusmag.com).

  On December 1, 2005, I receive a Media Mail package from BPVP. It was mailed sixteen days ago. Inside are two copies of Kong Unbound and a check for three hundred dollars. Media Mail, after all these months.

  I call Karen. Bob answers. “Got your money yet?” I ask.

  “No. Even though Karen got paid for editing the book last week.”

  “And they didn’t notice your address was the same as hers? ”

  “No, they didn’t.”

  “Don’t get excited, Bob,” I said. “It’s coming Media Mail, with the books.”

  There was silence on the line a few seconds.

  Then Bob said: “Don’t you love it when they do that? ”

  “Mine took sixteen days from NYC. Yours can’t be more than a few days behind that.”

  I rang off.

  Besides those two copies I got that December day in 2005, I have seen exactly one copy for sale, in a Borders, two weeks later.

  Then, on a day in early spring 2006, BPVP declared bankruptcy for themselves, including I-Books, after lying to everyone about the state of their upcoming projects, and everything has been tied up in a neverending bankruptcy procedure ever since. It never got down to intellectual property—mine anyway—and someone bought the whole shebang and is still trying to figure stuff out.

  BPVP and Simon & Shuster’s exclusivity on my story ended in December 2006.

  As for your publisher’s reason she wants to put out the Only Story you’ll ever see as a reprint in Polyphony, she said: “Nobody saw it.”

  And she was right.

  Here it is, another refugee of the True and Terrible History of SF Malzberg’s always going on and on about.

  And he’s right, too.

  [1] This afterword was written for the anthology Polyphony 7, which was cancelled before publication.

  Thin, On the Ground

  There’s a sampler on Gramma Elkins’ wall that says: “You don’t have to look for Trouble: It’s looking for you.”—Uncle Breck

  Of course, they tell me he always also said: “If unarmed and assaulted, pull a tree out of the ground and flail away.”

  We weren’t looking for trouble. We were going to Mexico to celebrate graduation from high school, class of 1962.

  I was the third person in my family to make it all the way through school. We were me and Bobby Mitchell, my absolute best friend since 1st grade. We got in the 1953 Ford pickup we owned together, way before dawn of the morning after we graduated; it was so early the big comet everyone was talking about was blazing across the sky.

  Bobby, who’s a lot smarter than me, said it was called Comet 1962 IIB and had a Norwegian and a Japanese guy’s names after it.

  I just thought it was big and pretty.

  We drove off under it, heading south. The stoplight on the highway was still on blink.

  We’d bought the truck back in January, and we’d stood in line like everyone else in Texas, at the courthouse over in Crosley, on April 1st to get our new black-number-on-white-background plates to replace the 1961 white-on-black plates: and then we’d flipped a nickel and called it and Bobby had slept in the truck down at the service station the night of April 14th to be in line to get a new inspection sticker, which everyone had to have on April 15th. We were new to truck ownership, but we knew there was a better way to do it than that . . .

  That was all behind us, and we were heading south. On our dashboard was a glow-in-the-dark Jesus Bobby’s sister had won in Sunday school, way back in the third grade, for reciting all the books of the Bible, pretty much in one breath. When we bought the truck, Bobby convinced her to sell us the statue for a whole dollar. She didn’t want to sell it, she kept it on top of her chest-of-drawers in her bedroom. “We can drive it all over the world,” he said. “What are you gonna do, take your dresser out for a drive?”

  Bobby was looking at the plastic Jesus. He started singing:

  “My name is Jesus, the son of Joe:

  Hello-hello-hello . . .”

  And kept singing it as we passed through Rising Star as the east was beginning to lighten.

  We’d left home before sunup, and we pulled up at the parking lot at the bordertown (it was called Bordertown, Texas) at 6 p.m. on a blazing hot May day. Even from here, you could hear the sounds of Tex-Mex music coming across the Rio Grande, which was about 40 feet wide here.

  “Not so grande,” said Bobby, who spoke some Spanish.

  We walked across the wooden bridge, and a vista opened up before us—a whole town of one-story buildings spread out before us as fas as the eye could see—the only thing taller was a miniature Eiffel-tower-looking thing with an umbrella and chair on top and a man asleep in it.

  The ever-alert fire lookout,” said Bobby. The bomberos—firemen.”

  We nodded at the Mexican border guards. They waved back. “Keep out of real trouble,” said a dapper-looking one to us in English.

  The bridge emptied onto what looked like the main street. There was a big sign just as you came to it: Official Exchange Rate Today (and a space for a chalked message which today said) $1.00 US = 12 Pesos.

  “Think of everything as 8 cents,” said Bobby. “If it’s too expensive at 8 cents, it’s too expensive in pesos.”

  Guys, like carnival barkers, were lined up in front of all the shops, which looked like used record stores to me. “Bargains galore!” they yelled. “No down payment to GI Joe!” they said to a couple of soldiers. “Your uniform is your collateral!” I wondered w
hat the hell they could be selling in installments. “Shopper’s Paradise; a consumer’s Eden!” yelled another.

  We came to a store. There was a guy standing in front of it like the others, but with his arms crossed and not saying anything.

  As we got to him he said, “Please come in and buy some junk so I can close early.”

  Well, honesty is the best policy.

  We got a gold-plated machete and a red-and-white striped rebozo and a two-gallon purple piggy-bank with a comical expression on its face. The bank was covered with painted green and orange flowers.

  “Where’s Boy’s Town?” asked Bobby.

  “This whole town’s Boy’s Town,” said the man, “but the second street to the left”—he pointed—“is what you want.”

  “Do you have a sack for this stuff?”

  “Here’s how we do it.” He put the machete and piggy-bank inside the rebozo, made a couple of folds, and handed the neat package, square and tight, by the rebozo-hood handle, to Bobby.

  “Could you do that again?” asked Bobby, his eyes wide.

  “No, I cannot,” said the shopkeeper. “I can only make a package that neat once a day. Your pardon.”