More Than Melchisedech

by R. A. Lafferty

  “”¦be in St. Louis on or about the last Saturday in May. I will see you there then and give you your assignment for the rest of your life. Henri Salvatore.”

  The name Henri Salvatore was not familiar to Duffey, but something there was familiar. This Henri or Henry was one of Duffey's own creations, from a talisman given, many years before, to a Cajun riverman. This Cajun, probably a maternal uncle (since his forgotten surname was definitely not Salvatore) had surely conferred that talisman for the birthing of this person who had written the letter. Yes, Duffey would recognize one of his creations anywhere, even by a letter written by one of them. But why should a creature be able to give a life assignment to his own creator? And was it in St. Louis that the talismanic children were going to have their conclave independently of their creator? Why then was their creator invited to town by one of them?

  Duffey and Casey and Mary Catherine left the station area in three different taxi cabs, and they went down three different streets. So much for that. Duffey took his taxi to the home of one of his partners, Charley Murray.

  But the cabs of Duffey and Casey arrived, from opposite directions, in front of the Murray residence, at the same time. Once again, it was a thing that could get a little bit stuffy.

  “I go in here, Casey,” Duffey said with just a little bit of irritation, “An old friend and partner of mine lives here. “

  “I go in here also,” Casey said, a little bit puzzled. “This was the address that I have. You had better check your address. Mine checks.”

  Oh, it was explained all right, after a little while, inasmuch as such almost-embarrassing things are ever explained. Charley Murray greeted Duffey as his oldest and best friend, as he was. And Charley knew who Casey was and had been expecting him.

  “I meant to phone you, Duffey, and tell you that this young Casey was coming down from Chicago to St. Louis at about the same time you were,” Charley Murray said. “I thought it would be nice if there were some way you could recognize each other in case you traveled on the same train. I was wondering how I could describe you to each other so you could make yourselves known, but this was a little bit difficult considering that I had never seen Casey.”

  “You described us both marvelously, even though at a distance, even though you were not conscious that you were doing it,” Duffey said. “The mind of man was a wonderful thing. Though you had never seen Casey, I recognized him instantly from your description.”

  “You are, as always, a crooked-tongued fraud, Melchisedech,” Charley said. “You two met on the train, did you? Casey has come to town for the wedding of an army friend of his, a nephew of mine. We weren't sure how much room there would be for out-of-town guests over at the Stranahans, so Casey was here on a possible overflow basis. And he is welcome here, and there, and everywhere.”

  Well, that was all right, that was fine, that was as good an explanation as any. Duffey's breath ran a little short when he heard part of it, of course, but we all have shortages of breath sometimes. Duffey knew a man named Stranahan here in St. Louis, a Patrick Stranahan who used to come into the Rounders' Club, a man who was very close to this Charley Murray, and a fairly close friend of Duffey himself. And Duffey, once on an evening of mellow exuberance, had given a gift to this Patrick Stranahan.

  It would be fine here, but a little bit nervous and testy. Duffey rather washed that he had gone to stay with his sister and her husband Bagby. He was astonished now that he hadn't even thought of that, since he almost always stayed with them when he was in St. Louis.

  “But would the mysterious Henri Salvatore be able to find me at the Bagbys?” Duffey asked himself now. “Well, will he be able to find me at the Murrays? Why did I think that he would have a better shot at me here? He didn't say where to be in St. Louis, and this is a fair-sized city.”

  About twenty minutes later, there was a car and a voice outside, both of them calling out for Casey. But Duffey got another one of his shocks from that. He knew that voice, and yet he knew that he had not ever heard it before. He knew it because he had made it. It was the voice of one of his creatures. But the voice and the car went away with Casey, and Duffey forbare to look out.

  Duffey phoned his sister. Then he went over to the Bagbys. Murray said that they would all meet over at the Rounders' Club later. Duffey spent several hours with the Bagbys. His sister had always been very close to him, even when he didn't see her for years at a time. But how had Bagby become so close? This was the one friend on earth who would do anything for him. Duffey and Bagby seemed to have an infinite number of points of contact.

  Later, Duffey and the Bagbys picked up Beth Keegan, Duffey's old St. Louis girl, and her husband to go to the Rounders'. Beth was named Erlenbaum now.

  “Kerowl, kerowl! the dogs do growl. The Duffeys have come to town!” Beth chanted when she saw him.

  “Where has this doggerel come from, Beth?” Duffey asked her. “What Duffeys? I have heard this chant before since I have been in town.”

  “Oh, the Duffeys, the Duffeys, the bright and shining Duffeys! They are all over town, as lively as a dog blanket full of fleas. You aren't in with these new Duffeys, Melchisedech. You just haven't their class or color. You'll see them, you'll see them. There was no way of avoiding them.”

  “Whence have they their name?” Duffey asked, a little bit bewildered.

  “Oh, from you ultimately, I suppose,” Beth said. “They're creatures of yours, and you are their architect. But I'm afraid they got a little bit out of hand. You used too much color when you made them, Melchisedech. You used too much noise. You were working in an unaccustomed medium, I suppose, but they're badly overdone. Everybody in town loves them. They'd better.”

  Duffey's sister Mary Louise looked wonderful, but even she was a little bit overdone. But Bascom Bagby, the baroque, the flawed pearl, the husband of Mary Louise, the brother-in-law of Duffey, though he also was a little bit overdone, did not look wonderful. He looked too old for his chronological age. He looked sick. But he looked more than ever like Duffey. He had lost some of his bluffery and he seemed very glad to see Duffey, “probably for the last time” , as he said. But he was still a powerful and humorously rough-looking man, with beetling brows and a beetling belly.

  “He is my dark object,” Duffey said as he had said before. “He is my uncleansed stables, he is another part of myself, and I sincerely love the low freak of a man. He is closer to me than kindred.”

  “Yes, there are odd things happening in town,” sister Mary Louise said. “The ‘Duffeys’ have come to town. The beggars aren't in it with the ‘Duffeys’. I love you with your nose in a sling.”

  “What Duffeys have come to town?” Melchisedech asked her as he had asked Beth. “Who are they?”

  “If you don't know them, then nobody does,” Mary Louise said. “There has never been so fired-up a band of Gypsies as these Duffeys.”

  Abd Beth chimed in again. “Oh, there's no question about who they are,” she said. “They're you. They're you if you were multiplied ten or eleven times, if you were better looking and smarter than you really are, if you were more colorful, if you were wittier, if you were more magnetic. They are you exactly, with ten thousand superior things added to each of them.”

  Beth's little girls had long since become big girls. Beth was a grandmother now, but she was still a piece of cool, ivory statuary that laughed. “I know, Melky, every time that I see one of them (and I've been seeing them yesterday and today everywhere) that you thought him up, or her. If I wanted to make people, how would I start, Duffey? I bet mine wouldn't be as sprawling or overdone as yours are. We will see some of your creatures tonight. Wherever we go, some of them will be there. What are they doing in St. Louis? I also love you with your nose in that sling.”

  “I believe that the creatures are holding some sort of conclave in this town this week,” Duffey said, “but I didn't authorize it.”

  “You had better authorize it, Duffey,” Erlenbaum, Beth's husband, said with a moun
tainous grin. Erlenbaum sometimes kneaded huge fists and grinned loweringly at Duffey, and Duffey pushed him a ways by taking friendly liberties upon the lap and bosom of Beth while grinning back at him. “If you can't whip them, Duffey, and you can't, then you'd better join them. If they were yours once, they're not now. Any of them would take you around on a leash like a little dog.”

  Duffey and the Bagbys and the Erlenbaums arrived at Rounders' Club. Most times, when Duffey would come into Rounders', whether he had been gone for an hour or for three years, a band or orchestra or combo would strike up ‘The King Shall Ride’. For Duffey was still King at the Rounders' Club. But now he was not noticed when he came in. There were other attractions there.

  There was the picture of the ‘Severed Giant Hands’ up over the doorway that led to the Elegant Riverboat Deck. These ‘Severed Giant Hands’ were an old dream of Duffey's. Now it was the case that Duffey felt his own hands to be severed and deprived of further creative functions when he came into the presence of several of his own creations.

  How had he ever done them? And how had they gone so far beyond everything that he had any knowledge of? There were several of the Duffeys-come-to-town present. They were brilliant, bedazzled, larger than life, overwhelming, loud, grotesquely super-intelligent, laughing, shouting, pleasant, pleasant, pleasant. They had very light ways for their very great masses. It was as if they had just come from other gravities and other worlds. Duffey might as well be invisible, for all that anybody would give him a look when the more flamboyant ‘Duffeys’were there.

  Then the vane swung around and Duffey became visible once more. “Oh, it was Duffey himself!” a female of the incredible species cried out. She was the most gentle of the ‘Duffeys’ and she came to Melchisedech Duffey in a great sweep. The colors of these creatures! In what store could you find pigments for such colors?

  “Oh, you came to us like a ghost, and we hardly knew you,” this gentle one said, but the chandeliers quivered a bit from the sound of her gentle voice. “It's as though you were hidden in a cloud or in a burning tree,” she said. “And then you must remember that most of us have never seen you before, and we have never heard your voice.

  “Oh, bring bread and wine, people! This is the Duffey himself, the Melchisedech. Ah, but we do love you with your nose in a sling. That shall be one of your attributes when you are sung in epics! We wouldn't have you any other way. We were wondering what you could do special for your apparition.”

  Duffey had to rub his eyes with his fists. It was as it had been when he was the Boy King back in his first childhood and he had made some sun-squirrels. He had not been able to look at them. He had to look away and rub his eyes. “But you made them,” one of the seneschals had chided him, “why can you not look at them?”

  “I didn't know they would be so bright when the light went on inside them,” young King Melchisedech had said. And these his present animations, Duffey sure hadn't realized that they would be this bright when the light was turned on inside them.

  This first of them who had seen him here, this most gentle of the ultra-people, was named Mary Virginia Schaeffer, and she was from Galveston. Duffey knew her by this identity, just as she knew him as Duffey.

  Some of the others came to meet him. They were overpowering, but there was something lacking out of the middle of them. Duffey exulted in the company of these finest of all creatures for a half hour or so, and then he came back to his objection.

  “My central creation is not here,” Duffey said accusingly.

  “Oh, Finnegan, he'll be here tomorrow,” a big-brained, grinning young man of this special people swore. “No, Finnegan isn't here yet tonight. He was the salt of our lives, and we are saltless without him. But not quite saltless, Duffey, when you are here.”

  But there was some oddity in what they knew Duffey by. They knew him as the editor, now the former editor, of the Crock. It had been a cult sheet with them. They had reveled in the intelligence of it, in the humor of it, in the Duffiness of it. But they had only wispy and intuitive knowledge of Melchisedech in his royal aspect.

  The special people who were there, dining and roistering at Rounders', were John Schultz (who was Hans) (who was the big-brained grinning young man), and Marie Monaghan who was his wife from Australia.

  And Dorothy Yekouris from New Orleans, and Henri Salvatore from Morgan City, Louisiana (Oh, oh, he will give you your rest-of-your-life scenario, Duffey), and Mary Virginia Schaeffer from Galveston. And Absalom Stein from Chicago (Duffey already knew him a little bit, but he had never realized what a magnificent person he was, and he had never been absolutely sure that he was one of his creations). Six of the high twelve were here present. And Duffey had traveled from Chicago on the train with two others of them that day, but from long acquaintanceship with them he did not always notice just how magic-imbued they really were. Casey Szymansky and Mary Catherine Carruthers also belonged to these special creatures, but Duffey had seen them almost daily from their childhoods.

  But here about him now were five of his creatures that Duffey had never seen before, and a sixth one whom he had never seen with open eyes before. Since when had a sixth one become Absalom Stein? Hadn't he used to be somebody more grubby?

  Oh, there were the old ‘Unreality Fringes’ about all of the magnificent animations. And yet they were real. That sort of smokey halo that they all had, it was called the ‘unreality fringe’ in the lingo of sorcerers. But these persons were real.

  The people at the Rounders' Club had discovered that Duffey was in their midst now. For a while there, this artist had been in the dark shadow of his own animated art. He had been dwarfed by it. Now it was recognized that these special people had all been made by Duffey, that they were among his easy masterpieces. A little combo there played ‘The King Shall Ride’. And then it played the rousing ‘Gadarene Swine Song.’ Olga Sanchez of the torchy shoulders still worked there. She came and caressed him, as others did. Duffey was back in his legendary fiefdom.

  Duffey had a whole riot of mixed feelings about this colorful sprawl of youngish people that he had created. Each one of them was clearly an expression of his art at its best, but maybe they expressed him a little too strongly. Oh, they were all brainy and brawny and brilliant, but it may be that they were somewhat excessive in all of it. Was this flamboyance in the right line of real art? Maybe. These special people were arts and statuaries of Duffey, were they not? They even conceded that they were.

  “Duffey misunderstands his own processes,” Marie Monaghan Schultz said. “He does not make us. He collects us and gives us our settings and our sparkle. He found our souls hidden away and forgotten in old junk stories. He bought us all for a song. I think it was the ‘Gadarene Swine Song’ he bought us for. And now he puts us on display. We were all in Razzle Daz and when you have been in Razzle Daz, you can't get any higher than that.”

  Duffey gaped almost without understanding her. He had difficulty remembering, with all this light shining in his eyes and in his ears. But Razzle Daz had been a little comic strip he drew for the Crock. He had done it with unused parts of his mind and with unbusy moments of his hands, but many persons had thought that it was absolutely the best thing in the Crock, which Duffey had never quite understood. And, yes, of course, these splendid animations had been the models for the characters in Razzle Daz. Those characters had even gone by the nicknames of some of the splendid animations, ‘Finnegan’ for instance, and ‘Hans’, and ‘Show Boat’.

  “Duffey collects works of art,” Marie Monaghan went on, “and we are all of us works of art.”

  “You are wrong, Marie,” Duffey insisted. “I do make you. But I haven't collected you, and I don't know how you have collected yourselves in this town. I did not give you your settings and sparkle quite as you have them now. I think you're a little overdone. You may have to be changed.”

  “You will change us at your peril, grubby sorcerer,” Dotty Yekouris told him. “We like us just the way we are, and we like you th
e way you are. Oh, may your nose never heal!”

  But if Duffey had made these people, and of course he had, how did their excellence become independent of his? Their wit was too fast for him to keep up with, and all their jokes were obsoleted by new jokes every minute. When had Duffey's mind ever worked so fast as did the minds of these creatures of his?

  “I knew that you would be exactly like this,” Mary Virginia said. “Banging your hands together as you do! It's as though you still had a ‘maker's mallet’ in your hands!”

  She kissed him with that transcendent way she would always have. Yes, he'd made them with a ‘maker's mallet’. He remembered that part of it now.

  But these people were all just a little bit larger than life, and maybe they were too large. Henri Salvatore, the Fat Frenchman, was tremendous. And Hans Schultz was at least enormous. And Absalom Stein, was he really that big? But Duffey hadn't seen him for quite a few years. He had never seen him since he had gone by the name of Absalom Stein.

  Those three master-work girls who were here right now, Dotty Yekouris, Mary Virginia Schaeffer, Marie Monaghan, they didn't look overly large beside the men they were with. And yet each of them would have stood a quarter of an inch over six feet, barefooted and slouching and smiling wickedly. They were ample in all ways.

  That estimate of their size was Duffey's subjective estimate, of course. They may not have loomed that large to other people. But Duffey was their maker, and what size he comprehended for them should have been the size imposed on them. Duffey recalled that Mary Catherine Caruthers, also in this town somewhere, was larger than she would seem to ordinary eyes.