The Year's Best Science Fiction 11 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  How can I tell you what happened next? I can only describe the skeleton. You must add the nerves and tubes.

  Miss Luptik introduced us to the workaday gods and devils of the Navaho. She knew them so well, she could show us, in words, how they looked, what they wore, what or who they ate, how they played, how they were calmed, what they controlled, who they rewarded, who they destroyed.

  For some reason, possibly of curriculum, possibly of need, possibly because Miss Luptik was then into a malevolent chapter of her Ph.D. thesis, she ran through the Wakonda Goods in three minutes flat, then swung over to the other camp. Here, in the kingdom of open sores, many legs, fuzzy bodies and pincers, Miss Luptik seemed curiously at home. Each creature Miss Luptik dragged up from the swamp was a separate Hitler, a swirl of claws and gore. In the sunny, dry classroom, Miss Luptik brewed bitter herbs. We sank in her soup, ankles, knees, thighs, middles, chests, necks, chins, mouths, noses, eyes, hair. We simmered together in an old clay pot.

  Miss Luptik ran around the room begging for plants to grow, calling to the heart of each seed, begging the thunder people to rumble the world’s ovaries, fighting off demons, raising the dead, harvesting beans, butchering birds, cursing age, sucking at youth, licking strength from the fiery sun, then tonguing the cold moon for relief.

  I stared down at the fallen doll. It grew, a tidal wave of sour protoplasm, slashed in color, its fat feather a weapon. I, Oliver August, who lights three on a match, was frightened half to death by the skinny instructor in the tight girdle. Miss Luptik was some new kind of ventriloquist. She spoke through the doll. And she, in turn, was someone else’s puppet.

  Wakonda Bad rolled into a snake, crept like warm ooze into my head through the ear. And a strange and secondary magic occurred for me. The slap of red hands on stretched hide, the tomtom throbbing of Miss Luptik’s voice, changed to another music. Yellow hands beat drums of human meat. Chow Mein mixed with feathers. Wakonda Bad developed an urge for gold fillings. He wanted mine, and my belly button for a nose ring.

  All fear has one mother. My mouth dried. My armpits were drenched. My neck tingled. I couldn’t breathe.

  Slap! Miss Luptik clapped her hands. I fell five miles, breaking to pieces. Talk about timing. One minute before the bell, Miss Luptik returned us to the world.

  In epilogue, a changed Miss Luptik, the familiar Miss Luptik, said in a chatty summary, “The dear Navahos knew their gods the way we know our own moles. They talked to them, prayed to them, made offerings to them. But they never never never depicted them. They never drew the gods. It was an inconceivable act, the worst imaginable sin. Think on that. Isn’t it the perfect testimony to pure horror? Isn’t it the essence of belief? They felt, with wisdom handed down through millenniums, that if the gods were drawn, the image would leap up and devour the artist. Crunch. Fini.”

  The bell rang. Miss Luptik asked me to hand her the doll. She took it, dropped it into her bag, and left the room with gorgeous poise.

  Later, Oliver August lay thinking of dark forces.

  Our apartment was on the second floor. The neon sign from the candy store downstairs flashed on and off, a green guardian through the troubled nights of my childhood. That night I noticed the sign again after long years. I was glad to have it. I lay in bed thinking how shrewd were those Indian gods to avoid too much exposure, to put their faith in a kind of spiritual radio. How much worse is the imagined avenger, the shadow who knows.

  Pictures or no, the peculiar truth is if the Rain God came walking on the Grand Concourse, I would recognize him instantly.

  Some miles downtown and east, where the Island of Manhattan begins to narrow, Marilyn Mayberry was also awake.

  “Good morning,” said cheerful Marilyn Mayberry on the following Thursday.

  She came late, dressed for a party in a soft pink dress, a pink hat with a wide brim, white alligator shoes and bag, and long white gloves. Under a chubby arm, she carried a leather portfolio.

  “Good morning, Sipping Deer,” Miss Luptik said.

  Minutes before, I blushed when the teacher arrived at class. After Tuesday’s experience there was an intimacy between us. The night of her epic lecture, I had her three times in a series of greedy, protective dreams. Since then, this was our first daylight encounter.

  When Miss Mayberry entered I was sadly accepting the fact that Miss Luptik would never again duplicate the Tuesday emotion. Her old self, she was telling us about ceremonies of initiation. She was strong but not possessed. Facing the truth was difficult. It was as if a doctor said to me, “Oliver, your stomach is ruined. You will never eat shrimps again.”

  “I drew the gods,” Miss Mayberry said.

  “Beg pardon, dear.”

  “I drew your big old nasty gods. I drew them as an extra term project.”

  “Ah?”

  “I think they would look nice hanging around the room.”

  Miss Mayberry pulled the zipper that held her portfolio together. She lifted out a pile of drawing boards. In living color, before our eyes, Miss Mayberry displayed her gallery of gods. Each drawing bore a legend:

  we are of the fire

  i make the sun to burn

  give us corn, oh corn spirit

  i am black death in the storm

  bow low to me, brave hunter

  etcetera, etcetera. All the gods, sneering, grimacing, or passive and smoldering, had a striking resemblance to Robert Mitchum.

  Miss Mayberry beamed. She positively beamed.

  “I brought wall tacks,” she said.

  “How creative,” Miss Luptik said.

  Then Miss Mayberry tacked up the gods. Miss Luptik worked along. She had been taken completely by surprise. Miss Mayberry won the day without losing an arrow.

  As I sat watching, in the greenhouse of my heart a hatred bloomed simply and sweetly—a clean, neat hatred for the pink, ripe, bitchy, muffler-knitting, big-knockered, tight-assed Marilyn Mayberry. Instantly, easily, absolutely without anger, I swore vengeance on her for this fantastic act of total blasphemy. Without ado, the gods appointed Oliver August as their ambassador in this matter of honor. I accepted the job without hesitation.

  How come?

  To this day I can only speculate. Perhaps because I had only recently learned about being afraid. Miss Luptik allowed me to see something of dignity and beauty in that dirty emotion. The darkness is real. The Wakonda Bads are a bopping gang. There is reason to crap carefully during new moon, and therefore real reason to huddle together.

  Having learned about fear, I learned about need. But all this was new and vulnerable insight.

  Miss Marilyn Mayberry, on the other hand, was impatient with unseen phantoms. Tranquil since teething, tranquil she would remain. Undoubtedly she too had been disturbed by Miss Luptik’s doll, but she refused to nurse its ugly hunger. Her mother had warned her not to play jacks with the Wind People. There was too much going on, hope chests to fill, the promise of weddings and babies. So, a true child of science, she drew the gods and nearly killed them all.

  The girl came close to wiping out all of Hell. That, of course, was really the terrible penalty the Indians suspected —that the evil gods would die, leaving nothing, not a stain, but only tepid paradise.

  I screamed for blood. I swore to drill Marilyn Mayberry to some carpet, somewhere, with the bluntest instrument I could think of. That was the way it had to be, the only way to save the universe.

  Imagine, I of tender passions, Oliver, who turned my adolescent eyes from those long, thin books that showed Popeye and Olive Oyl making love. I, the lonely dreamer, the nibbler of rose petals. I had grown feathers. I painted my face. Miss Mayberry was my buffalo. I wanted a coat made of her.

  The pictures hung, the class went on. I heard Miss Luptik’s voice, but not the words. For the first time in my life, I had a single purpose. Already I was busy with blueprints.

  After class, looking eager, I invited Miss Mayberry for a coke. She thought things over. I had a difficult moment. Did her an
tenna pick up static?

  She said yes.

  From then, to the end, it was a quaint courtship.

  In the early phase my biggest problem was to conceal my red identity.

  There is a story about a prince who was lonely. One day, looking at one of his fields from the castle tower, he saw a maiden. He wanted the maiden, so he saddled his white horse and galloped to where she was picking strawberries.

  Around and around he rode, but the maiden never looked up. So back he rode and fell into depression. His wise man was called to diagnose the trouble. When he heard the prince’s story, he patted his royal head. He told the prince to sleep and seek guidance in a dream.

  The prince slept and dreamed. He dreamed he rode a green horse. When he woke up the message hit him right away. He called his groom and ordered the groom to paint his stallion green.

  “Green?” the groom said.

  “Uh huh,” answered the prince. “Get the picture: I ride down to the field where this maiden is picking. She sees me on a green horse. Then she says, ‘Heavens, Sire, your horse is green.’ And I say, ‘Yes, beautiful lady. I am the prince.’ In a week, I send her flowers. In two weeks, I send her jewels. In a month, I grant her daddy a fief. In six months, I take my pleasure.”

  “Great,” said the groom, and painted the horse green.

  Later, the prince saw the maiden. He jumped on his green horse and went flying down to the field. Around and around he rode, but nothing happened. He rode faster, the horse snorting, the prince in a lather. Finally, the maiden looked up from her strawberry patch.

  “Heavens, Sire,” she said in a golden voice, “your horse is green.”

  “Yes, beautiful lady,” said the prince, “and in six months we’re going to screw.”

  My situation was similar. The important thing was to go slow and steady. Dressing for dates, I double-checked my fly. I used my sister’s deodorant. I chewed Dentyne and gargled with Lavoris. I trimmed my pointy nails. Nothing should offend. No jagged ends should telegraph jagged intentions.

  I followed a perfect timetable, forcing my mind to think like a German. It was two ballets at City Center, an Italian movie and an off-Broadway revival of The Tempest before I even touched her hand.

  When I touched, she pulled away. I did not pursue with reckless fingers. I made a fist, as if in suffering, and rested the fist on the arm of my seat.

  No need to give you every detail. Student romance is not the most interesting of subjects. You know how things go, in chords and flashes.

  A human totem pole, with all the faces mine and smiling, I took Marilyn Mayberry into various worlds. If she did not like green horses, I would use brown paint. If not brown, lavender.

  What did she like the best? Art? We went to the Modern Museum where she showed a taste for Edward Hopper’s picture of an usher in the movies.

  “I like films,” she said. “And not only uptown. Right in the neighborhood is just as good.”

  I took her to movies.

  “I like foreign,” she said. “But I think people who criticize Hollywood are artsy-craftsy snobs.”

  Remembering the Mitchum-faced gods, I confessed a love for the Warner Brothers.

  Sports?

  “Basketball is nice. The rest I can take or leave.”

  The basketball season was over, so we left.

  Books?

  “I read and read,” she said. “And read and read and read. Do you enjoy Thomas Wolfe? I do.”

  “I do.”

  “Look Homeward Angel.”

  “Oh yes.”

  Food? She loved Chinese, a touchy subject in those days, but I went along.

  “You order from group A.”

  “No, really.”

  “Go on. I’ll order from group B.”

  “Let’s start with wonton.”

  “Wonton is lovely. Two wonton soups, please. And chopsticks. We’ll eat with chopsticks.”

  “I couldn’t. Olly, I just couldn’t.”

  “You can. Sure you can. I just know you can.”

  Meal after meal, I grappled with stilts. A winner down the line, Marilyn Mayberry never dropped a grain of pork fried rice or a single snow pea.

  How I hated that girl.

  Gradually, I got to know her. So comfortable within her healthy skin, Marilyn Mayberry was absolutely without pangs. She had never felt hunger. The few appetites that stirred in her were appetites for future feeding, and she was calm and confident that her table would be set in due time. This was not a girl who would sleep with a frog on the chance of morning metamorphosis. There was enough in the world to keep her happy. Why gamble when it is so much easier, and safer, to simply be cautious?

  She liked everything about the twentieth century, from the Double-Crostics in the Times to Jackie Gleason. And she seemed to like them equally.

  Oliver Chameleon, camouflaging my secret heart, took on painful coloration. When Marilyn Mayberry bought the New Yorker, we went to little theaters where they served Coffee in cups designed for thin lips. When she wished to rest from the better things, she would tell me about “when I was a little girl” and we would end up watching that mighty milleped called the Rockettes at Radio City.

  Music was important too. So, many of our evenings ended with Marilyn tapping her glass with a swizzle while five obsolete Negroes and a sprinkle of middle-aged Caucasians belched Dixieland. When the Saints Go Marching In. I sang along, all right, but with my own words, celebrating my own dream of entrance.

  We came closer. Close enough to discuss the great controversy between square-cut and pear-shaped diamonds, the need for adequate insurance, the matter of discipline in the raising of children and how weddings were made for parents and grandparents. We talked about D. H. Lawrence, for whom we felt sorry, and Barry Goldwater, for whom we did not.

  And we came closer. We held hands on campus. We kissed in her hall. By the end of May, outside her door, while she fumbled for keys, I pressed her breast and she bit my cheek.

  On the bus going home, I rejoiced.

  Around that time, I can’t exactly remember dates, the gods began visiting me each night They looked so harried, I worried.

  “White boy,” said the fellow in charge of Household Misery, “hurry yourself. We’re fading fast. Necessity is the mother of redemption.”

  “I’m doing my best,” I said. “I’m keeping tight lines of supply. Positions must be consolidated.”

  “You know how Douglas MacArthur feels about lethargy,” the god said.

  “I know,” I said. “I know.”

  Marilyn Mayberry retreated suddenly. Was it her intuition? For a week she wouldn’t let me near her. She skipped our Tuesday class, and on Thursday she sat near the door. She broke our Wednesday date. I saw her walking on Riverside Drive eating ice cream with a total stranger. Thwarted love is bad. Thwarted vengeance is awful.

  Each night, the gods tch-tched.

  I doubled my efforts. Desperately, using everything I knew or suspected, I sought to fill Marilyn Mayberry’s life with aphrodisiacs.

  Based on a magazine article I read in my sister’s Ladies Home Journal, I encouraged Marilyn to eat spicy foods.

  “My upper lip is sweating, Olly.”

  “Have more sauce.”

  “No. I’ll dehydrate.”

  “Curry is supposed to punish. That’s the gourmet’s way.”

  “No, Olly. No sauce.”

  To stimulate her mentally, I spent twenty dollars on a copy of the Kama-Sutra and followed with A Doctor Looks at Sex.

  “The first book was terrible. They spend so much time thinking about new positions it’s no wonder their gross national product is way down. They need construction manuals, not marriage manuals.”

  “Whoever said the Kama-Sutra was a marriage manual?”

  “Well, people sleep together. The second book was sensible. I lent it to my mother.”

  I took her to the Persian Room to watch Hildegarde.

  I championed the wearing of loose-f
itting garments.

  I planned picnics in Central Park, where we watched the seals.

  I took her to the American Museum of Natural History to feel the great presence of dinosaurs.

  We went to the Hayden Planetarium to watch stars being born and nebulae whirl.

  “Some day man will probe the mystery of outer space.”