by Brian Aldiss
"You know the answer to that one all the time, Arthur," he said. It was the only time he ever used the other's name.
"Yep," Arthur said slowly. "Reckon I do. If them shakers were rattled off the table, it would mean the intangibles had got me."
Gloomily, he sank back onto the pillows. The Popular Mechanics slid unregarded on to the floor. After a moment's hesitation, the crinkled man turned and went to the door; there, he hesitated again.
"Hope you'll be up and about again in the spring," he said softly.
That made Arthur sit up abruptly, groaning as he did so.
"Come and see me again!" he said. "You promise, you'll be around again?"
"I’ll be around," the crinkled man said.
Sure enough, his antique truck came creaking back into the multiple lanes of Hapsville traffic another twenty-one years later. He turned off the bypass and pulled up.
"Neighborhoods certainly do change fast," he said.
The movie theater looked as if it had been shut down for a long time. Now it was evidently used as a furniture warehouse, for a big pantechnicon was loading up divans outside it. Behind Arthur's place, a block of ugly apartment buildings stood; children shrieked and yelled down its side alley. On the other side of the busy highway was a row of small stores selling candies and pop records and the like. Behind the stores was a busy helicopter port.
He made his way down a narrow side alley, and there, squeezed behind the rear of the drugstore, was Arthur’s place. Nature, pushed firmly out elsewhere, had reappeared here. Ivy straggled up the posts of the porch, and weeds grew tall enough to look in all the windows. Chickweed crowded the front step.
"What do you want?"
The crinkled man would have jumped if he had been the jumping kind. His challenger was standing in the half-open doorway, smoking a pipe. It was a man in late middle age, a bull-like man with heavy, un-shaven jowls and gray streaking his hair.
"Arthur!" the crinkled man exclaimed. And then the other stepped out into a better light to get a closer look at him.
"No, it can't be Arthur," the crinkled man said, “You must be — Mike, huh?"
"My name's Mike. What of it?"
"You'd be-sixty-four?"
"What's that to you? Who are you—police? No— wait a bit! I know who you are. How come you arrive here today of all days?"
"Why, I just got around to calling."
"I see." Mike paused and spat into the weeds. He was the image of his father and evidently didn't think any faster.
"You're the old pepper-and-salt guy?" he inquired.
"You might call me that, yes."
"You better go in and see ma." He moved aside reluctantly to let the crinkled man squeeze by.
Inside, the house was cold and damp and musty. Mabel hobbled slowly around the bedroom, putting things into a large black bag. When the crinkled man entered the room, she came close to him and stared at him, nodding to herself. She herself smelled cold and damp and musty.
She was eighty-eight. Under her threadbare coat, she had shrunken to a little old lady. Her spectacles glinted on a nose still sharp but incredibly frail. But when she spoke her voice was as incisive as ever.
"I thought you'd be here," she said. "I said you'd be here. I told them you'd come. You would want to see how it ended, wouldn't you? Well—so you shall. We're selling up. Selling right up. We're going. Prue got married again—another miller, too. And Mike's taking me out to his place—got a little shack in the fruit country, San Diego way."
"And ... Arthur?" the crinkled man prompted.
She shot him another hard look.
"As if you didn't know!" she exclaimed, her voice too flinty for tears. “They buried him this morning. Proper funeral service. I didn't go. I'm too old for any funerals but my own."
"I wish I'd come before...." he said.
"You come when you think you'll come," Mabel said, shortly. "Arthur kept talking about you, right to the last.... He never got out his bed again since that time he bust up his back down at the garage. Twenty-one years he lay in that bed there."
She led the way into the front room where they had once drunk diluted soup together. It was very dark there now, a sort of green darkness, with the dirty panes and the weeds at the windows. The room was completely empty except for a table with two little china shakers standing on it.
The crinkled man made a note in his book and attempted to sound cheerful.
"Arthur won his bet all right! I sure do compliment him," he said. He walked across the room and stood looking down at the two shakers.
"To think they've stood there undisturbed for sixty-six years...." he said.
"That's just what Arthur thought!" Mabel said. "He never stopped worrying over them. I never told him, but I used to pick them up and dust them every day. A woman's got to keep the place clean. He'd have killed me if he found out, but I just couldn't bear to see him believing in anything so silly. As you once said, women have got their own intangibles, just like men.”
Nodding understandingly, the crinkled man made one final entry in his notebook. Mabel showed him to the door.
"Guess I won't be seeing you again," he said.
She shook her head at him curtly, for a moment enable to speak. Then she turned into the house, hobbled back into her dark bedroom, and continued to pack her things.