Steel and other stories [SSC]

by Richard Matheson

His head jerked up, alarmed, as, from far across the rubbled plain there came a sound.

  “Eh?” he muttered. “What be that?”

  He blinked, re-focused blood-streaked eyes, shook his head, squinted. And then his lower jaw slipped down and down until his mouth became a yawning cave.

  A man was hobbling across the plain, waving a crooked arm at him. He watched the ashes rise in clouds of powder around the limping man and, in his mind, a great numbness struck.

  A fellow creature! A comrade, another voice to hear, another.. .

  The man stumbled up.

  “Friend!” cried the man from out his startled face.

  And abruptly, hearing this human voice usurp the mountainous, brooding silence, something suddenly snapped within the poet’s brain.

  “I shall not be robbed!” he cried. And he shot the man neatly between the eyes. Then he stepped across the peaceful body and went over to another rock of fused sidewalk.

  He sat, shook back his sleeve. And, just before he bent to work again, he spun the empty chambers in his hand.

  Ah, well, he sighed, for this moment, to have this glorious, shining doom alone—it was worth it.

  Sonnet to a Parboiled Planet, he began . . .

  <>

  ~ * ~

  THE SPLENDID SOURCE

  Then spare me your slanders, and read this rather at night than in the daytime, and give it not to young maidens, if there be any . . . But I fear nothing for this book, since it is extracted from a high and splendid source, from which all that has issued has had a great success.

  —Balzac: Contes Drolatiques, Prologue

  It was the one Uncle Lyman told in the summer house that did it. Talbert was just coming up the path when he heard the punch line: “ ‘My God!’ cried the actress, ‘I thought you said sarsaparilla!’ “

  Guffaws exploded in the little house. Talbert stood motionless, looking through the rose trellis at the laughing guests. Inside his contour sandals his toes flexed ruminatively. He thought.

  Later he took a walk around Lake Bean and watched the crystal surf fold over and observed the gliding swans and stared at the goldfish and thought.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said that night.

  “No,” said Uncle Lyman, haplessly. He did not commit himself further. He waited for the blow.

  Which fell.

  “Dirty jokes,” said Talbert Bean III.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Uncle Lyman.

  “Endless tides of them covering the nation.”

  “I fail,” said Uncle Lyman, “to grasp the point.” Apprehension gripped his voice.

  “I find the subject fraught with witchery,” said Talbert.

  “With—?”

  “Consider,” said Talbert. “Every day, all through our land, men tell off-color jokes; in bars and at ball games; in theater lobbies and at places of business; on street corners and in locker rooms. At home and away, a veritable deluge of jokes.”

  Talbert paused meaningfully,

  “Who makes them up?” he asked.

  Uncle Lyman stared at his nephew with the look of a fisherman who has just hooked a sea serpent—half awe, half revulsion.

  “I’m afraid—” he began.

  “I want to know the source of these jokes,” said Talbert. “Their genesis; their fountainhead.”

  “Why?” asked Uncle Lyman. Weakly.

  “Because it is relevant,” said Talbert. “Because these jokes are a part of a culture heretofore unplumbed. Because they are an anomaly; a phenomenon ubiquitous yet unknown.”

  Uncle Lyman did not speak. His pallid hands curled limply on his half-read Wall Street Journal. Behind the polished octagons of his glasses his eyes were suspended berries.

  At last he sighed.

  “And what part,” he inquired sadly, “am I to play in this quest?”

  “We must begin,” said Talbert, “with the joke you told in the summer house this afternoon. Where did you hear it?”

  “Kulpritt,” Uncle Lyman said. Andrew Kulpritt was one of the battery of lawyers employed by Bean Enterprises.

  “Capital,” said Talbert. “Call him up and ask him where he heard it.”

  Uncle Lyman drew the silver watch from his pocket.

  “It’s nearly midnight, Talbert,” he announced.

  Talbert waved away chronology.

  “Now,” he said. “This is important.”

  Uncle Lyman examined his nephew a moment longer. Then, with a capitulating sigh, he reached for one of Bean Mansion’s thirty-five telephones.

  Talbert stood toe-flexed on a bearskin rug while Uncle Lyman dialed, waited and spoke.

  “Kulpritt?” said Uncle Lyman. “Lyman Bean. Sorry to wake you but Talbert wants to know where you heard the joke about the actress who thought the director said sarsaparilla.”

  Uncle Lyman listened. “I said—” he began again.

  A minute later he cradled the receiver heavily.

  “Prentiss,” he said.

  “Call him up,” said Talbert.

  “Talbert,” Uncle Lyman asked.

  “Now,” said Talbert.

  A long breath exuded between Uncle Lyman’s lips. Carefully, he folded his Wall Street Journal. He reached across the mahogany table and tamped out his ten-inch cigar. Sliding a weary hand beneath his smoking jacket, he withdrew his tooled leather address book.

  Prentiss heard it from George Sharper, CPA Sharper heard it from Abner Ackerman, MD. Ackerman heard it from William Cozener, Prune Products. Cozener heard it from Rod Tassell, Mgr., Cyprian Club. Tassell heard it from O. Winterbottom. Winterbottom heard it from H. Alberts. Alberts heard it from D. Silver, Silver from B. Phryne, Phryne from E. Kennelly.

  By an odd twist Kennelly said he heard it from Uncle Lyman.

  “There is complicity here,” said Talbert. “These jokes are not self-generative.”

  It was four a.m. Uncle Lyman slumped, inert and dead-eyed, on his chair.

  “There has to be a source,” said Talbert.

  Uncle Lyman remained motionless.

  “You’re not interested,” said Talbert, incredulously.

  Uncle Lyman made a noise.

  “I don’t understand,” said Talbert. “Here is a situation pregnant with divers fascinations. Is there a man or woman who has never heard an off-color joke? I say not. Yet, is there a man or woman who knows where these jokes come from? Again I say not.”

  Talbert strode forcefully to his place of musing at the twelve-foot fireplace. He poised there, staring in.

  “I may be a millionaire,” he said, “but I am sensitive.” He turned. “And this phenomenon excites me.”

  Uncle Lyman attempted to sleep while retaining the face of a man awake.

  “I have always had more money than I needed,” said Talbert. “Capital investment was unnecessary. Thus I turned to investing the other asset my father left—my brain.”

  Uncle Lyman stirred; a thought shook loose.

  “What ever happened,” he asked, “to that society of yours, the S.P.C.S.P.C.A.?”

  “The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals? The past.”

  “What about that sociological treatise you were writing. . .”

  “Slums: A Positive View?” Talbert brushed it aside. “Inconsequence.”

  “Isn’t there anything left of your political party, the Pro-antidisestablishmentarianists?”

  “Not a shred. Scuttled by reactionaries from within.”

  “What about Bimetallism?”

  Talbert smiled ruefully. “Passé, dear Uncle. I had been reading too many Victorian novels.”

  “Speaking of novels, what about your literary criticisms? The Use of the Semicolon in Jane Austen? Horatio Alger: The Misunderstood Satirist? To say nothing of Was Queen Elizabeth Shakespeare?”

  “Was Shakespeare Queen Elizabeth,” corrected Talbert. “No, Uncle, nothing doing with them. They had momentary interest, not more . . .” />
  “I suppose the same holds true for The Shoe Horn: Pro and Con, eh? And those scientific articles—Relativity Re-Examined and Is Evolution Enough?”

  “Dead and gone,” said Talbert, patiently. “Those projects needed me once. Now I go on to better things.”

  “Like who writes dirty jokes,” said Uncle Lyman.

  Talbert nodded.

  “Like that,” he said.

  ~ * ~

  When the butler set the breakfast tray on the bed Talbert said, “Redfield, do you know any jokes?”

  Redfield looked out impassively through the face an improvident nature had neglected to animate.

  “Jokes, sir?” he inquired.

  “You know,” said Talbert. “Jollities.”

  Redfield stood by the bed like a corpse whose casket had been upended and removed.

  “Well, sir,” he said, a full thirty seconds later, “once, when I was a boy I heard one . . .”

  “Yes?” said Talbert eagerly.

  “I believe it went somewhat as follows,” Redfield said. “When—uh—When is a portmanteau not a—”

  “No, no,” said Talbert, shaking his head. “I mean dirty jokes.”

  Redfield s eyebrows soared. The vernacular was like a fish in his face.

  “You don’t know any?” said a disappointed Talbert.

  “Begging your pardon, sir,” said Redfield. “If I may make a suggestion. May I say that the chauffeur is more likely to—”

  “You know any dirty jokes, Harrison?” Talbert asked through the tube as the Rolls Royce purred along Bean Road toward Highway 27.

  Harrison looked blank for a moment. He glanced back at Talbert. Then a grin wrinkled his carnal jowls.

  “Well, sir,” he began, “there’s this guy sittin’ by the burlesque runway eatin’ an onion, see?”

  Talbert unclipped his four-color pencil.

  ~ * ~

  Talbert stood in an elevator rising to the tenth floor of the Gault Building.

  The hour ride to New York had been most illuminating. Not only had he transcribed seven of the most horrendously vulgar jokes he had ever heard in his life but had exacted a promise from Harrison to take him to the various establishments where these jokes had been heard.

  The hunt was on.

  max axe / detective agency read the words on the frosty-glassed door. Talbert turned the knob and went in.

  Announced by the beautiful receptionist, Talbert was ushered into a sparsely furnished office on whose walls were a hunting license, a machine gun, and framed photographs of the Seagram factory, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in color and Herbert J. Philbrick who had led three lives.

  Mr. Axe shook Talbert’s hand.

  “What could I do for ya?” he asked.

  “First of all,” said Talbert, “do you know any dirty jokes?”

  Recovering, Mr. Axe told Talbert the one about the monkey and the elephant.

  Talbert jotted it down. Then he hired the agency to investigate the men Uncle Lyman had phoned and uncover anything that was meaningful.

  After he left the agency, Talbert began making the rounds with Harrison. He heard a joke the first place they went.

  “There’s this midget in a frankfurter suit, see?” it began.

  It was a day of buoyant discovery. Talbert heard the joke about the cross-eyed plumber in the harem, the one about the preacher who won an eel at a raffle, the one about the fighter pilot who went down in flames and the one about the two Girl Scouts who lost their cookies in the laundromat.

  Among others.

  ~ * ~

  “I want,” said Talbert, “one round-trip airplane ticket to San Francisco and a reservation at the Hotel Millard Fillmore.” “May I ask,” asked Uncle Lyman, “why?”

  “While making the rounds with Harrison today,” explained Talbert, “a salesman of ladies’ undergarments told me a veritable cornucopia of off-color jokes exists in the person of Harry Shuler, bellboy at the Millard Fillmore. This salesman said that, during a three-day convention at that hotel, he heard more new jokes from Shuler than he had heard in the first thirty-nine years of his life.”

  “And you are going to—?” Uncle Lyman began.

  “Exactly,” said Talbert. “We must follow where the spoor is strongest.”

  “Talbert,” said Uncle Lyman, “why do you do these things?”

  “I am searching,” said Talbert simply.

  “For what, dammit!” cried Uncle Lyman.

  “For meaning,” said Talbert.

  Uncle Lyman covered his eyes. “You are the image of your mother,” he declared.

  “Say nothing of her,” charged Talbert. “She was the finest woman who ever trod the earth.”

  “Then how come she got trampled to death at the funeral of Rudolph Valentino?” Uncle Lyman charged back.

  “That is a base canard,” said Talbert, “and you know it. Mother just happened to be passing the church on her way to bringing food to the Orphans of the Dissolute Seamen—one of her many charities—when she was accidentally caught up in the waves of hysterical women and swept to her awful end.”

  A pregnant silence bellied the vast room. Talbert stood at a window looking down the hill at Lake Bean which his father had had poured in 1923.

  “Think of it,” he said after a moment’s reflection. “The nation alive with off-color jokes—the world alive! And the same jokes, Uncle, the same jokes. How? How? By what strange means do these jokes o’erleap oceans, span continents? By what incredible machinery are these jokes promulgated over mountain and dale?”

  He turned and met Uncle Lyman’s mesmeric stare.

  “I mean to know,” he said.

  At ten minutes before midnight Talbert boarded the plane for San Francisco and took a seat by the window. Fifteen minutes later the plane roared down the runway and nosed up into the black sky.

  Talbert turned to the man beside him.

  “Do you know any dirty jokes, sir?” he inquired, pencil poised.

  The man stared at him. Talbert gulped.

  “Oh, I am sorry,” he said, “Reverend.”

  ~ * ~

  When they reached the room Talbert gave the bellboy a crisp five-dollar bill and asked to hear a joke.

  Shuler told him the one about the man sitting by the burlesque runway eating an onion, see? Talbert listened, toes kneading inquisitively in his shoes. The joke concluded, he asked Shuler where this and similar jokes might be overheard. Shuler said at a wharf spot known as Davy Jones’ Locker Room.

  Early that evening, after drinking with one of the West Coast representatives of Bean Enterprises, Talbert took a taxi to Davy Jones’ Locker Room. Entering its dim, smoke-fogged interior, he took a place at the bar, ordered a Screwdriver and began to listen.

  Within an hour’s time he had written down the joke about the old maid who caught her nose in the bathtub faucet, the one about the three traveling salesmen and the farmer’s ambidextrous daughter, the one about the nurse who thought they were Spanish olives and the one about the midget in the frankfurter suit. Talbert wrote this last joke under his original transcription of it, underlining changes in context attributable to regional influence.

  At 10:16, a man who had just told Talbert the one about the hillbilly twins and their two-headed sister said that Tony, the bartender, was a virtual faucet of off-color jokes, limericks, anecdotes, epigrams and proverbs.

  Talbert went over to the bar and asked Tony for the major source of his lewdiana. After reciting the limerick about the sex of the asteroid vermin, the bartender referred Talbert to a Mr. Frank Bruin, salesman, of Oakland, who happened not to be there that night.

  Talbert at once retired to a telephone directory where he discovered five Frank Bruins in Oakland. Entering a booth with a coat pocket sagging change, Talbert began dialing them.

  Two of the five Frank Bruins were salesmen. One of them, however, was in Alcatraz at the moment. Talbert traced the remaining Frank Bruin to Hogan’s Alleys in Oakland where his wife
said that, as usual on Thursday nights, her husband was bowling with the Moonlight Mattress Company All-Stars.

  Quitting the bar, Talbert chartered a taxi and started across the bay to Oakland, toes in ferment.