I don’t come to until it's after dark and I'm trussed up like a turkey. Ms. Cooper is next to me and her hands are tied behind her back with a red bandanna and there’s a rope around her feet. She looks disheveled, but pretty: her eyes are wide and I can tell she’s not too pleased to be lying here next to an Indian. Her dress is buttoned up to the chin so I'm thinking at least, thank God, they’ve respected her. It's cold, even as close together as we are. The Wilcoxes are all huddled around the fire, counting money, and the smoke is a straight white line in the sky you could see for miles. So this is more good news, and I'm thinking the Wilcoxes were always a bunch of dumb-ass honkies when it came to your basic woodlore. I'm wondering how they got it together to pull off a bank job, when I hear horse’s hooves and my question is answered. Pierre Cardeaux, Canadian French, hops off the horse’s back and goes straight to the fire and stamps it out.
“Imbeciles!” he tells them, only he’s got this heavy accent so it comes out “Eembeeceeles.”
Which insults the Wilcoxes a little. “Hold on there, hombre,” Andrew Wilcox says. “Jess because we followed your plan into the bank and your trail for the getaway doesn’t make you the boss here,” and Pierre pays him about as much notice as you do an ant your horse is about to step on. He comes over to us and puts his hand under Ms. Cooper’s chin, sort of thoughtfully. She spits at him and he laughs.
“Spunk,” he says. “I like that.” I mean, I suppose that’s what he says, because that’s what they always say, but the truth is, with his accent, I don t understand a word.
Andrew Wilcox isn’t finished yet. He’s got this big chicken leg which he’s eating and it’s dribbling onto his chin, so he wipes his arm over his face. Which just spreads the grease around more, really, and anyway, he’s got this hunk of chicken stuck between his front teeth, so Pierre can hardly keep a straight face when he talks to him. “I understand why we’re keeping the woman,” Andrew says. “Cause she has—uses. But the Injun there. He’s just going to be baggage. I want to waste him.”
"Mon ami, ” says Pierre. “Even pour vous, thees stupiditee lives me spitchless.” He’s kissing his fingers to illustrate the point as if he were really French and not just Canadian French and has probably never drunk really good wine in his life. I’m lying in the dust and whatever they’ve bound my wrists with is cutting off the circulation so my hands feel like someone is jabbing them with porcupine needles. Even now, I can remember smelling the smoke which wasn't there any more and the Wilcoxes who were and the lavender eau de toilette that Ms. Cooper used. And horses and dust and sweat. These were the glory days, but whose glory you may well ask, and even if I answered, what difference would it make?
Ms. Cooper gets a good whiff of Andrew Wilcox and it makes her cough.
“He’s right, little brother,” says Russell Wilcox, the runt of the litter at about three hundred odd pounds and a little quicker on the uptake than the rest of the family. “You ever heared tell of a man who rides a white horse, wears a black mask, and shoots a very pricey kind of bullet? This here Injun is his compadre.”
“Oui, oui, oui, oui, ” says Pierre agreeably. The little piggie. He indicates me and raises his eyebrows one at a time. “Avec le sauvage we can, how you say? Meek a deal.”
“Votre mere,” I tell him. He gives me a good kick in the ribs and he’s wearing those pointy-toed kind of cowboy boots, so I feel it all right. Finally I hear the sound I’ve been waiting for, a hoot-owl over in the trees behind Ms. Cooper, and then he rides up. He hasn't even gotten his gun out yet. ’‘Don’t move,” he tells Pierre. “Or I’ll be forced to draw,” but he hasn’t finished the sentence when Russell Wilcox has his arm around my neck and the point of his knife jabbing into my back.
“We give you the Injun,” he says. “Or we give you the girl. You ain't taking both. You comprendez, pardner?”
Now. if he'd asked me. I'd have said, hey, don’t worry about me, rescue the woman. And if he’d hesitated. I would have insisted. But he didn’t ask and he didn't hesitate. He just hoisted Ms. Cooper up onto the saddle in front of him and pulled the bottom of her skirt down so her legs didn't show. “There’s a little girl in Springfield who’s going to be mighty happy to see you. Ms Cooper.” I hear him saying, and I’ve got a suspicion from the look on her face that they're not going straight to Springfield anyway. And that’s it. Not one word for me.
Of course, he comes back, but by this time the Wilcoxes and Pierre have fallen asleep around the cold campfire and I've had to inch my way through the dust on my side like a snake over to Russell Wilcox’s knife, which fell out of his hand when he nodded off, whittling. I've had to cut my own bonds, and my hands are behind me so I carve up my thumb a little, too. The whole time I'm right there beneath Russell and he’s snorting and snuffling and shifting around like he’s waking up so my heart nearly stops. It's a wonder my hands don't have to be amputated, they've been without blood for so long. And then there’s a big shoot-out and I provide a lot of cover. A couple of days pass before I feel like talking to him about it.
“You rescued Ms. Cooper first,” I remind him. “And that was the right thing to do; I'm not saying it wasn’t; don’t misunderstand me. But it seemed to me that you made up your mind kind of quickly. It didn’t seem like a hard decision.”
He reaches across the saddle and puts a hand on my hand. Behind the black mask, the blue eyes are sensitive and caring. “Of course I wanted to rescue you, old friend.” he says. “If I'd made the decision based solely on my own desires, that’s what I would have done. But it seemed to me I had a higher responsibility to the more innocent party. It was a hard choice. It may have felt quick to you, but, believe me, I struggled with it.” He withdraws his hand and kicks his horse a little ahead of us because the trail is narrowing. I duck under the branch of a Prairie Spruce. “Besides,” he says, back over his shoulder. “I couldn’t leave a woman with a bunch of animals like Pierre Cardeaux and the Wilcoxes. A pretty woman like that. Alone. Defenseless.”
I start to tell him what a bunch of racists like Pierre Cardeaux and the Wilcoxes might do to a lonely and defenseless Indian. Arnold Wilcox wanted my scalp. “Z remember the Alamo,” he kept saying and maybe he meant Little Big Horn; I didn’t feel like exploring this. Pierre kept assuring him there would be plenty of time for “trophies” later. And Andrew trotted out that old chestnut about the only good Indian being a dead Indian. None of which was pleasant to lie there listening to. But I never said it. Because by then the gap between us was so great I would have had to shout, and anyway the ethnic issue has always made us both a little touchy. I wish I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard him say that some of his best friends are Indians. And I know that there are bad Indians; I don't deny it and I don’t mind fighting them. I just always thought I should get to decide which ones were the bad ones.
I sat in that car until sunset.
But the next day he calls. “Have you ever noticed how close the holy word W is to our Western word "home’?” he asks. That’s his opening. No hi, how are you? He never asks how I am. If he did, I’d tell him I was fine, just the way you’re supposed to. I wouldn’t burden him with my problems. I’d just like to be asked, you know?
But he’s got a point to make and it has something to do with Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. How she clicks her heels together and says, over and over like a mantra, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home,” and she’s actually able to travel through space. “Not in the book,” I tell him.
“I know” he says. “In the movie.”
“I thought it was the shoes,” I say.
And his voice lowers; he’s that excited. “What if it was the words?" he asks. “I’ve got a mantra.”
Of course, I’m aware of this. It always used to bug me that he wouldn’t tell me what it was. Your mantra; he says, loses its power if it’s spoken aloud. So by now I’m beginning to guess what his mantra might be. “A bunch of people I know,” I tell him, “all had the same guru. An
d one day they decided to share the mantras he’d given them. They each wrote their mantra on a piece of paper and passed it around. And you know what? They all had the same mantra. So much for personalization.”
“They lacked faith,” he points out.
“Rightfully so.”
“I gotta go,” he tells me. We’re reaching the crescendo in the background music and it cuts off with a click. Silence. He doesn’t say goodbye. I refuse to call him back.
The truth is. I'm tired of always being there for him.
So I don't hear from him again until this morning when he calls with the great Displacement Theory. By now I’ve been forty almost ten days, if you believe the birth certificate the reservation drew up: I find a lot of inaccuracies surfaced when they translated moons into months. So that I’ve never been too sure what my rising sign is. Not that it matters to me, but it's important to him all of a sudden; apparently you can't analyze personality effectively without it. He thinks I’m a Pisces rising; he’d love to be proved right.
“We can go back, old buddy,” he says. “I've found the way back.”
“Why would we want to?” I ask. The sun is shining and it’s cold out. I was thinking of going for a run.
Does he hear me? About like always. “I figured it out,” he says. “It’s a combination of biofeedback and the mantra ‘home.’ I've been working and working on it. I could always leave, you know, that was never the problem, but I could never arrive. Something outside me stopped me and forced me back.” He pauses here and I think I’m supposed to say something, but I'm too pissed. He goes on. “Am I getting too theoretical for you? Because I’m about to get more so. Try to stay with me. The key word is displacement.” He says this like he’s shivering. “I couldn’t get back because there was no room for me there. The only way back is through an exchange. Someone else has to come forward.”
He pauses again and this pause goes on and on. Finally I grunt. A redskin sound. Noncommittal.
His voice is severe. “This is too important for you to miss just because you’re sulking about god knows what, pilgrim,” he says. “This is travel through space and time.”
“This is baloney,” I tell him. I’m uncharacteristically blunt, blunter than I ever was during the primal-scream-retum-to-the-womb period. If nobody’s listening, what does it matter?
“Displacement,” he repeats and his voice is all still and important. “Ask yourself, buddy, what happened to the buffalo?”
I don’t believe I’ve heard him correctly. “Say what?”
“Return with me,” he says and then he’s gone for good and this time he hasn’t hung up the phone; this time I can still hear the William Tell Overture repeating the hoofbeat part. There’s a noise out front so I go to the door, and damned if I don’t have a buffalo, shuffling around on my ornamental strawberries, looking surprised. “You call this grass?” it asks me. It looks up and down the street, more and more alarmed. “Where’s the plains, man? Where’s the railroad?”
So I’m happy for him. Really I am.
But I’m not going with him. Let him roam it alone this time. He’ll be fine. Like Rambo.
Only then another buffalo appears. And another. Pretty soon I’ve got a whole herd of them out front, trying to eat my yard and gagging. And whining. “The water tastes funny. You got any water with locusts in it?” I don’t suppose it’s an accident that I’ve got the same number of buffalo here as there are men in the Cavendish gang. Plus one. I keep waiting to see if any more appear; maybe someone else will go back and help him. But they don’t. This is it.
You remember the theories of history I told you about. Back in the beginning? Well, maybe somewhere between the great men and the masses, there’s a third kind of person. Someone who listens. Someone who tries to help. You don’t hear about these people much so there probably aren’t many of them. Oh, you hear about the failures, all right, the shams: Brutus, John Alden, Rasputin. And maybe you think there aren’t any at all. that nobody could love someone else more than he loves himself. Just because you can’t. Hey, I don't really care what you think. Because I’m here and the heels of my moccasins are clicking together and I couldn’t stop them even if I tried. And it’s okay. Really. It’s who I am. It’s what I do.
I’m going to leave you with a bit of theory to think about. It’s a sort of riddle. There are good Indians, there are bad Indians and there are dead Indians. Which am I?
There can be more than one right answer.
SOMETHING RICH AND STRANGE
R. A. Lafferty
“Something Rich and Strange” was purchased by Gardner Dozois, and appeared in the July 1986 issue of Asimov’s, with an illustration by Arthur George, Lafferty is another of those authors who doesn't appear frequently enough in the magazine to really suit us, but he made a number of sales to Asimov’s under George Scithers, and a handful more under Gardner Dozois, and each has been memorable. Lafferty started writing in 1960, and in the years before his retirement in 1987, he published some of the freshest and funniest short stories ever written in the genre, as well as a string of vivid and unforgettable books such as the novels Past Master, The Devil Is Dead, The Reefs of Earth, Okla Hannali, The Fall of Rome, Arrive at Easterwine, and The Flame Is Green, and landmark collections such as Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Strange Doings, Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add?, Golden Gate and Other Stories, and Ringing the Changes. Lafferty won the Hugo Award in 1973 for his story “Eurema's Dam,” and in 1990 received the World Fantasy Award, the prestigious Life Achievement Award. We still hope to coax him out of retirement to do some more work for us.
Here he spins a very funny yarn about aliens and. . . teeth. Yes, teeth. And damn big teeth at that. . .
* * *
I am the biggest and the best,
I'm full of jive and juices.
I wear my heart outside my breast.
My teeth are like a moose’s.
Buck Tooth Boogie, Anonymous.
***
George Dander had two front buck teeth bigger than those of any other man or beaver or bull moose in the world. George Dander heard voices, a recent circumstance with him. George Dander was conditionally engaged to an enlarging and charming person named Mary Deare. Except for those three items, he was much like everybody else, pleasant, prodigal, talkative, a bit eccentric, opinionated, and mistaken fifty-one percent of the time.
Except for his two buck teeth he was handsome, and he was larger and louder than life. Except for the voices he'd been hearing, he had never had any self-doubts at all: but the new voices did have a doubtful quality to them. Except for Mary Deare (a metamorphic creature who was sometimes called the Unwreckable Mary Deare) his life might have been as empty as are the lives of so many billions of other persons.
Three other young men were also engaged to Mary. The conditions she had imposed on George Dander were that he should get rid of those damned buck teeth, and that he should make a million dollars. He could probably make a million dollars if he put his mind to it. But he sure didn’t want to get rid of his buck teeth which were his trademark and his manhood. Ah well, the conditions that Mary Deare had put on her other three fiances were even more stringent.
When the voices first came to George Dander he had trouble understanding them because of their foreign accent. But he and the voices soon adjusted to each other. The voices seemed to be right in the middle of George’s head and nobody except himself could hear them—except, apparently, the sharp-eared Mary Deare a little bit sometimes.
But when George was alone (alone with the voices, for he was never really alone since they came to him) he questioned them.
“Who are you really?” he asked them. “What is your name?”
“Our name is Multitude because there are many of us,” they answered him.
“That line has been used before, approximately,” George told them. “Where are you really, the rest of you? Wherever in the world are you?”
“We are not in this wor
ld at all,” they said. "The Name of our world is Synnephon-Ennea or Cloud-Nine Planet. Its direction from here is celestial north.”
“Why do you send your voices here?”
“Because we're friendly. We like to talk to all sorts of people. And we like to upgrade the ideas of all sorts of people."
“Do you ever visit any other worlds in person, in the flesh?”
“Oh yes. Perhaps we will visit your world in some very near future: after we have made preparations and shaped the public apperceptions there so we won't appear too shocking to you.”
“Why did you pick me to talk in my head?”
“We always seek good paired receptors. Really, we have to have them or we can't make ourselves heard at all. In you we found one of the three best sets of paired receptors on your world. It’s a joy to make contact with such an excellent set of receptors as yours.”
“You mean my buck teeth? Do I pick you up through my buck teeth?”
“Yes. Does such a thing startle you?”
“Not entirely. There’s a bull moose in the Bronx Zoo who picks up radio programs with his buck teeth. He mostly gets New York City boogie music programs, and the nearby animals listen appreciatively to them too. I had guessed that my case was something like that.”
“When we come into our kingdom there in your world, one of the first things we will suppress is boogie radio stations. And in the meanwhile we will work through you and through others (especially your girlfriend who has an exceptionally good opportunistic brain) to try to upgrade this world's ideas of beauty. That will have to be done before the time of our coming. Now, to show our friendship, is there anything we can do to make you happier?”
The seven answers had been in seven different voices.
“Can you see into the future?" George Dander asked them.
Isaac Asimov's SF-Lite Page 12