The Avram Davidson Treasury

by Avram Davidson

  The Blakeneys were, for Blakeneys, quiet. They were also uncomprehending.

  “It’s the way we’ve been used to living. On many of the other worlds people do live, many families—and the families are all smaller than this, than yours, than the Blakeneys, I mean—many in one big house. But not on the world we lived in. There, every family has its own house, you see. We’ve been used to that. Now, at first, all five of us will live in the new house we’re going to build near the mill. But as soon as we can we’ll build a second new one. Then each family will have its own …”

  He stopped, looked helplessly at his wife and friends. He began again, in the face of blank nonunderstanding, “We hope you’ll help us. We’ll trade our services for your supplies. You give us food and cloth, we’ll grind your flour and saw your wood. We can help you fix your furniture, your looms, your broken floors and walls and roofs. And eventually—”

  But he never got to explain about eventually. It was more than he could do to explain about the new house. No Blakeneys came to the house-raising. Robert and Ezra fixed up a capstan and hoist, block-and-tackle, managed—with the help of the two women—to get their small house built. But nobody of the Blakeneys ever came any more with grain to be ground, and when Robert and Ezra went to see them they saw that the newly-sawn planks and the lathe-turned wood still lay where it had been left.

  “The food we took with us is gone,” Robert said. “We have to have more. I’m sorry you feel this way. Please understand, it is not that we don’t like you. It’s just that we have to live our own way. In our own houses.”

  The silence was broken by a baby Blakeney. “What’s ‘houses’?,” he asked.

  He was shushed. “No such word, hey,” he was told, too.

  Robert went on, “We’re going to ask you to lend us things. We want enough grain and tatoplants and such to last till we can get our own crops in, and enough milk-cattle and draft-animals until we can breed some of our own. Will you do that for us?”

  Except for Young Whitey Bill, crouched by the burning, who mumbletalked with “Rower, rower, rower,” they still kept silence. Popping blue eyes stared, faces were perhaps more florid than usual, large, slack mouths trembled beneath long hook-noses.

  “We’re wasting time,” Ezra said.

  Robert sighed. “Well, we have no other choice, friends… Blakeneys… We’re going to have to take what we need, then. But we’ll pay you back, as soon as we can, two for one. And anytime you want our help or service, you can have it. We’ll be friends again. We must be friends. There are so many, many ways we can help one another to live better—and we are all there are, really, of humanity, on all this planet. We—”

  Ezra nudged him, half-pulled him away. They took a wagon and a team of horses, a dray and a yoke of freemartins, loaded up with food. They took cows and ewes, a yearling bull and a shearling ram, a few bolts of cloth, and seed. No one prevented them, or tried to interfere, as they drove away. Robert turned and looked behind at the silent people. But then, head sunk, he watched only the bay road ahead of him, looking aside neither to the water or the woods.

  “It’s good that they can see us here,” he said, later on that day. “It’s bound to make them think, and, sooner or later, they’ll come around.”

  They came sooner than he thought.

  “I’m so glad to see you, friends!” Robert came running out to greet them. They seized and bound him with unaccustomed hands. Then, paying no attention to his anguished cries of “Why? Why?” they rushed into the new house and dragged out Shulamith and Mikicho and the baby. They drove the animals from their stalls, but took nothing else. The stove was now the major object of interest. First they knocked it over, then they scattered the burning coals all about, then they lit brands of burnwood and scrambled around with them. In a short while the building was all afire.

  The Blakeneys seemed possessed. Faces red, eyes almost popping from their heads, they mumbled-shouted and raved. When Ezra, who had been working in the shed came running, fighting, they bore him to the ground and beat him with pieces of wood. He did not get up when they were through; it seemed apparent that he never would. Mikicho began a long and endless scream.

  Robert stopped struggling for a moment. Caught off-guard, his captors loosened their hold—he broke away from their hands and his bonds, and, crying, “The tools! The tools!”, dashed into the burning fire. The blazing roof fell in upon him with a great crash. No sound came from him, nor from Shulamith, who fainted. The baby began a thin, reedy wail.

  Working as quickly as they could, in their frenzy, the Blakeneys added to the lumber and waste and scraps around the machinery in the shed, soon had it all ablaze.

  The fire could be seen all the way back.

  “Wasn’t right, wasn’t right,” Young Red Bob said, over and over again.

  “A bad thing,” Old Little Mary agreed.

  Young Big Mary carried the baby. Shulamith and Mikicho were led, dragging, along. “Little baby, a hey, a hey,” she crooned.

  Old Whitey Bill was dubious. “Be bad blood,” he said. “The elses women grow more babies. A mum mum,” he mused. “Teach them better. Not to funnywalk, such.” He nodded and mumbled, peered out of the window-look, his loose mouth widening with satisfaction. “Wasn’t right,” he said. “Wasn’t right. Another house. Can’t be another house, a second, a third. Hey, a hey! Never was elses but The House. Never be again. No.”

  He looked around, his gaze encompassing the cracked walls, sinking floors, sagging roof. A faint smell of smoke was in the air. “The House,” he said, contentedly. “The House.”

  The Goobers

  INTRODUCTION BY JAMES GUNN

  Avram Davidson had an eye for the curious and the obscure. Not for the sort of absurdity that appears nowadays under the heading of “News of the Weird,” but those oddities of human behavior that get fossilized in language or in myth. Every now and then a postcard would materialize on my desk, dropped, as it were, from some invisible observer, with a report from Avram about some strangeness he had come across.

  “Do you know,” one said, “that Gunn is the horse of MacDonald?” I think it was MacDonald; it could have been some other Scottish name.

  That sensitivity to language was evident from his first published story, “My Boy Friend’s Name Is Jello,” and it was evident in everything he wrote, including the story at hand, “The Goobers.” “The Goobers” is unusual, however, in that it is narrated by a language-challenged boy and cannot display Avram’s customary virtuosity. But Avram was the master of his trade, and he could adapt his vocabulary when the story called for it—he could sound like a country boy.

  The story was unusual, too, in being published in a place different from his favorite science fiction and fantasy magazines, particularly the magazine he edited for a time, Fantasy & Science Fiction. Swank was one of those men’s magazines that flourished for a season after the success of Playboy. But “Goobers” was typically Avram in its sly introduction of the fantastic into the everyday, and the startling impact of the figurative become literal.

  THE GOOBERS

  WHEN I WAS A boy I lived for a while after my folks both died with my grandfather and he was one of the meanest, nastiest old men you’d ever want to know, only you wouldn’t’ve wanted to’ve known him. He had a little old house that there was nothing in the least cute or quaint about and it smelled of kerosene and bacon grease and moldy old walls and dirty clothes. He must’ve had one of the largest collections of tin cans filled up with bacon grease around there in those parts. I suppose he was afraid there might be a shortage of this vital commodity some day and he was sure as Hell going to be prepared for it.

  The dirty old kitchen had two stoves, one wood and one kerosene, and although the thicket out behind the house had enough dead brush and timber in it to heat the place for years he was too damned lazy to swing an axe. Same thing with the clothes. Rather than pay a woman to do a laundry or perish forbid he should actually do it himself, he just let the
clothes accumulate and then he’d go through it and use the least dirty ones all over again. Finally every so often it would get so bad that none of the other kids wanted to sit next to me and the teacher’d talk to the neighbors and then one or the other of them who happened to have a gasoline power washing-machine of the old-fashioned sort would come by with one of her kids and a wagon and a couple of bushel baskets.

  “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, alls 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 gland-fodda,” 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’ve 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 asylium 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 couldn’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 h
e 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.