The Complete Roderick

by John Sladek

  ‘Ma I can’t see out of it.’

  A bandaged hand patted Roderick on the head. ‘Nice little talker you got there, ma’am, kit-built is he? Never seen anything like – no look, I don’t know what kind see-see-em or what you got in there but usually these eyes take a while to get warmed up – not warmed up exactly but see they gotta compatiblize with the other stuff, look you wanta leave him here for an hour, see how it pans out?’

  The man with bandaged hands set Roderick on the blistered paint of the counter. From there he could turn his good eye one way to see Ma leaving, or the other way to see the man going into a back room. Roderick could see a table back there, and a pair of hands turning pages.

  ‘… seems in order, we might even take some of the damaged stock here on page three, but of course I want my boy Franklin to go over this …’

  ‘Yes sir of course sir, you know I think you’ll find this is your lucky –’

  The door closed. But not before Roderick glimpsed a heavy gold ring mounting a single pinball.

  No one at Larry’s Grill noticed just when the little machine came in, but there it was, sitting up on a barstool listening to the chatter of the regulars.

  ‘You wouldn’t think it to look at me …’ said the woman in purple lipstick, holding herself steady as she raised a brimming shot-glass. ‘You wouldn’t think it to look …’

  ‘At’s right Lena, you tell ’em.’ The taxi driver, who considered that his Irish ancestry gave him the right to a brogue and the gift of story-telling, went on with his story about the Baltimore Mets. ‘See they went to Japan to play this exhibition game, and one night they all went down to this –’

  ‘Think I heard this,’ said the swarthy used-car salesman. ‘I hear every damn thing, that’s the trouble in mind, Oh! –

  Gonna lay my head

  On some lonesome railroad line

  And let the midnight train

  Ease my troub – yeah, yeah, YOW! –

  Tourette’s syndrome they call it, I calls it like I sees it, grab it when I can get it –’

  ‘No but listen one night they all went down to this special kind of geisha –’

  ‘No spitting on the floor,’ said Larry to the man in the red hunting cap, who was glaring at the three newcomers, youths in red Digamma Upsilon Nu sweatshirts. ‘Boys if you got ID, welcome.’

  ‘College boys!’ muttered the spitter, while beside him two truck drivers argued money.

  ‘You think you’re broke? Betcha I’m ten times as broke as you.’

  ‘Yeah? Betcha you got more money in your billfold right this minute than I got in my whole – life. My whole billfold.’

  ‘Hell I couldn’t even afford that brassy blonde over there.’

  The woman he could not afford had discovered Roderick. ‘Hey, you want a peanut? Here boy! Cute little bastard ain’t he, I mean with one green eye one blue –’

  ‘You wouldn’t think it to look at me, but I used to be a Paris passion, fashion model.’ Another drink passed purple lips. ‘Paris, France.’

  ‘I’m so broke –’

  ‘Where the hell is Dot today, she’d like this, have a peanut boy?’

  ‘– doesn’t want a damn peanut, what the hell’s the matter with you? You can see the thing’s a machine, what’s it gonna do with a peanut, vend it? Anyway Dick, listen they get to this geisha place –’

  ‘Who belongs to this thing anyway?’ Larry leaned over the bar to look at it. ‘Anybody belong to this thing?’

  ‘Probably came in with them college boys,’ said the hunter, and spat on the floor.

  ‘Goddamnit Jack, behave yourself.’

  ‘Parish fashion model, you believe that?’

  The used-car salesman turned. ‘Ignore Lena boys, she used to be a plaster of Paris model only now she’s just plas – ow, Jesus Lena can’t you take a joke?’

  ‘Okay that’s a bet. Larry counts the money in both our billfolds, and whoever’s got less gets all the money. Larry come here, we got a bet –’

  The taxi driver’s brogue deepened desperately. ‘Will ye listen? Now the lads get to this special geisha place only it turns out –’

  ‘Sure he wants a peanut, don’t you my little sweet-urns? Come on boy, sit up for – he won’t sit up.’

  Larry, holding two billfolds, spun around to catch old Jack spitting again. ‘That’s it, Jack. Out. I told you about that, now out!’

  The old man’s earflaps stood up like the ears of a fox terrier. ‘All of a sudden the place is too classy for me, all of a sudden it’s a classy college-boy place, eh? Well I’m goin’. I’m goin’.’ He deliberately spat again and ambled out.

  ‘I’m a-comin’, I’m a-comin’,’ sang the used-car man. He tapped his feet on the brass rail, threw a peanut into the air and caught it in his mouth, winked at the blonde and made a face at Roderick. ‘Howdy doody little robot. How’s all your nuts and bolts?’

  ‘Bejesus will you listen man? They get to this geisha place and it turns out that all the girls are just inflatables!’

  ‘But no really, I was a Parish, a Paris, a mannequin.’

  ‘Inflate me,’ sang the used-car man, ‘my sweet inflatable –’

  ‘I’m very well thanks,’ said Roderick. No one seemed to hear, which was just as well because he was not quite telling the truth. In fact he felt strange and dizzy, and a peculiar pulse was building up behind his new eye. A pair of purple lips swam by, saying:

  ‘To look at me, be honest, you wouldn’t think …’

  Larry transferred all the money from one billfold to the other and handed them back. ‘You win, Eric.’

  ‘Hey wait a minute, that ain’t a fair bet. He only had six bucks there, I had over twenty!’

  ‘Yeah well that was the bet, who had less –’

  ‘Yeah but I mean I’m risking twenty against six, what kinda odds is that?’

  The expensive blonde said, ‘Larry, forget them geeks, willya? I wanta buy my little friend here a drink, I wanta buy him a Shirley Temple. You get him a dish so he can lap, my little sweet-ums!’ She patted Roderick’s metal cheek. ‘Soon as I get back from the little girls’ room, honey, you and me can have a drinky, okay?’

  ‘Her little robottoms,’ said Dick, and winked at no one. ‘Hey little robottoms, what’s your name?’

  ‘Roder-ick Wo-od.’ Roderick lurched and nearly fell from the stool. One of the fraternity boys caught him.

  ‘Wow, HE TALKS! Crazy, you see that boys? Shoo-be-do, Pow! Zap! She’s a transistor sister with a … and what was that name? Woody? Howdy Woody, how’s the old wood pe –’

  ‘Shut your gob will you? The point is, they all slept with this little inflatable geisha see? And they all came down with a dose!’

  ‘Okay Eric, how about double or nothing?’

  The money changed billfolds solemnly as one of the fraternity boys said, ‘Doubles hell, we’re drinking triples here, by God!’ They had indeed been drinking so much that it seemed a good idea to take Roderick with them, just as it seemed a good idea to leave their car (since none of them could remember where it was parked anyway) and steal another.

  The two men in the back of the Rolls-Royce sat so close that, had passers-by been able to see them through its dark windows, they might have supposed that Mr Kratt and Ben Franklin were embracing. They were in fact looking over a typewritten list.

  ‘Now what the hell’s this, twenty grand for a diode loser?’

  ‘Laser it’s supposed to be, they use it for etching the –’

  ‘Sure, sure, just so you checked all this stuff out. This could turn out to be the best damn thing ever happened to us, Benny, where we gonna find, look at these kilns, ten grand under wholesale, and this, where is it?’ Kratt erected a stubby finger and ran it down the list. ‘All this test stuff half price, Christ if I knew they owned all this and were tight for cash, ‘I’d have set fire to their place myself, Ha!’

  ‘Yes sir, now –’

  ‘So what do you think, bub? Make an
offer on the whole shebang or what?’

  Ben Franklin sat back, felt Mr Kratt’s tweed-covered arm against his neck, sat forward again. ‘Well if you ask me –’

  ‘Jesus Christ, I don’t see anybody else here to ask but the chauffeur, wouldn’t ask that little greasy spic for the time of – told me when you came over you wanted responsibility bub, so here it is, do we buy?’

  ‘Well, yes if you really, if it’s really what you want –’

  ‘Hell yes, you think I want to go on all my life paying through the nose for hardware we could make ourselves? Now you buy this crap and get the plant working, by the way how’s that peanut brittle idea going?’

  ‘Well Hare I mean Dr Hare is just working out a few last-minute bugs I guess, something about the batteries, the –’

  ‘Fine, fine. Because I don’t want nobody getting there first, we got to drive a spearhead see into this fun food market, then broaden our base, first maybe the gingerbread talkbacks and then see what we can do with chocolate chips, you tell Hare to get the lead out of his ass and put this stuff forward, hear me?’

  ‘Yes sir, but you see he thinks –’

  ‘Thinks, that loony thought his last employers right out of business, you tell him to stop thinking and start producing. Jesus, leave it up to him we’d still be farting around with some piddling little so-called improvement twenty years from now, I know these science yak-heads. Christ Benny, why do you think I put you in charge here? It’s because you’re not a science yak-head, you got your feet on the ground.’

  ‘Science, well I was trained –’

  ‘Sure, sure, but look, just look at these yak-heads, the way they go around blinding everybody with science, blind themselves too. Jesus they take an idea and play with it and play with it – until they go blind!’

  ‘Ha ha, yes I guess there is a sort of masturbational side to research, even dreams – you know the answers sometimes come up in dreams, Kékulé –’

  ‘Yeah well I say screw that! Screw that! I want to see that damn gingerbread boy on the market in months not years, months. Hell save the damn improvements, later we put out the new improved model, miracle ingredient, only way anything ever gets done. Tell that to Hare and his dreaming coolies, make him listen! Tell him if I don’t see talking gingerbread boys in the supermarkets by Easter, I’ll hand him his dick in a test-tube, let him have a wet dream about that!’

  ‘Uh, yes sir.’ Ben folded the inventory and put it in an inside pocket. ‘Now if that’s all I think I’ll just get out here and –’

  ‘We’re both getting out here, bub, only reason I had this little greaser drive us here was so I could show you my gallery.’

  ‘Gallery? Shooting –?’ Ben peered out but could see no neon through the dark glass.

  ‘The Kay Tee Art Gallery, right there, bub. We got an opening tonight, Edd McFee, ever heard of him?’ Kratt opened the door.

  ‘No I don’t th –’

  ‘You will. Come on.’

  And Ben Franklin, hurried from the car into a mirror-fronted place, caught sight of his own nice face, poised for some suitable expression. He had already shaken hands with two or three persons inside before he could stop thinking about that face: maybe he should grow his moustache again, and to hell with Mr Kratt?

  XI

  The artist and the beautiful Mrs McBabbitt swept past the two critics who’d been standing in the same spot since their arrival.

  ‘… but I still don’t see why they all look the same, aren’t they all just …’

  ‘Well I call it Paradigmatics, it’s …’

  ‘… just purple squares?’

  The two critics stood with their backs to as many of the pictures as possible, twiddled their champagne glasses, and studied the crowd.

  ‘Plenty of loot here … who’s the big boy in the J. Press suit?’

  The taller critic looked where the shorter was looking. ‘Oh, Everett. Everett Moxon, he’s nobody. Now. Probably just here to ask Mr K. for a job. He used to be into reactors, light-cooled reactors or something boring like that. Lost everything in the panic.’

  ‘Just as well, before he started polluting light or something. Ever know a businessman with a conscience?’

  ‘Not unless they’ve started buying them as investments, who’s that stunning woman in black talking to McFee?’

  The shorter looked where the taller was looking. ‘Mrs McBabbitt. If you think she’s beautiful now, wait till you see the finished product.’

  ‘You don’t mean –?’

  ‘Yep. Going through one of those whole-body cosmetic surgery jobs, bones and all.’

  ‘But they take years! And loot …’

  ‘Absolutely. Everybody here is loaded practically, except Allbright.’

  ‘Allbright! God I wish he’d hurry up and o.d. or whatever he’s going to do, I really get sick of seeing him everywhere. All he does is steal books to support his nasty habit.’

  ‘Poetry? Well I’ve got a dozen signed copies of his book put away, just in case. Posthumous glory might – hey, who’s that old woman?’

  The taller critic, looking, said, ‘I didn’t know you read Allbright’s poetry – The one in the shawl?’

  ‘I don t. Looks more like a lace table-cloth, but who is she? Haven’t [ seen her before? Some kind of writer or –?’

  ‘No, last year. She entered this giant toilet in the Des Moines Bienniale, name’s Rose Wood, something like that.’

  The shorter critic shook his head. ‘No, before that, way back, a writer my parents knew in Chicago – now was she the writer or was it her husband?’

  ‘Maybe the toilet was rattling off its memoirs – Christ, why don’t you just ask her?’

  ‘I will. I might.’ But neither critic made a move, except to put down an empty glass when a waiter came by and seize a full one. They remained anchored to the spot even after the crash.

  Mr Vitanuova spread his wide face in a smile and his wide hands in a benediction. ‘Me, I don’t understand nothing. It’s the wife, see? She knows Art like I know garbage. No wait, don’t get sore, hey I don’t mean this is garbage, I mean real garbage, it’s my business.’

  But already the woman in the Abbott & Costello t-shirt had turned away to listen to Ben Franklin:

  ‘Well purple, yes, it’s kind of ecclesiastical, isn’t all art? I mean isn’t that why we take it seriously, because it has its own liturgy?’

  Allbright moved a book-shaped bulge under his sweater. ‘You’re gonna give me canons of taste for this? The fact is the guy painted the same damn purple square twenty times, the same purple the same square – and you justify that? If it were art you wouldn’t need to bring in all the big guns, the Church and Freud, Marx and Pater or any other dear damned dead philos, where’s that waiter? Hauling in Wittgenstein or maybe Kirke, waiter! Hey, over here!’

  ‘No, look fella, I’m not trying to justify anything. But so what that they’re all alike, so were icons, most of them look like mass production jobs.’

  ‘Mass production I like that, keep the old prayer-wheels of industry turning, isn’t that religion?’

  ‘Well I’m not really –’

  ‘Counting the revs, counting the revs see, because numbers make it all important, don’t they? This geek here could paint one purple square and who cares, but if he paints twenty, in comes the old number magic. What does the twenty stand for? What does it mean? Because that’s religion too, numbers have to mean something: the eight-fold path, the seven deadly sins, the ten commandm –’

  ‘What’s wrong with that? Just a way of keeping track, I mean even truth is binary, if you –’

  ‘Telling the beads,’ said Allbright, lifting two drinks from a passing tray. ‘Listen pal, numbers are everything in religion, telling the beads, when I was a kid I used to think that meant you know, talking to the beads. Only later on I found out it meant telling like a fucking bank teller, counting up the days of indulgence, no good storing up riches in Heaven if you can’t count them �
�� Listen, you want my advice?’

  The woman in the Abbott & Costello t-shirt moved on without waiting to hear his advice; a moment later she was advising Dr Tarr to look for religious significance in these paintings.

  ‘Lyle Danton? Is it you?’

  The young man in patched denim work-clothes turned. ‘I call myself Tate now.’ He studied the old woman in lace, the corsage of radishes at her throat. ‘Ma?’

  Ma Wood squeezed his forearm. ‘I’m glad to see my best pupil still interested in art.’

  ‘Art?’ His unhappy laugh startled her. ‘Let’s talk about something else. You still living in Newer?’ He moved to keep his face in profile, a habit she remembered.

  ‘Of course. Oh, I see, like Picasso? Taking your mother’s name I mean. But if you’re not painting now, why in the world –?’

  ‘Oh I’m painting, all right. I mean when I can afford the materials. Well it’s a long story …’

  She kept hold of his arm. ‘But don’t your parents – I mean they used to be the richest folks in town when your father was running the factory. I thought he’d be doing even better by now, didn’t you all move to the city so he could become general manager or some such, was it managing director?’

  ‘Him.’

  ‘You don’t get along?’

  ‘We never did. And when he killed my mother … No, well okay it was an accident everybody says, traffic computer goes haywire and he smashes into the back of this truckload of tranquillizers; it could happen to anybody.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’

  ‘Okay an accident maybe but he hated her guts, he always hated her guts. On account of me.’

  ‘The birthmark?’

  He still kept his face in profile to hide it. ‘Mom would have split long ago, only she was too damn kind-hearted, you know? I mean he needed all his money to start this new business, she knew he couldn’t make it if he had this alimony around his neck, so she just stayed, stayed and stayed until he –’