Both the women gasped, “Did the cops come?”
“If they did, they was late to the party. I grab this hillbilly by his leather jacket with my one arm—the strongest arm in this world—and throw him clean acrosst the room. And when his buddies come after me, I pound my chest like a figurin gorilla and make a figurin face at em, and they all of a sudden get their shirts up their necks and go back to listenin to their hillbilly music. And I pick up the chick—she’s laughin so hard she’s chokin—and Elkins, white as a sheet out a the laundromat, after me, and away we go, and here we are.”
“Yes, you fool, here you are!” shouted Deena. “Bringing that girl here in that condition! She’ll start screaming her head off when she wakes up and sees you!”
“Go figure yourself!” snorted Paley. “She was scared a me a first, and she tried to stay upwind a me. But she got to likin me. I could tell. And she got so she liked my smell, too. I knew she would. Don’t all the broads? These False wimmen kin’t say no once they get a whiff of us. Us Paleys got the gift in the blood.”
Deena laughed and said, “You mean you have it in the head. Honest to God, when are you going to quit trying to forcefeed me with that bull? You’re insane!”
Paley growled. “I tole you not never to call me nuts, not never!” and he slapped her across the cheek.
She reeled back and slumped against the wall, holding her face and crying, “You ugly stupid stinking ape, you hit me, the daughter of people whose boots you aren’t fit to lick. You struck me!”
“Yeah, and ain’t you glad I did,” said Paley in tones like a complacent earthquake. He shuffled over to the cot and put his hand on the sleeping girl.
“Uh, feel that. No sag there, you two flabs.”
“You beast!” screamed Deena. “Taking advantage of a helpless little girl!”
Like an alley cat, she leaped at him with claws out.
Laughing hoarsely, he grabbed one of her wrists and twisted it so she was forced to her knees and had to clench her teeth to keep from screaming with pain. Gummy cackled and handed Old Man a quart of beer. To take it, he had to free Deena. She rose, and all three, as if nothing had happened, sat down at the table and began drinking.
About dawn a deep animal snarl awoke the girl. She opened her eyes but could make out the trio only dimly and distortedly. Her hands, groping around for her glasses, failed to find them.
Old Man, whose snarl had shaken her from the high tree of sleep, growled again. “I’m tellin you, Deena, I’m tellin you, don’t laugh at Old Man, don’t laugh at Old Man, and I’m tellin you again, three times, don’t laugh at Old Man!”
His incredible bass rose to a high-pitched scream of rage.
“Whassa matter with your figurin brain? I show you proof after proof, and you sit there in all your stupidity like a silly hen that sits down too hard on its eggs and breaks em but won’t get up and admit she’s squattin on a mess. I—I—Paley—Old Man Paley—kin prove I’m what I say I am, a Real Folker.”
Suddenly, he propelled his hand across the table toward Deena.
“Feel them bones in my lower arm! Them two bones ain’t straight and dainty like the arm bones a you False Folkers. They’re thick as flagpoles, and they’re curved out from each other like the backs a two tomcats outbluffin each other over a fishhead on a garbage can. They’re built that way sos they kin be real strong anchors for my muscles, which is bigger’n False Folkers’. Go ahead, feel em.
“And look at them brow ridges. Like the tops a those shell-rimmed spectacles all them intelleckchooalls wear. Like the spectacles this collidge chick wears.
“And feel the shape a my skull. It ain’t a ball like yours but a loaf a bread.”
“Fossilized bread!” sneered Deena. “Hard as a rock, through and through.”
Old Man roared on, “Feel my neck bones if you got the strength to feel through my muscles! They’re bent forward, not—”
“Oh, I know you’re an ape. You can’t look overhead to see if that was a bird or just a drop of rain without breaking your back.”
“Ape, hell! I’m a Real Man! Feel my heel bone! Is it like yours? No, it ain’t! Its built diff’runt, and so’s my whole foot!”
Is that why you and Gummy and all those brats of yours have to walk like chimpanzees?“
“Laugh, laugh, laugh!”
“I am laughing, laughing, laughing. Just because you’re a freak of nature, a monstrosity whose bones all went wrong in the womb, you’ve dreamed up this fantastic myth about being descended from the Neanderthals…”
“Neanderthals!” whispered Dorothy Singer. The walls whirled about her, looking twisted and ghostly in the halflight, like a room in Limbo.
“… all this stuff about the lost hat of Old King,” continued Deena, “and how if you ever find it you can break the spell that keeps you so-called Neanderthals on the dumpheaps and in the alleys, is garbage, and not very appetizing…”
“And you,” shouted Paley, “are headin for a beatin!”
“Thass what she wants,” mumbled Gummy. “Go ahead. Beat her. She’ll get her jollies off, ’n quit needlin you. ’N we kin all get some shuteye. Besides, you’re gonna wake up the chick.”
“That chick is gonna get a wakin up like she never had before when Old Man gets his paws on her,” rumbled Paley. “Guy In The Sky, ain’t it somethin she should a met me and be in this house? Sure as an old shirt stinks, she ain’t gonna be able to tear herself away from me.
“Hey, Gummy, maybe she’ll have a kid for me, huh? We ain’t had a brat aroun here for ten years. I kinda miss my kids. You gave me six that was Real Folkers, though I never was sure about that Jimmy, he looked too much like O’Brien. Now you’re all dried up, dry as Deena always was, but you kin still raise em. How’d you like to raise the collidge chick’s kid?”
Gummy grunted and swallowed beer from a chipped coffee mug. After belching loudly, she mumbled, “Don’t know. You’re crazier’n even I think you are if you think this cute little Miss Foureyes’d have anythin to do with you. ’N even if she was out of her head enough to do it, what kind a life is this for a brat? Get raised in a dump? Have a ugly old maw ’n paw? Grow up so ugly nobody’d have nothin to do with him ’n smellin so strange all the dogs’d bite him?”
Suddenly, she began blubbering.
“It ain’t only Neanderthals has to live on dumpheaps. It’s the crippled ’n sick ’n the stupid ’n the queer in the head that has to live here. ’N they become Neanderthals just as much as us Real Folk. No diff’runce, no diff’runce. We’re all ugly ’n hopeless ’n rotten. We’re all Neander…”
Old Man’s fist slammed the table.
“Name me no names like that! That’s a G’yaga name for us Paleys—Real Folkers. Don’t let me never hear that other name again! It don’t mean a man; it means somethin like a high-class gorilla.”
“Quit looking in the mirror!” shrieked Deena.
There was more squabbling and jeering and roaring and confusing and terrifying talk, but Dorothy Singer had closed her eyes and fallen asleep again.
Some time later, she awoke. She sat up, found her glasses on a little table beside her, put them on, and stared about her.
She was in a large shack built of odds and ends of wood. It had two rooms, each about ten feet square. In the corner of one room was a large kerosene-burning stove. Bacon was cooking in a huge skillet; the heat from the stove made sweat run from her forehead and over her glasses.
After drying them off with her handkerchief, she examined the furnishings of the shack. Most of it was what she had expected, but three things surprised her. The bookcase, the photograph on the wall, and the birdcage.
The bookcase was tall and narrow and of some dark wood, badly scratched. It was crammed with comic books, Blue Books, and Argosies, some of which she supposed must be at least twenty years old. There were a few books whose ripped backs and water-stained covers indicated they’d been picked out of ash heaps. Haggard’s Allan and the Ice Gods, Wells’ O
utline of History, Vol. I, and his The Croquet Player. Also Gog and Magog, A Prophecy of Armageddon by the Reverend Caleb G. Harris. Burroughs’ Tarzan the Terrible and In the Earth’s Core. Jack London’s Beyond Adam.
The framed photo on the wall was that of a woman who looked much like Deena and must have been taken around 1890. It was very large, tinted in brown, and showed an aristocratic handsome woman of about thirty-five in a high-busted velvet dress with a high neckline. Her hair was drawn severely back to a knot on top of her head. A diadem of jewels was on her breast.
The strangest thing was the large parrot cage. It stood upon a tall support which had nails driven through its base to hold it to the floor. The cage itself was empty, but the door was locked with a long narrow bicycle lock.
Her speculation about it was interrupted by the two women calling to her from their place by the stove.
Deena said, “Good morning, Miss Singer. How do you feel?”
“Some Indian buried his hatchet in my head,” Dorothy said. “And my tongue is molting. Could I have a drink of water, please?”
Deena took a pitcher of cold water out of the refrigerator, and from it filled up a tin cup.
“We don’t have any running water. We have to get our water from the gas station down the road and bring it here in a bucket.”
Dorothy looked dubious, but she closed her eyes and drank.
“I think I’m going to get sick,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“I’ll take you to the outhouse,” said Deena, putting her arm around the girl’s shoulder and heaving her up with surprising strength.
“Once I’m outside,” said Dorothy faintly, “I’ll be all right.”
“Oh, I know,” said Deena. “It’s the odor. The fish, Gummy’s cheap perfume, Old Man’s sweat, the beer. I forgot how it first affected me. But it’s no better outside.”
Dorothy didn’t reply, but when she stepped through the door, she murmured, “Ohh!”
“Yes, I know,” said Deena. “It’s awful, but it won’t kill you…”
Ten minutes later, Deena and a pale and weak Dorothy came out of the ramshackle outhouse.
They returned to the shanty, and for the first time Dorothy noticed that Elkins was sprawled face-up on the seat of the truck. His head hung over the end of the seat, and the flies buzzed around his open mouth.
“This is horrible,” said Deena. “He’ll be very angry when he wakes up and finds out where he is. He’s such a respectable man.”
“Let the heel sleep it off,” said Dorothy. She walked into the shanty, and a moment later Paley clomped into the room, a smell of stale beer and very peculiar sweat advancing before him in a wave.
“How you feel?” he growled in a timbre so low the hairs on the back of her neck rose.
“Sick. I think I’ll go home.”
“Sure. Only try some a the hair.”
He handed her a half-empty pint of whiskey. Dorothy reluctantly downed a large shot chased with cold water. After a brief revulsion, she began feeling better and took another shot. She then washed her face in a bowl of water and drank a third whiskey.
“I think I can go with you now,” she said. “But I don’t care for breakfast.”
“I ate already,” he said. “Let’s go. It’s ten-thirty accordin to the clock on the gas station. My alley’s prob’ly been cleaned out by now. Them other ragpickers are always moochin in on my territory when they think I’m stayin home. But you kin bet they’re scared out a their pants every time they see a shadow cause they’re afraid its Old Man and he’ll catch em and squeeze their guts out and crack their ribs with this one good arm.”
Laughing a laugh so hoarse and unhuman it seemed to come from some troll deep in the caverns of his bowels, he opened the refrigerator and took another beer.
“I need another to get me started, not to mention what I’ll have to give that damn balky bitch, Fordiana.”
As they stepped outside, they saw Elkins stumble toward the outhouse and then fall headlong through the open doorway. He lay motionless on the floor, his feet sticking out of the entrance. Alarmed, Dorothy wanted to go after him, but Paley shook his head.
“He’s a big boy; he kin take care a hisself. We got to get Fordiana up and goin.”
Fordiana was the battered and rusty pickup truck. It was parked outside Paley’s bedroom window so he could look out at any time of the night and make sure no one was stealing parts or even the whole truck.
“Not that I ought a worry about her,” grumbled Old Man. He drank three-fourths of the quart in four mighty gulps, then uncapped the truck’s radiator and poured the rest of the beer down it.
“She knows nobody else’ll give her beer, so I think that if any a these robbin figurers that live on the dump or at the shacks aroun the bend was to try to steal anythin off’n her, she’d honk and backfire and throw rods and oil all over the place so’s her Old Man could wake up and punch the figurin shirt off a the thievin figurer. But maybe not. She’s a female. And you kin’t trust a figurin female.”
He poured the last drop down the radiator and roared, “There! Now don’t you dare not turn over. You’re robbin me a the good beer I could be havin! If you so much as backfire, Old Man’ll beat hell out a you with a sledgehammer!”
Wide-eyed but silent, Dorothy climbed onto the ripped open front seat beside Paley. The starter whirred, and the motor sputtered.
“No more beer if you don’t work!” shouted Paley.
There was a bang, a fizz, a sput, a whop, whop, whop, a clash of gears, a monstrous and triumphant showing of teeth by Old Man, and they were bumpbumping over the rough ruts.
“Old Man knows how to handle all them bitches, flesh or tin, two-legged, four-legged, wheeled. I sweat beer and passion and promise em a kick in the tailpipe if they don’t behave, and that gets em all. I’m so figurin ugly I turn their stomachs. But once they get a whiff a the out-a-this-world stink a me, they’re done for, they fall prostrooted at my big hairy feet. That’s the way it’s always been with us Paley men and the G’yaga wimmen. That’s why their menfolks fear us, and why we got into so much trouble.”
Dorothy did not say anything, and Paley fell silent as soon as the truck swung off the dump and onto U.S. Route 24. He seemed to fold up into himself, to be trying to make himself as inconspicuous as possible. During the three minutes it took the truck to get from the shanty to the city limits, he kept wiping his sweating palm against his blue workman’s shirt.
But he did not try to release the tension with oaths. Instead, he muttered a string of what seemed to Dorothy nonsense rhymes.
“Eenie, meenie, minie, moe. Be a good Guy, help me go. Hoola boola, teenie weenie, ram em, damn em, figure em, duck em, watch me go, don’t be a shmoe. Stop em, block em, sing a go go go.”
Not until they had gone a mile into the city of Onaback and turned from 24 into an alley did he relax.
“Whew! That’s torture, and I been doin it ever since I was sixteen, some years ago. Today seems worse’n ever, maybe cause you’re along. G’yaga men don’t like it if they see me with one a their wimmen, specially a cute chick like you.”
Suddenly, he smiled and broke into a song about being covered all over “with sweet violets, sweeter than all the roses.” He sang other songs, some of which made Dorothy turn red in the face though at the same time she giggled. When they crossed a street to get from one alley to another, he cut off his singing, even in the middle of a phrase, and resumed it on the other side.
Reaching the west bluff, he slowed the truck to a crawl while his little blue eyes searched the ash heaps and garbage cans at the rears of the houses. Presently, he stopped the truck and climbed down to inspect his find.
“Guy In The Sky, we’re off to a flyin start! Look!—some old grates from a coal furnace. And a pile a coke and beer bottles, all redeemable. Get down, Dor’thy—if you want to know how us ragpickers make a livin, you gotta get in and sweat and cuss with us. And if you come acrosst any hats, be sure to tell me.”
Dorothy smiled. But when she stepped down from the truck, she winced.
“What’s the matter?”
“Headache.”
“The sun’ll boil it out. Here’s how we do this collectin, see? The back end a the truck is boarded up into five sections. This section here is for the iron and the wood. This, for the paper. This, for the cardboard. You get a higher price for the cardboard. This, for rags. This, for bottles we kin get a refund on. If you find any int’restin books or magazines, put em on the seat. I’ll decide if I want to keep em or throw em in with the old paper.”
They worked swiftly, and then drove on. About a block later, they were interrupted at another heap by a leaf of a woman, withered and blown by the winds of time. She hobbled out from the back porch of a large three-storied house with diamond-shaped panes in the windows and doors and cupolas at the corners. In a quavering voice she explained that she was the widow of a wealthy lawyer who had died fifteen years ago. Not until today had she made up her mind to get rid of his collection of law books and legal papers. These were all neatly cased in cardboard boxes not too large to be handled.
Not even, she added, her pale watery eyes flickering from Paley to Dorothy, not even by a poor one-armed man and a young girl.
Old Man took off his homburg and bowed.
“Sure, ma’am, my daughter and myself’d be glad to help you out in your housecleanin.”
“Your daughter?” croaked the old woman.
“She don’t look like me a tall,” he replied. “No wonder. She’s my foster daughter, poor girl, she was orphaned when she was still fillin her diapers. My best friend was her father. He died savin my life, and as he laid gaspin his life away in my arms, he begged me to take care a her as if she was my own. And I kept my promise to my dyin friend, may his soul rest in peace. And even if I’m only a poor ragpicker, ma’am, I been doin my best to raise her to be a decent Godfearin obedient girl.”
Classic PJ Farmer Page 14