Riverworld and Other Stories

by Philip José Farmer

  A sound like several sticks of dynamite exploding whirled them around toward the cone. They cried out with the people around them as they saw a white-hot object soaring toward them. They ran away, yelling, and behind them came a crashing sound. When they turned around again, they saw a hole in the back of the barn and smoke pouring out of it.

  The cry of “Fire!” arose. Parry hurried around with the others to the front of the barn and looked inside. The white-hot rock had landed in a pile of hay by the back wall, and both were blazing. The flames were spreading swiftly toward the stalls, which held three horses. These were screaming and kicking against the stall boards in a frenzy. From near the front of the barn, from the pens, pigs squealed in terror.

  During the futile efforts to save the barn, Parry identified the Haviks. The fire had brought all of them out of the house. Henry Havik was a very tall and very thin man of about fifty-seven, bald, broken-nosed, snaggle-toothed, and thick-lipped. The nose was also bulbous and covered with broken veins, the eruptions of whiskey. When he came close to Parry, he breathed alcohol and rotting teeth. The sons, Rodeman and Albert, looked like twenty-year-younger editions of their father. In twenty years, or less, their faces would be as broken-veined and their teeth as rotten.

  Bonnie had slipped out during the confusion, and though she should have been concerned about the barn, evidently she was looking for Parry. Seeing Malone, she came toward him, and Malone pointed at Parry. She was just twenty-one but looked older because of some deep lines in her face, the broad scar along the left side of her face, and the loose and tattered gingham dress she wore. Her yellow hair would have been attractive if it had not been so disheveled. In fact, Parry thought, if she were cleaned up and made up and dressed up, she would be pretty. There was, however, something wild and disquieting about the pale blue eyes.

  Smoke poured from the barn while men, choking and coughing and swearing, led the horses and drove the pigs out and others manned a bucket brigade. Since the Haviks had no phone, the sheriff had driven off in a hurry to summon the Roosville fire brigade. Parry gestured at Malone and Bonnie followed him, and he led the way to the other side of the house. He would have liked to have stationed Seton as a sentinel, but the chauffeur was lost in the seethe of smoke and mob.

  Parry said, “No need for introductions and no time. Tell me about Juan Tizoc, Bonnie. He’s the one this is all about, isn’t he?”

  “You’re pretty smart, Mr. Parry,” she said. “Yes, he is. When Juan was first hired by pa, I didn’t pay much attention to him. He was short and dark, Indian-looking, and he had a funny accent. And he was lame, too. He said an American tourist who was speeding hit him when he was a kid, and he couldn’t never walk straight again. He was sometimes bitter about that, but when he was with me he was mostly laughing and joking. That was what made me like him so much, at first. There hadn’t never been much laughing around here before he came here, let me tell you. I don’t know how he did it, since I didn’t really see him too much, but he made my days easier. Sorta edged with light even if they wasn’t full of it. Ma and Pa kept him humping, he was a hard worker, though he couldn’t never seem to satisfy them, and they insulted him a lot, hollered at him, and they was chinchy with the food, too. But he found time for me.…”

  “If he was treated so badly, why didn’t he just walk off?”

  “He was in love with me,” she said, looking away from him.

  “And you?”

  She spoke so softly that he could barely hear her.

  “I loved him.”

  She groaned, and she said, “And now he’s run away, left me!” She paused and then said, “But I just can’t believe he’d leave me!”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ll tell you why! We both knew how we felt about each other even though neither of us’d said a word about it. But we’d looked words enough! I suppose if I’d been a Mexican girl he’d have said something long before, but he knew he might just as well be a nigger as far as Roosville was concerned. And me, I loved him, but I was ashamed of it, too. At the same time, I wondered how any man, even a Mexican, could love me.”

  She touched her scar. Parry said, “Go on.”

  “I’d just finished giving the horses their oats when Juan came in to do something or other, I never found out. He looked around, saw no one was there except me, and came straight to me. And I knew what he was going to do and went into his arms and began kissing him. And he was telling me between kisses how much he hated all gringos, especially my family, he wished they’d all burn in hell, except for me, of course, he loved me so much, and then …”

  Rodeman Havik had passed by the barn door and had seen them. He had called out to his brother and father, and all three had rushed in at Tizoc. He had knocked Rodeman down, but the father and Albert had jumped on him and begun hitting and kicking him. Bonnie’s mother had come from the house then and with Rodeman’s help had dragged her into the house. There she was shoved into the basement and locked in.

  “And that was the last time I saw him,” she said, tears welling. “Pa said he’d kicked him off the farm, said he told him he’d kill him if he didn’t get out of the country. And Pa beat me. He said he ought to kill me, no decent white woman’d let a greaser slobber over her. But I was so ugly I was lucky even a greaser’d look at me.”

  “Why does he hate you so much?” Parry said.

  “I don’t know!” she said, suddenly sobbing. “But I wish I was brave enough to kill myself!”

  “I’ll do that for you!” someone bellowed.

  4.

  Henry Havik, his eyes and lips closed down like jackknife blades, soot covering the red of the broken veins of his nose, rushed at his daughter. “You bitch!” he shouted. “I told you to stay inside!”

  Parry stepped in between Havik and Bonnie, and said, “If you hit her, I’ll have you in jail in ten minutes.”

  Havik stopped, but he did not unclench his fists.

  “I don’t know who you are, you one-armed jackass, but you better step aside! You’re interfering with a man and his daughter!”

  “She’s of age, and she can leave whenever she pleases,” Parry said coolly. He kept his eyes on the farmer while speaking out of the side of his mouth. “Bonnie! Say the word, and I’ll see you into town! And never mind his threats. He can’t do a thing to you as long as you have protection. Or witnesses.”

  “He wouldn’t care where I was!” she said. “And I’m afraid to go away! I wouldn’t know what to do out there!”

  Parry looked at her with much pity and some disgust. Finally, he said, “Bonnie, the unknown evil is far better for you than the known evil. You have sense enough to know that. Have the courage, the guts, to do what your good sense tells you you should do.”

  “But if I leave here,” she wailed, “nobody’s going to do anything about Juan!”

  Havik shouted, “What?” and he swung at Parry, though it was obvious his primary target was his daughter. Parry blocked Havik’s fist with his arm and kicked the man in the knee. At the same time, Malone rammed his fist into Havik’s solar plexus. Havik fell gasping for breath and clutching his knee. A moment later, the two sons, closely followed by Sheriff Huisman, came around the corner of the house. Huisman bellowed at everybody to freeze, and everybody except Havik obeyed. He was rolling on the ground in agony.

  Huisman listened to all of them talking at once, then he bellowed for, and obtained, quiet. He asked Bonnie to tell him what had happened. After listening to her, he said, “So you’re a private dick, Parry? Well, you don’t have no license to practice here.”

  “True,” Parry said, “but that has nothing to do with the situation. I represent Miss Havik—do I not, Bonnie?—and she wishes to leave the premises. She is over twenty-one and so legally free to do so. Mr. Havik here attacked us—I have two witnesses to back that statement—and if he doesn’t keep quiet, I’ll charge him with …”

  “This is my property!” Havik said. “As for you, you dirty knee-kicking Fren
chman …”

  Parry took Bonnie’s elbow and said, “Let’s go. We can send for your clothes later.”

  The sons looked at their father. Huisman scowled and bit down on his cigar. Parry knew what he was thinking. He was well aware that the daughter was within her rights. Also, a New York reporter was watching him closely. What could he do, even if he wished to do anything?

  “You’ll pay for this, you ungrateful cow,” Havik said. But he did nothing to prevent his daughter from leaving. Trembling, moving only because Parry was pushing and steering her, she walked out of the yard and to the limousine.

  5.

  Parry went to bed at ten o’clock but was too tired to fall asleep at once. The events at the Havik’s had been stimulating enough; those that followed had drained him of even more energy and set his nerves to resonating. He was furious with the sheriff because of the contempt he had openly expressed for Bonnie after hearing her story and his refusal to question the Haviks or search their premises. Plainly, he thought that the beating up of Tizoc had been a worthy, even applaudable, act. And he claimed that there was not enough evidence to warrant an investigation into Tizoc’s disappearance. That the sheriff was right about the latter point enraged Parry even more.

  After the long session in the back room of the jail, Parry had gotten Bonnie a room at a Mrs. Amster’s. Then they had shopped at the small dress shop, purchased her clothes, and taken them to her place. She had bathed and put on some makeup—much, she would have considered sinful—and after dressing she had accompanied Seton and Parry to the restaurant. There she had been subjected to openly curious, and some hostile, stares from and much whispering among the patrons. By the time they left, she was in tears.

  Afterward, they’d walked around town, and she had told him in detail about her life in the Havik household. Parry was tough, but every once in a while the sufferings and tragedies of humanity refused to be kept at bay. Like the sea pounding a dike, they found a weak spot, and they poured through him. Usually, it was one case, like Bonnie’s, representing millions of men, women, and children who were enduring injustice, cruelty, and lack of love, that punched through. And then the others, or his consciousness thereof, roared in after the spearhead.

  Parry could not sleep for a long time because he felt as if he were a huge sea shell in which the ocean of suffering was a painful din. Finally, he did drift away, only to be awakened, half-stupefied, by a pounding on the door. He turned on the light and stumbled to the door, noting on the way that Malone, breathing whiskey fumes, had not been roused. The door swung open to reveal his landlady, Mrs. Doorn, and Mrs. Amster. Immediately, he became wide awake. Before Mrs. Amster could stammer out her story, he had guessed what had happened.

  A few minutes later, he plunged out the front door into the dimly lit three-in-the-morning night of Roosville. He ran to Huisman’s house, which was only a block from the jail. The sheriff wasn’t pleased to be pulled out of a beery sleep, but he put on his clothes and went out to his car with Parry behind him.

  “It’s a good thing you didn’t go out there by yourself,” he said thickly. “Old man Havik could’ve shot your butt off and claimed you was trespassing. As it is, I ain’t sure that Bonnie didn’t go willingly with her father.”

  “Maybe she did,” Parry said, sliding into the front seat. “There’s only one way to find out. If Havik has forced her to come with him, he’s guilty of kidnaping. Mrs. Amster said only that she woke up in time to see Havik and his sons pushing Bonnie into the car. She hadn’t heard a thing before then.”

  Though Huisman drove as swiftly as the winding gravel road would allow, he did not turn his siren or flashing red lights on. As they turned onto the road to the Havik farm, he turned off his headlights. It was evident, however, that they would not need them. The light from flowing lava and ejected rocks outlined the house brightly.

  “That thing looks like it’s getting ready to blow!” the sheriff said in a scared voice. “I ain’t never seen it so bright before!”

  He and Parry both cried out. A particularly large fragment, a white spot in the eye of night, had risen from the cone and was soaring toward the house. It disappeared behind the roof, and a moment later flames broke out from the area in which it had fallen.

  Huisman skidded the car to a stop by the fence with a shrieking of tires, and he and Parry tumbled out. The glare from the cone and from the rooftop flames outlined the house. It also showed them Bonnie, the top of her dress half torn off, her face twisted, running down the porch steps and toward them. She shouted something at them, but the whistling of steam and boomings of ejected rock and the cries of her father and brothers behind her drowned out her words.

  Parry shouted at Huisman, “Havik’s got a shotgun!”

  Cursing, Huisman stopped and undid the strap over the revolver in his holster. Havik ran out down the steps and into the yard, then halted to point the double-barreled weapon toward Bonnie.

  Parry yelled at her to throw herself on the ground. Though she could not have heard him, she sprawled onto the ground heavily. Parry saw by the light of another whirling glowing thing that came from over the house and downward that she had tripped on a small rock, now cooled to a dull red.

  Havik’s gun boomed twice; pellets tore by Parry.

  Huisman had thrown himself down, too, but had clumsily dropped his gun while doing so.

  Parry saw where the mortarlike trajectory of the rock would end, and he cried out. Later, he asked himself why he had tried to warn a man who was trying to kill his own daughter and would undoubtedly have tried to kill him, too. The only answer was that, being human, he was not always, by any means, logical.

  There was a thud, and Havik fell, the semiliquid stone bent somewhat around his shattered head, clinging to it. The odor of burning flesh and hair drifted over the yard.

  Rodeman and Albert Havik screamed with horror, and they ran to their father. That was all the time the sheriff needed. He recovered his revolver, and, rising, called at the two to drop their rifles. They started to do so but whirled around when several more rocks crashed into the ground just behind them. The sheriff, misinterpreting their actions, fired twice, and that was enough.

  6.

  Curtius Parry had arranged for Bonnie Havik to work as a maid for a Westchester family, and he had talked to a plastic surgeon about the removal of her scar. Having done all he could for her, he was now taking his ease in his apartment on East 45th Street. He had a drink in his hand; Ed Malone, sitting in a huge easy chair near him, held a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

  Malone was saying, “So Tizoc can’t be found? So what? At least you saved Bonnie from being murdered, and nothing less than poetic justice got rid of her beastly family for her.”

  Parry raised his thick eyebrows and said, “They’re dead, yes, but they’re still alive in Bonnie, working their violence in her. It’ll be a long time, if ever, before they cease to savage her guts. As for their deaths, were they examples of poetic justice? And as for Juan Tizoc, well, if I told you my theory about what actually happened to him, you’d say I was crazy.”

  “Tell me anyhow, Cursh,” Malone said. “I won’t laugh at you or call you crazy.”

  “I only ask that you keep it to yourself. Very well. The Catskills are not volcanic country, but Mexico is.…”

  “So?” Malone said after a long silence.

  “Consider the theory that some of the townspeople were voicing. They spoke about the spontaneous fires in the Havik house when Bonnie was eleven, and they hinted that Bonnie was somehow responsible for the volcano. But they did not know that in every allegedly authentic case of salamandrism, as it’s called, the phenomena always cease when the unhappy child becomes pubescent. So, Bonnie could not be responsible.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say that, Cursh,” Malone said. “I was afraid you were going to base your theory on supernaturalism.”

  “Supernatural is only a term used to explain the unexplainable. No, Ed, it wasn’t
Bonnie who heated up the sandstone not too deep in the earth and opened the earth in the cornfield to propel the white-hot stuff out onto the Haviks. It was Tizoc.”

  Malone’s drink sloshed over his hand, and he said, “Tizoc?”

  “Yes. The Havik men killed him, most bloodily and in a white-hot anger, I’m sure. And they dug a grave in the center of the field and filled it up and smoothed out the dirt over it. They expected that the roots of the corn plants would feed off Tizoc, and the plants themselves would destroy all surface evidences of his grave. This was most appropriate, though the Haviks would not know it, since corn was first domesticated in ancient Mexico. But Mexico is also the land of volcanoes. And a man, even a dead man, expresses himself in the spirit of the land in which he was raised and with the materials and in the method most available.

  “The Haviks did not know that Tizoc’s hatred was such, his desire for vengeance such, that he burned with these even as a dead man. He burned with hatred, his soul pulsed with violence even if the heart had ceased pulsing. And the sandstone was turned to magma with the violence of his hatred and vengeance.…”

  “Stop, Cursh!” Malone cried. “I said I’d not call you crazy, but …”

  “Yes, I know,” Parry said. “But consider this, Ed, and then advance a better theory, if you can. You saw the report the geologists made on the composition and the relative proportions of the gases and the ashes expelled by the volcano. These are not what any volcano so far studied has expelled.”

  Parry drank some Scotch and set the glass down.

  “The ejected elements, and their relative proportions, are exactly those that compose the human body.”

  The Henry Miller Dawn Patrol

  Foreword

  This story is not science-fiction, though in its preliminary form it was. But the story didn’t work out, so I put it aside and let it ripen—some might say fester—in my unconscious. Eventually, the good old hindbrain, or whatever it is that holds the unconscious, came up with an entirely new concept. And this said that the story should take place in modern times. This also said that the story wouldn’t be science-fiction.