“I don’t know how you let things get into such a condition, Mr. Harkness,” she’d say, wrinkling up her nose and breathing through her mouth. “You load these things up and I’ll wash’m for you, for pity’s sake, before they fester on you! You’ll both wind up in the pest house before you know it. Mercy!”
And the old turd would hobble around trying to look debilitated when actually he was as limber as a blacksnake when he wanted to be, frowning and making motions at me to get busy and trot the clothes out, and all the while he’d be whining things like, “I sure do thank you, Miz Wallaby . . .” or whatever in the Hell her name was, “I don’t know what we’d do without our neighbors, as the Good Book says. I’m just a poor sick old man and this boy is too much for me, it’s not right I should have such a burden thrust upon me in the decline of my life, I haven’t got the strength for it, no I haven’t ma’am, he’ll be the death of me, I predict, for he won’t work and he won’t listen and he won’t obey,” and so on and so forth.
Then, once she was out of sight and hearing, he’d sit back in his easy chair that had the bottom sprung out of it and he’d smirk and laugh and carry on about how he’d sure gotten the best of that deal, all right.
“Just set and wait long enough and let the word get around and sure enough, Boy, some damn fool will turn up and do the work! Well, I’m willing. Let’m. Good for their souls.” And he’d cackle and hee-haw and dribble Apple Twist tobacco juice onto his dirty old moustache.
He had no shame and he had no pride. Send me begging for food. He’d do that, although he had money for the bootlegger. And he’d send me to steal, too. “Don’t tell me you don’t want to, Boy. It’s the easiest thing there is. You got that big old hole in your overcoat pocket, all’s you got to do, Boy, is just drop in a can of pork’n’beans or a box a sardines, let ’m fall into the lining, then just walk out as easy as you please with your two hands in plain sight. Boy, your two hands in plain sight. So don’t tell me you don’t want to, Boy. You want to eat, don’t you?”
He had it all figured out. It was a perfectly good sort of thing to steal from the A&P, because the A&P was a monopoly. And it was a perfectly good thing to steal from Ah Quong, because Ah Quong was a Chinaman. “Live on a fish head and handful of rice a day. Boy, and that’s the reason us Americans can’t compete with ’m.”
He talked this way all around town and one day when I was “shopping” in the E Light Grocery Store, old Ah Quong waved me over. I was so afraid, I almost messed myself. I was sure old Ah Quong was going to brain me with a hatchet, having caught on to me, but all he did was to hand me a package. “You give you glandfodda,” he said. I took it and all but ran.
What was there inside of it but a bag of fish heads and a bag of rice.
You think he was ashamed?
“By grannies, Boy,” he said, running his tongue over his gummy old mouth, “we’ll make chowder. Nothing makes a better chowder than fish heads. Rice is nice, too. Rice is a thing that settles mighty easy on the stomach.”
He claimed he’d been wounded in the Spanish and American War but was cheated out of a pension by the politicians. He claimed he’d been to the Yukon for gold. He claimed he’d been a railroad engineer and he claimed this and that and the other thing, but as I got older I come to realize that they were all lies, just lies. He’d rather work hard at a lie than tell the easy truth. But I was a while in catching on to this.
When I say he was mean, I mean he was mean. I don’t mean he’d ever actually beat me. He wanted to for sure, he’d almost tremble with eagerness to do it sometimes, pulling at his belt and yelling and swearing. But he was too afraid to, because even though I was only about ten years old I was mighty big for my age and getting bigger all the time, and I had all my teeth, too. He knew that in a few years I’d be big enough to take him on and stamp all over him.
So he’d threaten. Mean, nasty threats. “Won’t go to get an old man’s medicine just because it’s mizzling a few drops,” he’d yell—meaning, won’t go pick up my booze when it’s raining fit to drown kittens. “I had enough. Boy, hear me now! I’ve had enough! I’m turning you over to the Authorities! The County can take care of you from now on! We’ll see how you like it in the orphanage asylum from now on! Water mush three meals a day and the cat-o’-nine-tails if you look down your nose at it. I’m going now, I’m going now, do you hear me? To tell’m to come pick you up . . .”
He bundled himself up and skettered out, rain and all. Of course he was just going to get his pint of moon, but I didn’t know that. I spent that night moving from one hiding spot to another, my teeth chattering. And finally fell asleep under the bed.
It was after the Authorities started never coming that he began with other threats. “Boy, I don’t know what I’m going to do with you. Yes, I do know. I’m going to sell you, Boy—I’m going to sell you to the Goobers!”
Well, I didn’t know if the Goobers lived in the next township or if they were the name of a foreign power. All I knew was, they weren’t good. If they’d’ve been good my grandfather would sure’ve never’ve mentioned them. Nobody ever heard him threaten to put me with some family which would dress me right and keep me clean and feed me decent, that’s for sure. He’d even threatened once to feed me to the hogs—not our hogs, we never kept hogs, it would’ve been too much of a work to slop them—but there were plenty of hogs kept in the town—and everybody knew that hogs have been known to eat children, though of course not of my size and age, just babies, but I didn’t know that then.
“What’re Goobers?” I asked after a little while. Maybe they could’ve been a kind of animal, I thought, but in a minute I realized no they coulda’t, animals couldn’t buy anything, they had to be people. Maybe the Goobers was their name—like we were the Harknesses.
“You’ll wish you never come to know,” was his answer. He made his mean little eyes all small, then he opened them so wide that the whites showed all around and the red under lids. “That’s what you’ll wish! When I sell you to the Goobers! Which I’ll do by the Ever-Living Lord of Heaven and Earth . . .” He never went to church or said a prayer, mind you and he didn’t finish, just sucked in his scabby lower lip and nodded at me.
Maybe they were another kind of Authorities. State, maybe, instead of County. Mr. Smith, Chief Goober of the State . . .? And of course his helpers. Anyway, whatever it was they might want to buy me for, it couldn’t be good. I knew that. But I wanted to know more. So I asked Rodney Sloat. He wasn’t a friend of mine, I had no friends, but he was a non-enemy at least, and he was known to read books.
“Rodney, is there any such a thing as Goobers?”
He nodded his head. “They live in holes in the ground,” he said.
It must’ve been about ten years ago that all of a sudden it came to me that what he must’ve been thinking of was, of course, gophers—and I spilled my coffee all over myself and scalded my legs. All that time it was a mystery what he had in mind. But right just then, when he told me they lived in holes in the ground, it never occurred to me that this was the thing he meant. They lived in holes in the ground! Oh, this was worse than anything ever imagined.
The old dog saw how he’d gotten to me, and it was like the smell of blood. He never let up. It was Do this, Do that, Don’t you dast do this or that, or I’ll sell you to the Goobers, sure as I’m alive . . . And I went about in fear of my life, almost, because although he’d never said that the Goobers would kill me—or even harm me—why, how did I know they wouldn’t? They lived in holes in the ground, didn’t they?
The old man didn’t have any friends any more than I had friends, but he had cronies, which was more than I had. One of them was a big ruined old hulk of a man with a long fat face all sunken in the middle and white stubble on it, but two little clumps of black eyebrow like curled-up caterpillars. And his name was Barlow Brook. Never just Barlow and never Brook or Mr. Brook.
I broke a plate.
“Got the dropsy,” said Barlow Brook.
Grandfather went into his song and dance. “Barlow Brook, the Boy is a torment to me by day and by night.”
“Take the hide off of him.”
“I swear. Boy, my patience is running out. There’s a show-down coming, do you hear me. Boy? It’s coming to that. I won’t whip you like Barlow Brook says, nooo. I’m too soft-hearted for that. But I warn you, Boy, and I call Barlow Brook to my witness, unless you mend your ways and mighty quick, I will sell you to the Goobers.”
Barlow Brook hooked open the door of the cold old dusty wood stove with his foot and spit into it. “George Wolf used to talk about the Goobers.” He reached himself a hunk of bread and one of our six hundred cans of bacon grease and smeared it on with his fingers and gobbled at it.
“George Wolf,” said my grandfather. “He was a bad one.”
“Bad as they come. Used to talk about the Goobers. Remember that girl at George Wolf’s?”
“Sassy girl?”
“Sassy as they come. You can’t make me, used to say. You ain’t my father, used to say. Ain’t even married to my mother. Try to catch her, he would. Couldn’t do it. Take care, he’d tell her. The Goobers will get hold of you one a’these days.” Bread crumbs, greasy bread crumbs, coming out of his mouth, but I never missed a word, thick as he was speaking, about the sassy girl at George Wolf’s.
Barlow Brook washed down his dinner from the smoky-looking bottle, didn’t wipe it or his mouth either.
“She says to him, there ain’t no such of a thing as any Goobers. Goobers is peanuts, she says to him. George Wolf, he told her, That’s why they call’m Goobers, he says, they look like that. Only not so small. Not near so small. Got wrinkled old shells on. Dirty yellow colored. Even sometimes a couple of hairs. Watch out, sassy. They’ll git ahold of you. George Wolf.”
Barlow Brook put his moldering shoes up to the kerosene stove.
“You hear, now, Boy,” said my grandfather, smirking at me.
I swallowed. I asked what, what happened to the sassy girl at George Wolf’s. A quick, secret look passed between those two evil old men. Something had happened to her, I knew that. I know it now. And I’ve got my own idea as to what. But, then . . . When Barlow Brook said, “Came and got her,” I had no idea except for sure that the Goobers were the they.
You can be sure that I did my best not to break any more plates. I fetched and I carried. When my grandfather said “Come here, Boy,” I came a running. But he was a bully, and there is no satisfying of bullies. He knew I was in mortal terror of being sold to the Goobers and he never let up. There were hickory trees back in the thicket and one day he sent me to get some nuts. I didn’t mind at all and I went quick.
And I came back quick. There was a bad family by the name of Warbank lived outside of town, so bad that even my grandfather didn’t want anything to do with them. They were meaner than he was and they had a bunch of big yellow dogs meaner than they were. When I got to the hickory trees with my bucket, there was Ding Warbank and Cut Warbank with their own buckets, and their dogs.
“You get the Hell out of here,” said Ding.
“It ain’t your thicket,” I said.
“Get him,” said Cut. The dogs came after me and I ran. One of them got hold of my pants and it came away in his teeth. Behind me, Cut called them back.
“We better not see you here again,” yelled Ding.
My grandfather took on fierce. No trashy Warbanks, he yelled, were going to tell him he couldn’t have nuts from “his own” thicket.
“You go on back there,” he ordered. “Go on, now.”
I didn’t move.
“Go on, I tell you! Go on, go on, go on! You want me to sell you to the Goobers?”
Oh, I was afraid of that, all right. I was afraid of the Goobers. But I’d never really seen any. And I had seen those Warbanks’ yellow dogs, felt their white shiny teeth pulling that bite out of my pants legs. And I wouldn’t go.
He yelled and he raged. Then, all of a sudden, he quit. “All right, Boy,” he said. “All right, then. I am through warning you. In one hour’s time, as I live and as my name’s Dade Harkness, in one hour’s time I swear that I will sell you to the Goobers. Now git out my sight—but don’t you leave the yard!”
What he figured on, I guess, was that the Warbanks would be gone by then and I’d rush out and get his old hickory nuts and then he’d pardon me . . . for the time being.
I stumbled away. “It’s four o’clock,” he yelled after me. “They’ll be here at five. Don’t bother packing—you won’t need nothing!”
An hour like that, I never want to pass again. I hid here and hid there, till I was sweaty and dirty as never before. But I didn’t trust any place. By and by I got so thirsty that I had to come out and get to the pump. I could hear the old man muttering to himself.
His warning about not leaving the yard didn’t matter to me worth a poke of peas—he, well, what could he’ve done to me for disobeying? Sell me to the Goobers? He was going to do that anyway . . . he said. Of course, he’d said it before and he’d changed his mind before, too. I knew only one thing for sure, and that was that I couldn’t stand any more of it. Anything was likely to be better.
I’d never been to George Wolf’s place, but I knew where it was, and it wasn’t all that far away. About a mile or so off, on the old dirt road along the creek. It was an ugly old shack, never had a lick of paint on it, I guess, though I barely noted that any more than I did the broken windows or the roof falling in on one side and the weeds and underbrush choking up the front yard.
If George Wolf had been the original local acquaintance of the Goobers, then the Goobers couldn’t’ve lived too far away from his place. That was the way my thoughts were running—and I was running, too—right into the woods and down the hill and almost into the swamp that stopped me going further.
“Goobers!” I yelled. “Goobers! You old Goobers! You hear me?” I screamed.
There was nothing but the echo of my voice. It was darkish there, and clammy, and it smelled bad and I was hot and cold and sweaty and I took a big breath and went on yelling again.
“I don’t care if he sells me! I don’t care if you buy me! He isn’t going to go on scaring me like this! You want to buy me? You just come on and do it!”
Something was buzzing when I stopped again. Maybe just a dragon fly. Something moved in the gray underbrush. Maybe just the wind. I could see a hole in the ground not far off. Maybe it was just a plain, ordinary hole. But I didn’t wait to find out about any of this. I turned and ran and stumbled away.
Where? Why, where but back to the old man’s house, back to the only sort of home I knew. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I knew it was going to happen there. It had to.
I slowed down to a soft walk before I got to the yard. Probably he didn’t even know I’d gone, didn’t think I’d’ve dared to. And I could still hear him muttering to himself for a while. Then, suddenly, he stopped.
So did I. Stopped breathing, I mean. I guess. The bell in the old church was striking, and while I’d missed the start, there was no need for me to count the chimes. It only struck the hours. So it had to be five o’clock.
I darted a quick look at the vines hiding his chair from where I was standing. Chair, no, I couldn’t see it. But I could see him—see his head, anyway, for he’d gotten up, sort of and had poked his face forward. It had gone the most horrible ugly sort of putty color. His eyes had a glaze over them like cold fried eggs. I had to turn to see what he was looking at, though of course I knew.
There were the Goobers, coming up the back path.
They were under my height. There were three of them and they had dirty yellow-colored wrinkled old shells on, with even a few hairs. And dirt was clinging to them.
“Where Boy?” asked the first.
“Here Boy?” said the second.
“You sell Boy?” asked the third.
They walked up and squeezed my arms and felt my legs. They pulled on my nose and grabbed hold of my t
ongue. They spun me around and thumped me on the back. Then they quit.
“No,” said the first.
“No good,” said the second.
“No buy Boy,” said the third.
They turned around and walked off. I watched them go, not even turning around when I heard my grandfather keel over and thump the porch floor.
After that, of course, I made his life a living Hell until I ran off two years later at the age of twelve, and there wasn’t a damned thing the old bastard could do about it.
Fairy Tale
By Jack Dann
We’ll bet you didn’t know that all the goblins and kolbolds and malign imps of the Unseelie Court once tried to take over all the Borscht Belt resorts in the Catskill Mountains in New York State, did you? You didn’t? Of course you didn’t. But read on, and the very funny story that follows will tell you all about it . . .
Jack Dann is one of the most respected writer/editors of his generation. His books include the critically acclaimed novel The Man Who Melted, as well as Junction, Starhiker, and a collection of his short fiction, Timetipping. As an anthologist, he edited the well-known anthology Wandering Stars; his other anthologies include More Wandering Stars, Immortal, Faster Than Light (coedited with George Zebrowski), and several fantasy anthologies coedited with Gardner Dozois. His most recent book is the acclaimed Vietnam War anthology In the Field of Fire, coedited with Jeanne Van Buren Dann. Upcoming is a new novel, The Burning Cathedral.
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