“As your doctor said, Bagley, one of us is crazy.”
“You cannot see my world at all, Foley. You see and hear about current states, but have you heard about Greater Armenia and Greater Ireland as political entities? Have you heard of Christendom still living? Do you know who still governs by entrenched right?”
“Tell me, Bagley, tell me. I'll be able to do the piece on you that I was going to do a year ago, and Tankersley won't fire me for the Carmody caper after all. Who rules, Bagley?”
“I do locally. I'm the Patrick of Tulsa. The Congregation of Patricks is a complex network, with Exarchs, Crolls, Autocrats, Larkers, Aloysii, Patriarchs, and so on up to the Emperor himself.”
“This is rich stuff, Bagley. Well, who is the Emperor?”
“I regret that the office has been vacant for more than a thousand years. But the authority still remains, though it is held in abeyance.”
“Oh brother! All right, I'll eat the whole animal down to the gamey rump! What are the unfledged falcons?”
“Foley, you should know these things without asking. You are a rare combination, with the simple mind and the complex eyes that see on the primary five levels. The unfledged falcon appears more reptilian than the reptiles. But sometimes it grows, it is fledged, it flies. At its best, to me, it is only mediocre: it was the Crusades; it was the Ottonian Empire (an interloper); it is firm but doltish authority. At its worst it is the fascist thing. But it is fledged only as a reaction: I see a present example of it. Oddly, I am getting this from your mind. A young man has been torched with this fever only this past evening. Already he has raised twenty-five men. He may even get the falcon off the ground. His name comes to me as Miguel. Is that right?”
“I think so. I was about to walk out on you. Now I'll wait a minute. You lifted that out of my mind neatly, though I don't know who dropped it in there. Yes, I believe he's trying to raise an army, from the very bottom, but I don't know who he is or where. Do you?”
“No. But I know that the time is due for the reaction, the fledging. There are probably a hundred such movements starting right now in the world. One of them will take hold and shake the world, in months, even in days. It is no help to us, though. Foley, the whisky's gona You'll have to go too. I only tolerated you for it.”
“I'm going. Tell me, though, fat man, what does Patrick mean, as a title, not a name?”
“It means patrician, both as a title and a name.”
“Bagley, you're not normal.”
“Not always, but more than most. I try to live by certain norms, squarely as a square. One meaning of norma, a norm, in Latin is a carpenter's square.”
“I tell you, Bagley, that you vary from that square. Isn't the word for that abnormal?”
“Not the only word. Me, I'm enormous.”
“Yes you are. Bagley — Oh, nothing.”
Foley went up the cluttered stairs and out the heavy door, leaving the impossible or enormous Bertigrew Bagley who was Patrick of Tulsa in an alternate. He caught again a corner-of-the-eye glimpse of the dog-ape-plappergeist that served Bagley. The thing thumbed its nose at Freddy happily, then made the Levantine gesture, then the African. Plappergeists are vulgar spirits. Only a trick of the light or a trick of the imagination, of course, yet a thing was there and it was in accord with Fred Foley. Less simple fellows would be unable to see the thing, even out of the corner of the eye.
The quick fox leaped through dark streets, superb in his sensing now. Foley was lately a member of a brain-weave and he had eyes all over him. He had better have! An unlighted car roared out of the street and up on the sidewalk after him, and men boiled out of it when it missed him and half crashed. Through a gap then, down a half-alley, over a fence, up an old outside stairway, across onto a lower roof, on and on. Freddy might be a simpleton but he was an agile simpleton. They did not have him that night.
He lost them, and continued to lurk and sprint for the fun of it. Easy into a trap (they were waiting for him outside his own door), coming so close they could taste him; then into a darkness that he knew, down a quick back block and into the night door of his own newspaper building. Into the night company of his peers, too many of the sleepy loungers and early boys for him to be followed there.
But somebody was after Fred Foley and they weren't kidding.
IV: LIAR ON THE MOUNTAIN
The python is a gentleman,
No common snake uncouth.
He prophesies from a lush divan
In a fortune-teller booth.
The little naked falcon biff
Bound with intengent tethers!
Beware the dreamy falcon if
He ever grows some feathers.
Till new day come, the toad plays dead,
Down in deep earth unlawful.
He has a jewel in his head
That sets it aching awful.
The badger faces down the dogs
And with the powers wrastles,
A steadfast rock in squishy bogs,
A patrick in his castles.
New Bestiary: Audifax O'Hanlon
TANKERSLEY DISCOVERED Freddy Foley about noon, tilted back in a chair in open-mouthed sleep. The Tank woke him by kicking the chair out from under him.
“Are you still on the Overlark jag, Foley?” he rumbled with kindly thunder.
“Yes. Yes. Still on it.” Freddy was a little startled. It was a sudden but not unpleasant awakening. “I request permission to continue — ”
“Let it go for a day, Foley. It'll keep. Get on the plane to San Antonio right now. You should be able to catch some sort of hedgehopper or nonsked to Del Rio from there. Then get to Vinegaroon any quick way you can. Something is happening there that's so simple-minded that I have hopes you may be able to understand it. I sure can't.”
“Oh, that's only Miguel trying things out a little,” Freddy said. “I think he just wants to take a United States town for an hour or two to proclaim himself, to get his name in the papers. He has only twenty-seven men. He can't do much with them yet.”
“Foley, who in peyote-pickers’ heaven is Miguel?”
“I don't know exactly; not to tell, anyhow.”
“You've been sitting in that chair for eight hours, they say. How could you know what's been going on down in Vinegaroon, Texas in the last hour? Do you know?”
“Yes. I told you: Miguel has taken the town with twenty-seven men from Mexico. It isn't serious. He did it just to get people hearing about him, and because it will do him good in Mexico that he was able to capture a United States town. He'll be back in Mexico by the time I get there, though, and I did want to see him.”
“Foley, how could you learn such howling nonsense when you were asleep? It just happened, whatever it is, or it's still happening. How do you know about it?”
“I work all the time, Mr. Tankersley, even when I'm asleep. I'll bet I'm the most under-appreciated reporter on this paper.”
“Get down there and find out what happened, Foley, right now! I sure can't believe the funny stuff that came over the wire. And while you're down in that bend of the river, see if you can find out anything about that recluse, O'Claire. I'm not sure how close he is to Vinegaroon. Nobody is quite sure where he lives. Find him, though, if he isn't too far out. He's some kind of wilderness baron — ”
“No, he's a patrick, Mr. Tankersley, not a baron. I'm not sure they have barons in their system. Anything else, Mr. Tankersley?”
“That's it, Foley. Ah, you'd better get up off the floor first thing. Somehow I don't have complete confidence in a man who's lying on the floor.”
“Yes sir,” Fred Foley said. He got off the floor and caught the plane to San Antonio. From San Antonio he flew in a private plane with a young man named Donald R. Clark to Pumpville. Donald R. sold computers and there was a rich rancher near Pumpville who might buy one. In Pumpville, Foley got on an army copter and flew the fifteen miles to Vinegaroon. All of this, from the time of the floor takeoff, was about two ho
urs.
Vinegaroon was full of soldiers. “Hey, boys, why do you not come till they have already leaved?” the Mexicans in Vinegaroon gibed at the soldiers. The Mexicans had liked the invasion of their town. It set them up a little. The Texans of Vinegaroon were merely puzzled. “We can't figure what they wanted at all. They came in, a double handful of them, with old rifles. They said they were going to occupy city hall. We don't have any city hall. They said they were going to occupy the radio station. We don't have a radio station either. ‘Hell, this is as bad as Mexico,’ they said. They said they were going to occupy the telephone exchange and the post office both. ‘I myself am the telephone exchange and the post office both,’ Miss Villareal told them. ‘They are my front two rooms. Come in and occupy.’ She talked Mexican with them then and they went in. When they came out again they shot a few shots into the air and sang some songs. ‘What happened in there?’ we asked Miss Villareal. ‘The leader, Miguel, bought a six cent stamp,’ she said, ‘and he made me Alcalde. Now I am Alcalde, Mayor of Vinegaroon.’ She can be mayor if she wants to. I'm the elected mayor and I'm supposed to get a hundred dollars a year for it, but there's never any money in the treasury. We don't have any treasury.”
The Texan who told this to Freddy Foley didn't seem very much concerned. “It may be some sort of Mexican holiday we don't know about,” he said. “It may have been a sort of pageant or reenactment of something, but our own Mexicans don't know anything about it being a special day. Hey, write it up real big, will you? Make it an invasion! Don't make it sound like a joke. We'll get a couple of tourists if you make it sound like a real invasion.”
An army colonel was trying to find out what this leader had looked like. Various of the inhabitants had drawn pictures of him. “I can draw better than any of those,” Freddy Foley said. He drew a picture of what Miguel really looked like. “Yes, that's him,” the people said. Freddy went in with Miss Villareal to her two front rooms. She was the telegraph office too. He filed his story with her.
“Come on out to my place for a while,” a big tawny man told Freddy. “I bet you never saw a place like mine.”
“You don't know where I could find a recluse named O'Claire, do you?” Foley asked him.
“I'm O'Claire,” the man said, and Freddy got in his pickup truck with him. Things were falling right for Freddy today. They always did when he was out for stories. Freddy Foley was a simpleton, but he was a simpleton that things fell right for.
They were riding through buffalo-grass and sagebrush and mesquite country. This O'Claire was a jolly man who talked away as endlessly as the country without seeming to say any more than it did. He was big, and sandy-colored in both hair and skin. He was either of late middle age or else ageless. The pickup truck moved like a little boat, covering wide, rolling distances easily; then there came a change in the motion, a roughness, as though the little boat were in a nipping cross-tide. Freddy noticed that they were no longer on a road, but it was not really rough. The unevenness was cushioned by the tussocks of buffalo-grass. The mesquite grew closer and bigger, the grass grew ranker, it became a thicket country; and the boat was going uphill, weaving and picking its way. The jolly O'Claire suddenly became musky and weird, without ceasing to be jolly.
“I am completely self-sufficient,” said the O'Claire. “I don't need the world at all, and the world doesn't believe it needs me. I am everything. I am all I need. I can get along without the world better than the world can get along without me.”
“Nobody can get along without the world,” Freddy said. This was getting to be heady country. That was probably the first generalized statement Freddy had ever made in his life.
“For my time of waiting, for my time of exile, I am completely self-sufficient,” O'Claire said. “I really have to be, to set a model for the rest of the world.”
“Just how long is your time of exile, Mr. O'Claire?”
“Oh, all my life so far, and probably all my life for as long as it extends. There is the world huddled there. And here am I camped before its front gate. The world is afraid to look out its front gate. It knows that I am here.”
“It's possible that you don't understand the world,” Freddy said. That was the second such statement he had ever made in his life.
“No I don't, don't understand it at all. All I know is that I am appointed to camp at its front gate and be self-sufficient. I believe that I am to guard it that nobody enters that front gate. Nobody ever does, though. The world is a closed thing, Foley. See the little peccary pigs, Foley. They're running in bigger flocks here than they do inside the world. We will take one. You will take one. I insist that you have that pleasure.” The little pigs were running in bigger bunches, the country had become more thicketed and forbidden, and they were rising much higher.
“How do I do it? I never took a peccary, O'Claire. I'll do it, though, if it's done.”
“Here's a little leather lashing. Hold it in your teeth, Foley. Now I'll race up alongside one. Dog it, Freddy. Throw it and tie it. That's all.”
“You're kidding.”
“No, I am not kidding. I want you to have this pleasure.”
O'Claire raced the pickup alongside a little skittering peccary. Freddy dove out and dogged it, just as the darting little boar had given up and broken speed. Freddy landed on it, and boar and boy rolled over and over a dozen times: the pickup had been going at a great rate of speed. The slippery little squawker doubled back on itself and doubled again, like a greased snake, and tusked Freddy horribly. But Fred got it on its back with its four feet together and lashed them tight.
O'Claire backed the pickup alongside. Was it possible that that sandy man was a little white about the edges? Had he expected Foley to do it? Freddy threw the little trussed boar into the back of the pickup. It was about fifty pounds and it sure was mean.
“Do you eat them?” Freddy asked. He was bleeding pretty badly about hand and forearm and cheek. That little pig had known how to use its tusks.
“Oh sure, that's my main meat. I eat it fresh, and I also preserve it. I have over a thousand pounds of it set back in one of my caves. I hole up a while in the winter months.”
“It gets winterish down here?”
“It does when you're high enough, and I live high. Who wants to live below the frost?”
“You really dog the peccaries from your pickup, O'Claire?”
“Sure. It's easy. You did it well the first time, outside of getting tusked.”
“Who handles your pickup when you dive out on one of the things?”
“Oh, I have it under voice control. It backs and stands like a real dogging pony. I'm serious. A self-sufficient man has to be good on gadgets. I just flip that green toggle on the dash and I have it under voice control. Say, you don't see a house around here anywhere, do you?”
They had come to pretty high country by now. They hadn't ridden twenty-five miles, and Foley hadn't noticed any country this high when he flew into Pumpville with Clark. There was a big stream of water booming down the thicketed hills, and it had been a smaller stream lower down. That could not be. The place was unnatural. The earth sounded hollow below them. They were near the crest. How could there be so much water flowing down?
“No, I sure don't see any house around here,” Foley said. “And I didn't expect to see such high mountains around here.”
“Ah, those — I make them myself. I told you I was self-sufficient. I was hoping you'd say you couldn't see any house. Nobody's ever been able to find my house: that's why they call me a recluse and a legend. Well, here we are.”
“It's like everything was doubled here, O'Claire,” Freddy said.
“Everything that has substance will cast shadow, Foley. My things have substance. Don't get the things mixed up. Most people's things are shadow only.”
O'Claire parked the pickup where it stalled, with its nose pointing up at forty-five. Foley got out with him but he sure could not see any house there.
“We'll string the l
ittle pig first and let him bleed,” O'Claire said. He pulled three oak poles out; they were already chained together. He hooked on a little snatch block and set it up. He set a little clamp around the hocks of the animal and swung it into the air. He hooked it on. He stabbed it into the throat and it gushed a fountain there. Where had O'Claire pulled this sudden equipment from? It was a little shed there where the mesquite grew close to the mountain. You wouldn't have noticed that it was a shed if there hadn't been a little equipment in it. It was just a little cove of mountain-colored rocks. O'Claire led the way up staired rocks either through the shed or behind it. They were up on a rock ledge that was either ceiling or deck or portico. They went through rooms of a sort that held furniture of a sort, but you would hadly have guessed that they were either rooms or furniture if O'Claire hadn't been with you. There was water running and falling, and the sound of bigger water above.
“What's up there?” Freddy asked. He was losing direction in the several quasi-rooms and could hardly decide which was inside and outside.
“Oh, the fountain,” O'Claire said, “one of the primary fountains of the world.”
“There can't be a fountain on a mountaintop,” Freddy protested.
“A while ago you were thinking there couldn't be a mountaintop,” O'Claire told him. “You didn't see it when you flew in. Hardly anyone comes onto one of these fountains unless it's shown to him, but every river in the world begins with one. The cartographers don't know about them and the geologists don't know, but they are so.”
“It can't be artesian,” Freddy insisted. “Artesian water must come from higher ground somewhere and there isn't any. There can't be a fountain here.”
“Behold it, though,” O'Claire said, and there was quite a fountain there. “This is right at the front gate of the world and the world doesn't know it's here. None of it's as large as it looks. The lake — it's nearly circular — is only ninety feet across, and the fountain in the center gushes up only thirty feet. Even the roaring isn't as loud as it seems. A decibel recorder gives a low level of noise. There is quite a bit of illusion on my mountain.”
Fourth Mansions Page 6