“Your samizdat manuscripts!” she cried. “Your Dick novels!”
“You think you have to tell me? You think I don’t know?” A moment later, from the library, he shouted, “They’re gone! Damn it all to hell, they’re gone!”
Lia went to the door. Cal was on his knees beside the trunk, shuffling through the remaining kipple, mostly letters, notebooks from college, some innocent samizdat manuscripts that no one but Cal could possibly care about. The most precious remaining items were of course the letters from his parents. He held a batch of them in his hands, like stocks that a down-trending market has rendered nonnegotiable. He looked both comic and pathetic. Why hadn’t he just burned his dangerous Dick material before their move from Colorado? Hadn’t she asked him a dozen dozen times?
“Have you ever mentioned my Dick collection to her, Lia? Did you ever once let it slip that I had this stuff?”
“Cal—”
“Did you?”
“Yeah, sure, that’s all we ever talk about! How may I get my hippie hubby in deeper dutch with King Richard’s Court? ‘Outlawed P. K. Dick novels? Yes, Miss Rinehart. A whole trunk of them. When would it be convenient for someone to break in to get them? I hope it won’t be too much trouble for your hired thug to murder our dog while he’s picking them up. Oh, really. That’s wonderful.’ ” Lia, gritting her teeth, began to cry.
“I’m sorry,” Cal said.
He came to her and embraced her. As he held her, they heard their landlady, Mrs. McVane, yoo-hooing from the front door.
The woman came on into the apartment. Her husband was in the hospital in Columbus with a troubling numbness in his arms, but she herself had just come home from the reception at the Barony.
“Lia, darlin’, what’s happened? What else has happened?”
“A break-in,” Cal said. “A goddamn break-in.”
Calmly, Lia disengaged from Cal’s comforting arms and hooked her elbow through Mrs. McVane’s so that she could escort the woman back to the front door, assuring her landlady with every step that they would be fine, they just needed a little time to straighten things up and grieve for poor Vike.
Mrs. McVane expostulated with Lia, begging to be allowed to help, volunteering to call up two of Roger’s friends to assist Cal in carrying the husky outside and burying him. Poor Lia’s second burial of the day. Such a pity, such a pity.
It took about ten minutes to maneuver the woman back into her own half of the duplex. She was sincere in her desire to help, and Lia appreciated her concern. But the last thing either she or Cal needed now was another well-meaning deluge of compassion. They had stood in a rain of solicitude ever since Miss Emily’s death, and Lia would melt—dissolve and runnel away—if she had to endure its merciless mercies for even five more minutes. Aloneness was what she required. Cal, too, probably. Tomorrow, of course, or the day after, further consequences of the No-Knocks’ break-in would reveal themselves, and their lives would change again…
Lia reentered the apartment and closed the door. Mama dead, Vike gone, Cal’s Dickiana stolen. Disaster on disaster.
Where was Cal now? Lia found him in their own bedroom, sitting cross-legged on the floor with the window open behind him and the screen missing. In his lap rested a bright yellow hard hat such as those worn by men working construction. Cal had his hands on this hat as if it were a fortune-teller’s crystal.
His face, meanwhile, was twisted with emotion. Tears beaded at the corners of his eyes and made snaky red paths down his cheeks. Lia was surprised to see him responding so vehemently to Viking’s killing. He was usually more reticent, more reserved. Even Miss Emily’s death had not. prompted him to cry. In that event, he had been her comforter, not her fellow mourner. Maybe, of course, this was his response to a culminating series of shocks.
“What is it, honey?” Lia asked. She knelt before Cal, put her hands on his collarbones, and kissed his forehead.
“I’m abreacting,” he told her, his voice as thick and frayed as unraveling hemp. “Finally, Lia, I’m abreacting.” He lifted the yellow hat as if it would explain this strange remark.
It clarified nothing for Lia, not yet anyway, but there was so much muted hope in the gesture that she said, “Good. That’s very good, Cal…”
Later that evening, Le Boi Loan was on duty in the Save-Our-Way convenience store on Highway 27 out of LaGrange. Pleading illness, he had missed his shift at Gangway Books to do his No-Knock dirty work for Grace Rinehart, and now he really did feel ill. A knot kept shifting in his belly; his brow burned as if smeared with Ben-Gay; his hands were as cold as the ice in a Sno-Kone machine.
Perhaps he should have gone on home to Tuyet and the twins. Of course, then he would have had to lie to them to explain his early departure from the mall. Better to report for work at Save-Our-Way and make some money than to shirk his second job and to deceive his wife. But, dear God, he could still hear the echoes of his pistol shots and see Cal Pickford’s beautiful Siberian husky muzzle-down in the bathtub.
Shit, but his gut hurt! If only there were a new Daredevil to take from the whirl-rack and read. But there wasn’t. The June issue wasn’t out yet, and recently he’d heard rumors from a pair of comic-book fans who frequented the store that Frank Miller, the only artist-writer to make Daredevil come alive for them, was about to jump from Marvel to Stupendo, and that he might even leap from comic art to the design of campaign posters and the development of animated TV spots for whoever became the Republican presidential candidate in 1984. That was still a good ways off, but it showed that Miller had his eyes set on the future.
Maybe you should take up drawing again, Lone Boy told himself. You were pretty good for a while.
And so he brought a pad of paper out from under the counter and with a red Bic pen drew a caricature of King Richard throwing out the first ball at the opening game of the Washington Senators’ new season. But the ball was a hand grenade, and the player trying to catch it was the Senate’s minority whip, who always tried to block passage of any bill favored by the President.
Maybe you could start a comic, mused Lone Boy, devoted to the adventures of, say, “Masterman Milrose”.
Angrily, Loan wadded up his drawing and dropped it in an empty box behind the counter. A dumb-ass idea. All the good superheroes have already been invented, and if the President were going to have a series devoted to his heroics, he’d get Frank Miller to do it and not some fuckin’ upstart Americulturated Vietnamese with no track record. A really dumb dumb-ass idea, asshole.
Loan’s head ached, his stomach sloshed sea-sickeningly, and his tongue felt like a woollybooger. He found some aspirins in a tin next to the cash register, used his thumb to push them into a cup of lemon sherbet from the dairy bar, and ate them with a plastic spoon from the picnic-supplies department.
He still felt lousy when a car roared up and parked in front of the shop. The dork who’d given him the pistol and the tranquilizer darts climbed out and came rolling into Save-Our-Way as if he owned the place. He nodded, paraded up and down every aisle, and halted at the magazine and paperback rack near the checkout counter.
Here, the stooge lipsynched National Enquirer headlines and ogled the bazoomas of the gals on the covers of such books as Tart, Tender Torment, or Tender, Torrid Tart. Literary junk food that sold in depressing quantities even out at Gangway Books.
The only other person in the store, a tek-school student who’d been playing a video game, lost his last quarter and left.
“Dju get ‘em?” the stooge asked, still casually spinning the whirl-stand of paperbacks.
Lone Boy continued eating lemon sherbet.
“I asked you if you got ‘em, gook.”
“And gook to your goddamn racial insults. Stick ‘em where the E. coli roam, numbnuts.” Figure that out, Lone Boy thought, grim in his certainty that the stooge would try to strong-arm him.
Instead, the burly man said, “Forgive me, Mr. Loan,” and came to the counter with three paperbacks, none a bodice-ripper.
Loan saw that they were self-help titles, the topmost being Eliminating the Negative: Individual Affirmative Action for the Underconfident.
“They’re for my wife’s brother,” the stooge explained, not in the least embarrassed. “He’s on a self-improvement kick.”
“Okay, good. They’ve all been big sellers lately. But you’ve missed one that you might like, too.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“Twenty Days to More Discreet and Satisfying Nose Picking. I think there’s a copy behind Flame’s Flaccid Fury.”
Miss Grace’s emissary simply stared at him—contemptuously, it seemed to Loan. Then he said that he had come for some books that weren’t on sale at either Save-Our-Way or West Georgia Commons and that if Lone Boy didn’t have them, that’d be too bad, not only for him but for his family, too: Lone’s refresher course at the Fort Benning LAC might turn out to be more time-consuming than anybody had expected.
“They’re in the trunk of my car,” Lone Boy said. His stomach dropped again. The sherbet in it, the aspirins that he’d eaten, roiled in him. This was his final chance to keep the samizdat manuscripts out of Grace Rinehart’s clutches, and he could tell already that he had blown it, that he was giving in to the worst qualities in his makeup: ambition, greed, disloyalty.
Lone Boy led his visitor outside to his Datsun. The transfer of the stolen Dick novels—in a brown grocery sack—took less than thirty seconds. The Secret Service man set them on the floor of the backseat of his automobile. Then, from the inside pocket of his sports coat, he pulled out a flimsy pamphlet, which he thrust emphatically at Loan.
“Here. A token of Miss Grace’s appreciation.” He went around the nose of his car, climbed in, and drove away.
Lone Boy stood on the raised sidewalk outside the Save-Our-Way store, under the magnesium glare of its fluores-cents, watching the evening traffic go by. He knew without looking at the pamphlet that the agent had given him—at Grace Rinehart’s bidding and with her full complicity and connivance—an advance copy of the June issue of Daredevil.
It wasn’t thirty pieces of silver, Lone Boy supposed. But it would do, it would do…
“Do you know when I realized I was getting old?” Mr. Kemmings asked Cal the next morning at the Pet Emporium. My Main Squeeze was stretching out lazily for a long postprandial nap.
“No, sir,” Cal said, his mind not really on either Mr. K.‘s words or Squeeze’s lassitude.
“It must’ve been Lia’s mother’s funeral that made me remember this, Pickford. I’ve been to too many funerals, and each one makes me think of all the others. Anyway, I believe I first knew I was getting old when Keith, our son, was about fourteen.
“We didn’t have central heating. We used—I still use—space heaters. Dearborns burn either natural gas or propane, depending on where you live. When you turn a space heater on, it takes the chill off the air, but it also sucks all the moisture out of it. Folks who stay indoors a lot end up with parched mucous membranes and sore throats.”
Cal was absentmindedly listening to this spiel as he restocked the shelves with flea collars and fish food.
“What we used to do—to keep some humidity around us—was put a little pan of water on the ledge in front of the flames. Worked too. Only thing was, in really cold weather, when the flames were ripplin’ high, turnin’ the grate stones orange, well, the water in your pan would evaporate pretty damn fast. You had to keep toting in a teakettle to refill it. Got to be a pain.”
“Reckon it did,” Cal said, thinking, What’s the point, Mr. K.? What are you trying to tell me?
“So once I thought of getting Keith to do it. I was watching TV and didn’t want to get up, and I must’ve thought a tractable teenage kid would do as well as a footman. But Keith was watching, too, and didn’t want to do it, either. Not only did you have to fetch the kettle from the kitchen and fill the pan, you had to take the joker back. Two trips, and the hallway between was cold.
“Keith grumbled and moaned when I asked him, but soon enough went off to do it. When he came back from the kitchen, though, he wasn’t toting the kettle. He had a load of ice cubes in his hands, and just as I was about to shout, “Hey, boy, what the hell’re you doing?” he dropped those cubes—clunketa-clunketa—into the heater pan and came over next to me to watch the TV again.
“I was on the verge of scolding him when I thought, What for? That took some ingenuity. I’d’ve never thought of it. But Keith thought of it right off, a way to get water to the space heater without making two trips. And only a fresh mind—I told myself—could’ve come up with it. Me, I was pushing senility, and all I could do was marvel at Keith’s cleverness.” Mr. K. chuckled in memory and appreciation.
But, Cal reflected, the kid’s been dead for seventeen years; he didn’t even last until his twentieth birthday. History’s a goddamn devourer of children. A ravenous eater of the brave, the trusting, and the uninitiated.
“You and Lia doing okay today?” Mr. Kemmings suddenly asked.
“Yes, sir. We’re fine.” Cal had already decided not to burden his boss with an account of the break-in or of Vike’s unjust fate, and, with difficulty, he stayed mum even under the man’s solicitous questioning. Over the past several weeks, he knew Mr. K. had come to regard him as a surrogate child, and Cal had a genuine filial respect for Mr. Kemmings, too.
Around eleven, the telephone rang, and Mr. K. said, “Yeah, he’s here. Just a minute. I’ll have him pick up.” He made a shooing gesture, urging Cal into the combination office and stockroom at the rear of the Pet Emporium.
Cal went. He lifted the handset and pushed a lighted button.
His caller said, “I’m renewing our offer. Hire on as foreman of Berthelot Acres, and I’ll forget yesterday’s stupid rebuff. For that matter, both stupid rebuffs.”
Here it comes, Cal thought. Here it comes.
“Hello?”
“I’m here,” Cal said.
“And things have changed, haven’t they? Your illegal samizdat collection is in my hands. Damningly, it includes a letter to you from the author. Possession of such material is a violation of the emended Bill of Rights. A federal offense punishable by from three to fifteen years in prison, depending on the extent and nature of the illicit holdings themselves.”
“Philip K. Dick is a respected American writer.”
“You’re sparring with me again, Mr. Pickford. That reputation is based on his pre-Nixonian output. Unfortunately, the books you own—or owned—were written later, in a seditious and hostile spirit, when the author was failing emotionally and disintegrating intellectually. They couldn’t find publishers, and no one pretends that they have any literary merit.”
“I pretend that they do. Only it’s not a pretense. They lack status with the keepers of the status quo because they’re defiantly antiestablishment. Angry, not soothing. Compassionate, not cool. Crude, not refined. Whacked-out, not rational.”
“That’s a very pretty speech, Mr. Pickford. Did you steal it from A Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms?”
Cal shut up. He hadn’t, but it must have sounded like it. And pretty speeches, whether original or pilfered, whether heartfelt or hypocritical, made no difference, anyway. Grace Rinehart had him where she wanted him, and that—damn the bitch to hell!—was in her and Hiram’s clutches.
“Still there, Mr. Pickford?”
“Yeah, I’m still here. When do I start?”
“As soon as possible. Give notice today.” She rang off.
“Why in fuck did you have to kill our dog?” Cal asked the empty receiver. Then he hung up and slumped against the wall. His whole body was trembling.
After a while, Mr. Kemmings came back to see about him.“You all right, Cal.”
“Mr. Kemmings, I’m afraid I’ve found another job.”
The old man—two decades older than he’d been when his late son taught him about toting ice cubes—looked briefly stunned. Then he recovered and nodded.
“I knew I was going to lo
se you. You’re on your way up. Don’t worry, though. You’ll leave with my blessing. I’m just grateful I had you as long as I did.”
Grace Rinehart’s Cadillac rested in the gravel horseshoe of an overlook in Roosevelt State Park; its two occupants were gazing out over the tree-studded checkerboard of Pine Mountain Valley. This was the first time that Lia had seen the actress since Miss Emily’s funeral. Knowing that Grace had ordered both Vike’s murder and the theft of Cal’s Dickiana, Lia hated herself for having taken this ride. A woman of courage would’ve told Miss Grace where to stick it. She certainly wouldn’t be sitting in her car listening to her unload the psychic freight of her girlhood.
“You’re not taking notes,” Miss Grace said. “During our first session, you took notes.”
Lia gave her client a malevolent look. Today, she thought, I’m the one who’s fading out. I’m vanishing from the lofty branch of my self-esteem like a Cheshire Cat. Why? Because I don’t have the pluck to resist your bullying tyranny.
“I want you to take notes.”
Lia dug into her purse and extracted a tiny tape recorder. “May I use this instead?”
“That’ll be fine. Just so long as you have a record.” Miss Grace scrutinized Lia appraisingly. “You really don’t want to be here, do you?”
“Frankly, no.”
“Then tell me to drive you back to Warm Springs.”
Stop it, Lia wanted to shout. Stop tormenting me.
“Because I’ll do that. And you’ll merely forfeit the honor of my company and the bounty of my fee. Of course, Cal’s quit his job at the pet shop, and if you won’t be my therapist, I doubt that Hiram’s going to want to keep your hubby on as foreman. Then you’d both be out of work, wouldn’t you?”
“Blackmail,” Lia muttered.
Miss Grace hit the car’s horn with both fists; the resultant outcry echoed bleatingly over the valley. “It’s blackmail, all right, but not because I enjoy exercising power, Lia. It’s just that I want you and Cal working for us, it’s very important to me that you understand our point of view.”
Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas Page 25