Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

by Michael Bishop

  “So if anyone ask you to,” the dwarf was saying, “you go.”

  “Asks me to what? Go where?”

  “Why, to the Moon, of course. If anybody ask you to go there, you gotta do it. Very edyucashun’l.”

  “I think maybe I’d better get back to Lia, Horsy.” Cal rose, gathered up his wet clothes, put them on hangers, and, at Horsy’s suggestion, hung them in the shower stall to dry. He picked up the bloated copy of The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt and, reluctantly, dropped it into a wastebasket.

  Then he and the dwarf exited the saddle room and strode side by side—Cal walking casually, Horsy half trotting—toward the immense open doors through which the eastern pastures were visible.

  Before they reached the doors, Grace Rinehart, Hiram Berthelot, and Denzil Wiedenhoedt appeared in this sunlit opening and came on into the barn, squinting to adjust to its butterscotch-tinted gloom. Two Secret Service men remained outside, ostentatiously on guard.

  “Horsy,” Wiedenhoedt cried, “Secretary Berthelot wants to view the thoroughbreds! Let’s give him a tour!”

  “ ‘Scuse me, Mr. Cal. Duty done jus’ called.” He hobbled off toward the two men, who had separated from Miss Grace to stroll past Divine Intervention, Ubiquity, Valerian, and the other nine thoroughbreds whose stalls made a ritzy train through the tunnel of the stable.

  Hiram Berthelot waved at Cal, to acknowledge his existence, but Wiedenhoedt was too busy showing off his horses to waste his time on pleasantries.

  Now, though, Miss Grace was stalking Cal. She met him in the center of the cathedralesque barn.

  “We have a proposition for you, Mr. Pickford,” she said.

  “ ‘We’ ?”

  “Hiram and I. Lia still hasn’t formally agreed to do LAC work for me, or to cast her lot with Hi when we make our presidential bid in ‘84, but she’s coming ‘round. She sees that I’m not such an overbearing soul, not such an ogre.”

  “Did you come to Miss Emily’s funeral to convince her of that?”

  Grace drew back as if Cal had flicked her in the nose with his forefinger. “You’re not still upset because I bought my Brezhnev bears from you under false—false but harmless—pretenses? Or are you?”

  “If you’re rich, white, right, and over twenty-one, you can buy Brezhnev bears under just about any pretenses you want. I guess you qualify.”

  Now her squint was appraising rather than pupil-adjusting. “I really don’t like your tone, Mr. Pickford.”

  “What if it were higher?” Cal essayed a falsetto: “Would you be more favorably disposed? After all, us high-toned folks gots to stick together.”

  “Up yours, Pickford.” She started to turn and leave, but Cal grabbed her elbow and turned her about. He had flown headlong into a hurricane, talking to her as he had, but now he would behave, and maybe even redeem their meeting by showing her that even a has-been hippie could change his stripes … from American-flag campiness to designer haute couture.

  “Wait. I’m sorry. What proposition?”

  “Is there someplace else we could talk, Mr. Pickford? I feel like I’m in an empty church.”

  Escorting her by the elbow, he led her to the saddle room, but, outside its door, she said, “My God, it smells like a combination leather shop and locker room in there. Are you trying to establish your credentials as a full-fledged male?”

  “Not that I know of. I was only trying to find a semiprivate place to talk.”

  “Not here. Even outside would be better.”

  So he led her down the northern side of the stable, where the quarter horses had their stalls, thinking that they could sit on a bench in the shade of one of the building’s eaves. Meanwhile, Hiram and Denzil, the Katzenjammer Kids, were playing Radioactive a surprise visit—about a mile across the vault of the stable—and the horse was snorting and stamping as if not all that glad to see them. Cal could sympathize.

  Grace stopped at an empty stall, pushed its door inward, and said, This’ll do. This is fine.”

  The saddle room won’t do, Cal thought, but a horse stall is okay? All right. Suit yourself. He entered behind the actress, thinking of her as an actress, and they sat down on one of the plank ledges that Horsy had built to get himself closer to his work. Two bales of hay were broken and raked out in the corner, but otherwise the stall was immaculate, almost as if Horsy had disinfected every square centimeter.

  “Bouquet of Lysol,” Grace said.

  “Yeah. You wouldn’t want to play any leather games in here. Or change your gym shorts, either.”

  “Would you stop sparring with me? For just a few minutes?”

  “All right. What proposition?”

  “Hiram wants you to come to work at Berthelot Acres.”

  Although Cal had resolved not to be tempted by anything that this woman said or did, his heart began to rev. Goodbye to the Happy Puppy Pet Emporium. Hello honest-to-God cattle ranch. If you can’t work for Arvill Rudd, then why not for the sockdolager Secretary of Agriculture? But Cal mastered his excitement. “Why?”

  “Because you’re a cowboy. Or were. And we’ve got cows.”

  “Santa Gertrudis cattle.”

  “That’s right. Big-beamed reddish-brown creatures.”

  “Lia tells me they’re beautiful.”

  “Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder. I prefer horses.” She made a gesture that took in the whole of Brown Thrasher Barony.

  “I hear you also have Brezhnev bears.”

  “But you wouldn’t be responsible for them. Unless you wanted to be. They’re doing fine as is, I think.”

  “Your cattle aren’t doing fine?”

  “They’re all right. But Hiram feels they’d do even better if we had someone knowledgeable to watchdog and care for them.”

  This is like a dream come true, Cal thought. Woodbury isn’t that much farther from Pine Mountain than the pet shop is, and you’d love the work, you really would. In fact, seeing as how Lia already has her office in Warm Springs, it might be smart of us to move over there…

  The actress was studying him, trying to ascertain the content and flow of his thoughts.

  In hopes of throwing her off, Cal said, “I’ve got a really good boss right now. It’d be hard to stop working for him.”

  So Grace told him what he would earn if he signed on as foreman at Berthelot Acres. She added that Lia and he would be allowed to rent a house, in either Woodbury or Warm Springs, for what they were now paying for their duplex apartment. Other benefits would accrue when they began supporting Hiram’s bid for the presidency.

  “King Richard’s never going to abdicate.”

  “He’s announced that he is. I believe him. Sixteen years at the helm is enough to wear down any man, no matter how great. And I hate that sophomoric epithet ‘King Richard’. The people elected him four times, by bigger majorities every time, and he deserves to retire to all the honors befitting a man of his accomplishments.”

  “Amen. Hallelujah.”

  “Your mama’s water must’ve been a bath of cynicism. You’re blind and mean-spirited.”

  “I see a few things. I love some others.”

  “If you love yourself, or your wife, accept Hi’s offer. You won’t get another as good if you live to be ninety.”

  “What if Hiram—Secretary Berthelot—gets cut off at the pass at the Republican National Convention?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, it’s hard for me to see him as President Nixon’s successor. If he can’t get the nomination, there go your dreams of First Ladydom, Miss Grace.”

  “But you’d still be Hiram’s foreman, and Lia would still be my therapist.”

  “Wait a minute, now.” Cal sought the actress’s eyes. “If the President does decide not to run, wouldn’t he endorse Westmoreland rather than your husband? Westmoreland’s been the veep since ‘76. He’s popular, and he’s far better known than your husband. So why wouldn’t Westmoreland be the nominee?”

  Grace smiled. “He�
��s a former general.”

  “Right. You remember President Eisenhower, don’t you? He got his start in the military, I hear.”

  “And that’s why Dick, when Carter came along, got the baseball commissionership for Agnew and pep-talked Westmoreland into running with him. Turnabout, he felt, was fair play, and since he’d served as vice president under a man who’d once been a general and a war hero, Dick thought it fitting that a man who was a general and a war hero serve under him as vice president.”

  Dick, Cal thought. Dick, Dick, Dick. The name had different resonances for him than it had for Grace Rinehart.

  “And that’s one reason,” she went on, “Dick isn’t going to want to back Westmoreland’s candidacy in ‘84. He remembers Eisenhower’s warnings about the ‘military-industrial complex’, and he wants a civilian—a real civilian—to follow him.”

  “So says the man who turned the Pentagon loose on Indochina?” Cal was incredulous. “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not kidding. You see him as a hateful stereotype that has nothing to do with the person he really is.”

  “I guess that’s possible. He never invited me over for a drink so I could get to know him better.”

  “More sarcasm. But the fact remains: He wants a civilian to succeed him, and the civilian he has his eye on is Hiram.”

  “He has his eye on lots of civilians, Miss Grace. Sometimes he plucks them out of his eye and puts them on a list.”

  “Look, Dick’s decided that Hi’s his man, and what Dick decides, well, that’s what happens.”

  “Yeah, but the best laid plans of lice and ladies…”

  Where do we go from here? he wondered. She thinks Hi’s going to be our next president, and I don’t. She thinks Westmoreland’s in line to be dumped, and I don’t. She thinks Dick’s the cat’s meow, and I don’t. Her Dick, that is. My Dick—aka Philip K., aka Lia’s Kai—is dead, or mooning about somewhere between death and resurrection.

  “Do you want the job we’re offering or not?”

  Cal shut his eyes. In rapid sequence, he saw floating before him the dead Miss Emily, the dead Dora Jane Pickford, and the dead Royce Pickford. When he opened his eyes again, the temptation to say yes had fled utterly. But he had a twinge—a brief internal tugging—hinting that his self-righteousness was stupid and that he was passing up a perfect chance to get back at those who had robbed him of both his youthful idealism and his parents.

  “Well?”

  “No, ma’am, I don’t think so.”

  Grace Rinehart was beautiful, stunning even with sweat on her forehead and her hair mussed. Now, though, minute crow’s-feet tracked the corners of her eyes and her irises enlarged.

  “Pardon me,” Cal said. “No, miss, I don’t think so.”

  Grace’s bugeyes returned to normal. “Yes, it’s an affectation, wanting to be called ‘miss’ when I’m over”—humorously, she mumbled an unintelligible age—“and on my third marriage. Lia tells me as much. I say it’s only showbiz, but she insists that it derives—this affectation—from my fear of growing old.”

  Cal had no idea what to say to this speech.

  “Don’t you fear that? Growing old? Nearing death?”

  “What I fear,” Cal said, “is stagnating. Getting old may not have all that much to do with it.”

  “And you don’t think you’re stagnating working in, uh, the Happy Puppy Pet Emporium?”

  “Maybe.” (Cal feared that very thing. My job bores me silly, he silently admitted.)

  “Then why won’t you hire on? Why won’t you all get aboard our presidential express while it’s still working up steam?”

  “Probably because I’m a Democrat.”

  After staring at him blankly for a moment, Grace Rinehart began to laugh. Her laughter had no malice or mockery in it, only joy in the absurdity of Cal’s professed political allegiance.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that I can’t imagine who you intend to place your Democratic faith in. Kennedy wiped himself out at Chappaquiddick, Humphrey’s dead, Mondale might as well be, and Jimmy—dear Jimmy—that smilin’ peanut farmer undid even the Solid South for your pathetic crew. You all practically had to pay that dumpy man Asner—a television actor, for pity’s sake—to run last time, and the President just blew him away. I don’t know what else you could’ve expected, Mr. Pickford. Or who, so far as that goes, you think you’re going to sacrifice next time.”

  Cal gave her a wan grin. “Maybe Mr. Spock. He’s about due a shore leave from the Enterprise.”

  This wasn’t half so funny as admitting that he was a Democrat. Grace pursed her lips—sympathetically, he thought—and brushed a tangle of hair out of her eyes. Another impasse, another awkward silence. Cal wanted to get up and leave, their talk seemed to be over—but Grace herself made no move to rise. Damn. What could he say to blunt his refusal of her job offer and to ease his anxiety? What conciliatory word?

  “Time hasn’t done you in,” he essayed. “You’re still a looker, Miss Grace.”

  “In the evening. Under light like this.” She looked up at the slant-set skylight. Then, with no other preamble, she slowly undid the top two buttons of her dress.

  Cal stood up. “Listen…”

  She stopped. “You were hoping… well, not hoping, exactly, but wondering if perhaps I’d do something like this.”

  “No. No, I wasn’t.”

  “Wondering what it would be like to screw a film star. To be able to tell yourself, lying in bed next to the faithful Lia, that you’d done so.”

  “Miss Grace, that’s not—”

  “It hadn’t crossed your mind? Not at all? Not even the way a spiderweb might brush your forehead?”

  “Jesus,” Cal said. “Jesus.”

  “Perhaps we should’ve talked in the saddle room. At least the stink there would’ve proved to me which gender you belong to.”

  “Listen, you’re not seriously proposing that we get down in the hay together, are you? On the same afternoon that my wife’s mother was buried? With kaboodles of other people doing tangos around us on the very premises where you’d like us to get intimate? Is that your latest proposition?”

  “I seldom make much noise. What about you?”

  “My father told me never to put myself in a place where I had to fuck anybody with my pants on. I’m not about to take them off, borrowed or no, in a setup as spacy as this one. Mrs. Berthelot.”

  She smiled, a sorrowful rather than a sardonic smile. “You’ll regret walking away—and your jackass nobility—later.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “No?”

  “No. Have you ever balled anybody in the hay? Try it with Hiram. It’ll make your cute little fanny itch for a week.”

  With that, Cal exited the stall; he walked all the way across the stable’s concrete floor, past the beret-wearing agents at its entrance, and back down the lane of flowering quince and azaleas toward the canopy under which Lia sat. Approaching, he could hear Denzil Wiedenhoedt’s jukebox blaring “That Old Rugged Cross”.

  After showing his boss’s boss and Secretary Berthelot around the stable, Horsy went back to the saddle room. He fixed himself a corned-beef sandwich and laid hands on another beer. An easy day, once you got past poor Miss Emily’s funeral.

  While toddling around the saddle room sipping and eating, Horsy glanced into the wastebasket. There sprawled the water-logged book that Cal had discarded, The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt. Horsy fished it out. It looked semi-interesting, but it was all swole up with shower water, as fat as a June-bug grub. It would have to dry out for him to read it, and, once it had dried, it’d still be plump and hard to thumb.

  Later he carried it to his rafter room above the thoroughbreds and put it on his bedside table. Later yet, sitting in his barrel chair, he began perusing the sodden book. As he did, one of his spells ambushed him, and he was lifted through the stable’s ceiling like Elijah going up by a whirlwind into heaven…

  19

&
nbsp; “MY GOD!” Lia cried. “My God!”

  Cal hurried into the bathroom after her. His hand moved to her nape; his fingers began to knead the tautness there.

  “The No-Knocks,” he said. “The stinkin’, goddamn No-Knocks.”

  “What did they do to him, Cal? What did they do?” But she knew already. Vike’s absence from his spot under the redbud tree had been their first clue that something was, in Cal’s words, “bad wrong”.

  And then the front door, unlocked and ajar. Dirt stains on the living-room carpet. Followed by their discovery of Viking lying in the bathtub like a mound of ragged wolf pelts.

  Cal knelt beside the tub to check the husky out. Lia stared down with her hands gripping her face as if to let go would be to allow it to fly away. The funeral, the ordeal at the Barony, and now this. Numbing capstone to a day that, until now, had not been as bad as she had expected. Driving home from the Barony with Cal dressed—inexplicably—like a polo-playing pirate had lightened her mood, as had the thought of collapsing on the sofa with her shoes off and a stiff drink in hand.

  “Tranquilizer darts,” Cal said. “See ‘em.” He lifted the dead weight of Viking’s head and struggled to turn it toward Lia. “One or two would’ve probably only knocked him out—he was big enough to handle a fair-sized dose—but whoever did this, riddled him with the goddamn things. I count five. No, six.” He eased the great head down again and carefully began plucking darts.

  “Vo Quang Lat,” Lia said.

  Cal glanced up at her in puzzlement.

  “The Vietnamese they tranq’d the day that Grace drove me down to Fort Benning.”

  “Well, your conniving bitch was behind this, too.”

  “No. This was a break-in. Just a break-in. Why would Grace want to kill our dog?”

  Even as she said this, though, Lia knew that Cal was right, that the woman with whom she was now profitably counseling one day a week had ordered this hit. Why, though? Why kill poor Vike, her four-legged sweetheart? Well, because he had posed an obstacle to the No-Knock looking for incriminating evidence against either Cal or her. As this awareness dawned, so did an expression of disgust on Cal’s face. He came out of his crouch and pushed brusquely past her into the hall.