So we go up to the third floor and there is the phone booth, just like Harry the Horse describes it except that there is a hophead sleeping in it. We chase the hophead out and Socket sets the wire back up the way it is supposed to be, and plugs it in. Right away the phone booth starts to hum, and Harry the Horse gets a great big smile on his pan.
Socket puts a light bulb in the ceiling and turns it on, and then he looks the phone booth over. “I cannot figure much of this,” he says, “but this part here has to be the delay timer. If you want to go back right now you just twist this back to zero—”
“Not yet,” Harry the Horse says. “It is nice to know I do not have to wait twenty-four hours, but I am not yet ready. I must go guzzle the crow film and the machine.”
All of a sudden Harry the Horse frowns, like he sees a fly in the ointment. I begin to see the same fly too, and so does Socket, because he speaks up and says like this:
“Harry, I know what you are thinking. You do not wish to leave us here while you go rob my crow film—”
“What do you mean, your crow film?” Harry asks angrily. “It is my crow film.”
“Of course,” Socket says real quick. “The point is, you are afraid if you leave us behind with the machine, it may not be here when you get back, or us either for that matter, and I am honest enough to admit that this is at least a ten-to-one shot. If you are as honest, you will admit that what you think you will do about this is scrag us both. Is this not so?”
“I like your style, kid,” Harry the Horse says to him, “but I will admit that this seems like the good thing to do.”
“I thank you for your honesty,” Socket says. “You will understand that I am altogether opposed to this proposition, on general principles. So here is my thought: how about if I come with you while you swipe the crow film machine, and generally be of assistance (for it is sure to be heavy), and meanwhile our mutual friend here,” meaning me, “will keep watch over the phone booth and keep the junkies out of it. He is not apt to take the lam with it, on account of he is an old geezer who cannot cut it in 1930 without a joint or a job, and besides if he does you will surely scrag me and I am his friend.”
“This sounds jake to me,” Harry the Horse decides, so off they go together, hurrying a bit because it is a little past six bells in the morning and the sun will be up soon. They come back in about an hour with a drawer full of crow film and the machine for it, and while Harry the Horse checks to make sure the machine fits in the phone booth, Socket looks over the phone booth some more. “I think I begin to figure this out,” he says.
“Frankly,” Harry the Horse says, “and I hope you will not be offended, I am not so sure. You say if I twist this little dingus here I go right back where I start, right?”
“Right to the moment you leave,” Socket agrees.
“I am reluctant,” Harry the Horse says, “to tamper with the way Doc Twitchell leaves the machine, and then test the result with my personal body. It is more than half a day until the phone booth is supposed to go back—suppose I get there a half day early?”
“That is impossible,” Socket tells him. “That would be a pair of ducks.”
Harry the Horse frowns. “That is exactly what I mean. I wish to have no truck whatsoever with these ducks, as Doc Twitchell tells me they are bad medicine.”
By this time I am tired of hanging around in Harlem with Harry the Horse, and I do not care a fig if he does get a pair of ducks, or even a pair of goats or chickens. “Harry,” I say, “my good friend Socket knows all about this science jazz. He reads all the rocket ship stuff and you can rely on him. It is a piece of cake.”
Maybe I say it too enthusiastic, because Harry frowns even more. “If it is so safe,” he says to me, “why do you not be the one who tries it out? In fact,” he says, “I think this is a terrific idea.”
Now, this horrifies me no little, and in fact more than somewhat, but I am not about to let on to Harry the Horse that I am horrified, or he is apt to figure I care more about myself than him, and become insulted. So I swallow and head for the phone booth.
“As soon as you get there and see that everything is copacetic,” Harry tells me, “you push the button again. It is still set the same way, so it should bring you right back here. Do not monkey with it.”
“Wait!” Socket yells, and this seems like a terrific idea to me. “Listen, Harry,” he says, “I figure this gizmo will take him back to the very instant he leaves, or maybe a split second after. But if he then pushes the button again right away, it brings him forward the same amount of time as before—and he arrives a second after you do, a day and a half ago. Except that there is already a phone booth here, and nowhere for his to go, so there is a big explosion.”
My blood pressure now goes up into the paint cards. Harry thinks about this, and I can see it is a strain for him. “So how do we do this?”
“Well,” Socket says, “I think I get the hang of this phone booth, and if I am right this dial here is for years, and this one is for days, and this one is hours, and so on. See, the years one is on fifty, and the rest are in neutral.”
“So?”
“So all he has to do when he gets back to 1930 is move the days dial forward one notch, and the hours dial ahead seven notches, and the minutes, say thirty to be on the safe side, and he arrives here about fifteen minutes from now.”
Harry the Horse looks at me. “Do you get that?” he says.
“Yeah,” I tell him, a little distracted because something just occurs to me.
“Listen,” Socket says to me, “for the love of Pete do not fail to set the delay timer again before you push the button to come back here. Anything over five minutes is probably fine. Otherwise as soon as you get here you slingshot right back to 1930 again.”
“Got you,” I say, and he turns the delay gizmo back to zero.
All of a sudden the lights get dim like a brown-out, and when they come back up again Harry the Horse and Socket are nowhere to be seen. What is to be seen is a lot of gadgets and gizmos and little wop pigs and an old dead guy I know is Doc Twitchell.
I will be damned, I say to myself, it works.
Perhaps I should do like I promise Harry the Horse and go right back. If I do not arrive back at the right time he is apt to get angry and scrag my young friend Socket. But I figure I can reset the dials to any time I want, and if it does not work out right it is Socket’s fault for giving me the bum steer.
And besides, I cannot help myself.
I go into the livingroom and get some subway tokens and a couple of bobs from Little Isadore’s pants pocket, and I take the A train down to Broadway.
Broadway is just beginning to jump when I get there, on account of it is just past midnight, and I wish to tell you it looks swell. The guys and dolls are all out taking the air, and I see faces I do not see for a long long time. I see Lance McGowan, and Dream Street Rose, and Bookie Bob, and Miss Missouri Martin, and Dave the Dude with Miss Billy Perry on his arm, and Regret the Horseplayer, and Nicely-Nicely Jones, and the Lemon Drop Kid, and Waldo Winchester the newspaper scribe, and all kinds of people. I see Joe the Joker give Frankie Ferocious a hotfoot while Frankie is taking a shine from a little smoke. I see Rusty Charlie punch a draft horse square in the kisser and stretch it in the street. I buy an apple from Madame La Gimp. I find the current location of Nathan Detroit’s permanent floating crap game, and lose a few bobs. I stick my noodle into Lindy’s, and I watch a couple of dolls take it off at the Stork Club, the way dolls used to take it off, and I even have a drink at Good-Time Charlie’s, even though Good-Time Charlie naturally does not recognize me and serves me the same liquor he serves his customers. You know something? It is the best booze I taste in fifty years.
I see people and places and things that I say good-bye to a long time ago, and it feels so good that after a while I haul off and bust out crying.
Somehow I never seem to bump into myself—my thirty-year-old self—while I am walking around, and I guess this is
just as well, at that. After a while I decide that I am awake a long time for a guy my age, so I walk over to Central Park and take a snooze near the pond. When I wake up it is just coming on daylight, and I am hungry and there is very little of Little Isadore’s dough left, so I take the A train back up to Harlem and sneak in the back door of Doc Twitchell’s building again. When I get back to the phone booth it is just about half past seven bells, so I set the dial ahead one day and no hours and no minutes, and then I set the delay thing and push the button.
The lights go down and up and there are Harry the Horse and Socket again. Socket looks very glad to see me, and for that matter so does Harry the Horse. “It works great,” I tell them, and step out.
“This is good news,” Harry says, “because I am commencing to get impatient. Socket, I am sorry I do not trust you. Both of you are right gees, and you both assist me more than somewhat, and I tell you what I will do. When I get back home and become a rich guy, I will put half of the first million I make into a suitcase, and I will bring the suitcase to the First National Bank downtown and tell them to surrender it to you guys in fifty years, and you can go right down there today and get it. How is that for gratitude?”
Socket’s face gets all twisted up funny for a minute, like he wants to say something and does not want to say it, all at the same time. “Harry,” I say, “do you ever come back yourself?”
“Naw,” he says. “This stuff gives me the willies, and 1980 you can keep. As soon as I get back home I shoot up this phone booth until it does not work anymore. I have all I need to be a rich guy, and if anybody else gets ahold of the phone booth, maybe it gets around and they start not having horse races anymore or something. So this is good-bye.” He puts the crow film machine and the drawer full of crow films in the booth, and steps in with them.
“Well, Harry,” I say, “I wish to thank you for your generosity. Half a million bobs is pretty good wages for a electric guy and a dago pig. Enjoy your riches and good-bye.”
He has Socket move the delay gizmo back to zero, and the lights go down and up again, and that is the last I ever see of Harry the Horse, any way you look at it.
“Socket,” I start to say, “I hope you do not think for a minute that there is any half a million clams waiting at the bank for us—”
“I know there is not,” he says, and he shows me a little teeny light bulb the size of a peanut. “I do not like the way this mug talks about plugging people such as yourself and me, so while he and I are guzzling the crow film machine I decide it will be a great gag if I take this bulb out when he is not looking, and sure enough he never knows any different. I regret this later when he speaks of a million iron men, but I cannot think of a tactful way to bring the matter up, and he still has the gat, so I let it ride. Without this bulb,” he says, “Harry the Horse cannot read the crow film, and they do not make this bulb fifty years ago.”
Well, at this I am so surprised that I never get around to telling Socket Toomey why it is that I am so certain that are no half a million potatoes waiting for us at the First National Bank. And perhaps I even feel a little guilty, too, considering that Harry the Horse gives me the seven happiest hours of my life.
Because before I get on the A train to go back up to Harlem, fifty years ago, I call up Judge Goldfobber at his place out on the Island; and I tell him that the reason Harry the Horse and Spanish John and Little Isadore are late bringing the phone booth is because they are planning to double-cross him and keep it for themselves. Who Judge Goldfobber thinks I am, and why I am calling him, is anybody’s guess—but I know he believes me, and furthermore makes very good time in from the Island, because I can remember back almost fifty years ago to when I am in the bleachers the day a real judge gives Judge Goldfobber the hot squat, on account of his personal revolver matches up with six slugs they dig out of Harry the Horse.
HIGH INFIDELITY
Ruby hung at the teetering edge of orgasm for as long as she could bear it, mewing with pleasure and with joy. Then control and consciousness spun away together: she clenched his hair with both hands, yanked in opposite directions, and went thundering over the edge. Her triumphant cry drowned out his triumphant growl; she heard neither. When the sweet explosion had subsided, she lay marinating in the afterglow, faintly surprised as always to be still alive. Her fingers toyed aimlessly with the curly hair they had just been yanking. The tongue at her clitoris gave one last, lazy lick, and a shudder rippled up her body. I am, she thought vaguely, a very lucky woman.
After a suitable time her husband lifted his head and smiled fondly up at her. “Who was I this time?” he asked.
“Sam Hamill,” she said happily. “And you were terrific.”
“My dear, your taste is as good as your taste is good,” Paul Meade said.
She smiled. “Damn right. I married you, didn’t I?”
“Was I in this one?”
“Watching from the doorway. Even bigger and harder than usual.”
He climbed up her body. “Really?” She reached down to guide him into her, and he was even bigger and harder than usual. They both grinned at that, and gasped together as he slid inside. “I’ll bet my eyes were the size of floppy discs.”
“The old-fashioned big ones,” she agreed. “Who can I be for you now?”
“Anonymous grateful groupie,” he murmured in her ear, beginning to move his hips. “The Process saved your child’s life, and you’re thanking me as emphatically as you can.”
If Ruby Meade had an insecurity, this was it. She knew that Paul got such offers—his work and his achievement made it inevitable—and she supposed that they must be uniquely hard to turn down. But she had trusted her husband utterly and implicitly for more than two decades now. “Oh, doctor,” she said in an altered voice, and locked her legs around his familiar back. “Anything you want, doctor, any way you want me.” She suggested some ways in which he might want her, and his tempo increased with each suggestion, and soon she no longer had the breath to speak. Automatically he covered both her ears, the way she liked him to, with his left cheek and his left hand, and dropped into third gear. When he was very close, he lifted his head up as he always did, replacing his cheek with his right hand, and murmured “Give me your tongue,” and as always she gave him all the tongue she had, and he sucked it into his mouth with something just short of too much force as he galloped to completion. He roared as his sperm sprayed into her, and with the ease of long practice she brought her legs down under his and pointed her toes so that his last strokes could bring her off too.
I am, Ruby thought vaguely sometime later, an especially lucky woman.
Paul rolled off with his usual care and reached for his cigarettes. “‘They say,’” he sang softly, puffing one alight, “‘Ruby you’re like a dream, not always what you seem…’”
“I love you too, baby.”
They shared a warm smile, and then he pulled his eyes away. “I have to go to Zurich tomorrow,” he said. “Be gone about a week, maybe a week and a half. They called while you were working.”
“A week—?” she began, and caught herself.
“I know,” he said, misunderstanding. “It’s a long time. But it can’t be helped. It seems they tried The Process over there with a donor of the opposite sex. Rather important official, and they didn’t dare wait for another donor. I want to check it out—I expect it to be fascinating.”
I am, Ruby thought, going to kill him.
“Besides,” he said, “think how thirsty I’ll be for you when I get home. And how thirsty you’ll be for me.”
“Yes,” she said, her voice convincing, “that’ll be nice.”
“I’ll be moving around a lot,” he said, “but if you need to get hold of me in an emergency, just get in touch with Sam. He’ll know where I am day to day.”
“Okay,” she said, thinking briefly that it would serve him right if she did. Get in touch with Sam. Paul’s tendency toward automatic punning had, over the years, rubbed off on her. She wa
s ashamed of the rogue thought at once, but her disappointment remained.
She examined that disappointment the next morning, over a cup of caff, after she had kissed him good-bye and sent him on his way.
It was not the trip itself she minded. He had been away for longer periods before, and would be again; the biophysicist whose work had made brain-transplant a simple and convenient procedure would always be in demand, and he refused as many invitations as he possibly could. Nor did she envy him the trip; one of the reasons she had become a writer was that she liked squatting in her own cave, alone with her thoughts; most strange places and strange people made her uneasy. She was not truly jealous of his groupies either, not seriously—she knew that she would get the full benefit of whatever erotic charge he got from them. (Oh, anyone could be tempted beyond their ability to withstand…but she knew from long experience that Paul was wise enough and honest enough with himself not to get into such situations. He was much more likely to be mugged than seduced, and he had never been mugged.) Besides, she got propositions of her own in her fan mail.
By Any Other Name Page 24