The Avram Davidson Treasury

by Avram Davidson

  “Ah well, nobody is all bad,” was her philosophic comment, as she re-sheathed her besom and, clearing her nasal passages, skillfully swamped a fly in the gutter.

  It was to this picturesque scene, as yet unstirred by Beat, Hippy, Freak, Funk, RadLib or LibRad influences (and, indeed, only still faintly tinctured by the froth of the waves which once had beaten ceaselessly upon the Seacoasts of Bohemia) that there came one day clad only in his harness and his sword that strange brave man known, very simply, as John Carter of Mars.

  Some few of the readership may have figured out, all by themselves, that Fiduciary Debenture III (who lived downstairs) was not really named Fiduciary Debenture III. His real name was in fact A. Cicero Guggenhimer, Jr. He was not related to the the Guggenhimers. In fact I do not know, even, if there are, or were, any the Guggenhimers. The people who peddled lace, smolt copper, leisurely migrated between the State of Colorado, the US Senate, and the Venetian Litoral, now and then pausing to found an art museum or transport a monastary to a choicer location, are Guggenheims. With ei. Without er. However, A. Cicero’s grandmother was the last surviving granddaughter of old John Jacob You-Know-Who, and she had left A.C. her half of Manhattan Island, plus the bed of the East River, which Yon Yockoob had bought cheap in between grifting furs from the Redskins and whisking from the Knickerbockers (who had guffawed in Hudson Dutch when thinking how they were taking him in) those hay meadows and swamp-lots on which now stands the most valuable real estatery in the world.

  Bar none.

  Hence the A.

  As for the Cicero, he always claimed his grandmother got it out of a dream-book.

  It may not be generally known that every, but I spit you not, every commercial vessel which plies or “stands” up and down the East River pays through the hawse-hole for the privilege: because if not, trolls will come up and eat them. Naturally, when you got this kind of money, no matter how tied up in trusts and annuities and danegeld it may be, estates mean nothing, penthouses mean nothing, fancy cars and yachts mean nothing: so naturally you come to live in Greenwich Village, where everything is so, well, Interesting.

  People would snort when I told them that Edward and I lived on the seventh story of a seven-story walk-up: but we did. On the ground floor was the Dante Alighieri Association, the door of which in those days opened only wide enough to admit one small man with well-shined shoes at a time: doubtless to discuss Canto II, or whichever. As to its subsequent career as a coffee-house, of this I know nothing, I say nothing, I’ve heard nothing, wild horses would drag nothing out of me, so don’t even ask.

  “Seven stories and no elevator?” people would exclaim rolling eyes and clutching chests. “That’s got to be illegal!’

  “It does got,” I would agree. “But it didn’t used to got.’ Furthermore it was made of cast-iron and not wood, and was not mouldering at all: it was indeed a tenement house, probably one of the last of the Old Law or the first of the New Law tenements, but it was a tenement house in good condition, I should only be in half such good condition at the same age. I was younger in them days and had more than my memories, and thought nothing of charging up or down the full seven story mountain, heigh ho. Maurice with his Biblical beard used to pass by with his arms full of publications from the four or five quarters of the earth, the sales of which, such as they were, sustained him in scraps of food and the rent on the dozens if not scores of public coin lockers in which he stored the paper memorabilia of decades:

  Eheu, Maurice, Maurice! Where are you now?

  You were ahead of your time, as well as the wrong age and appearance, these were your only faults: had you lived today, had you been younger, were your beard not white nor your locks long, had you the proper academical affiliations an academician of the academicians (they should plotz), or a friend or a protegé of a bevy of academicians and critticks see how fast the Guggenfutzes (they should plotz) would bestow upon you Foundlingship after Foundlingship, weevils should only eat their navels: may you, o contrare, O Rare Maurice, flourish in eternal life.

  Amidst the Crash of Matter.

  And the Wrack of Worlds.

  G. (for Gabriel) Courland…the Moriarity Expert? The same. Whom else? G. Courland was then much exercised (if that is not too vigorous a word) in the matter of his trousers, yea cuffs? nea cuffs? He wanted no cuffs, his tailors want cuffs. “But they trip when you run fast,” he would explain. This cut neither ice nor worsted with Morris, Max, and Rocco. “So don’t run fast,” they said.

  All very well for them: staid old cockers with their wild, wild youths behind them. Gabriel G. was at that time running (there! that verb again!) a sort of Consolation Service. For listless wives. And the energy displayed by (now and then, though only now and then) some of them husbands on learning All, would, if devoted on behalf of their wives, have left them (the wives) quite listful. And McCourland ohn a Consolation Service.

  In Bleecker Street the Open Air Market how it flourished! Greens galore. Greens (as Butch Gyrene he put it) up the ass. Flowers in bloom, too. Nearbye, the old-established markets, all the names ending in vowels. Wendell Garrett, scarlet vest well-filled, cap of maintenance on his audacious head, would stroll in and out, tweaking the poultry. “Have you any,” this he would ask of the Sons of Sicily and the Abruzzi, you or me they would kill: “Have you any guinea fowl?”

  Dandelion greens, fresh-made latticini, lovely reeky old pastafazool, no, had some other name, cheese, hm, mm, ah! Provalon’! *Smekk* Mussels in icy pools with water always a drip-drip-drip-a-drip, pizza—you let the word pass you by without your lips trembling, your nostrils pirouetting and corvetting, your salivary glands drooling and your eyes rolling? You must be dead, dead…

  Or else, for your sins and your bad karma, you have known nothing but Protestant pizza, may God help you. Not baked in a stone oven according to the Rules of the Council of Trent. Not with the filling so firmly bonded to the crust—and the crust brown and crisp and bubbly round the rim, Marón!, that wild horses could not part filling from crust: No! What do you know of pizza, you with your heritage of Drive-ins, and McDonald’s, and the Methodist Church, pizza, you think that is pizza, that franchised flop, comes frozen, is thawed, is redone in an ordinary metal quick-a-buck oven, with the cheese from Baptist cows, the tomatoes by Mary Worth, the filling rolling back from off the crust limper than a deacon’s dick: this you call pizza?

  Marón.

  As for the fruit bread for the Feast of St. Joseph—

  “Whats a matta you no shame?” screamed Philomena Rappini, of the Fresh Home-Made Sausage Today Market. “Put a some clothes on! You some kine comuniss? Marón, I no look!” But between her fingers, plump and be-ringed, ahaah, oh ho: she did look! And why not? So there he was, dark and well-thewed and imperially slim.

  (Well-hung, too.)

  “Your pardon, Matron, and a daughter to a Jeddak of Jeddaks I perceive you must be by your grace and slender high-arched feet: may I place my sword in pawn? A message to Ed Burroughs? Magnetic telegraph message to muh newew Ed Burroughs? Jest tell him it’s Uncle John. John Cyarter.

  “Of Mars.”

  As to how he had gotten here, here, I mean there, in The Village, across the countless leagues and aeons and ions of interstellar freezing space, who knows? Who knows, in fact, what song the sirens sang? Who gives a shit?

  When one tired of the coffee-house scene in The Village, there was always The Museum. And by “The Museum” neither I nor any denizen of the Old Village Scene as it then obtained meant one of the sundry establishments displaying genuine old art or artifacts or modern exempla of the Dribble, Splotch, Drool, or Ejaculate, School(s): no. We meant The Museum, there on Great Jones Street, Barnum’s Museum. A mere shadow of itself, you say? May be. May have been. Old William Phineas, Jr. himself was then alive, great-nephew to the Yankee Showman himself. Billy Finn. The most recently painted sign was the one reading: Veterans of the World War, One-Half Price—and to this had been added by pen a new s after War, plus the words, in
between lines, And of the Korean Conflict. These letters had a pronounced wobble, so indicative of the State of the Nation as well as of old Bill Barnum’s hand not being quite so firm as it once was. Inside? Jumbo’s hay-rack. A corset belonging to one of the Dolly Sisters. Anna Held’s bath-tub plus one of her milk bills for same. Genuine rhinestone replica of the famed Bicycle Set which Diamond Jim had given Lillian Russell. William Jennings Bryan’s hat. Calvin Coolidge’s hat. Old Cool Cal. The oldest wombat in the world, right this way, folks.

  And so on.

  Across the street the incredible wooden Scotchman, no mere Indian being good enough, was the emblematic figure in front of the establishment of MENDEL MOSSMAN, SNUFF AND SEGARS, also Plug, Cut-Plug, Apple Twist and Pigtail Twist. Also (though not openly designated as such, of course), behind the third mahogany door with opaque crystal glass window from the left, an entrance to a station of the Secret Subway System.

  Officially, no, it was not officially called the Secret Subway System; officially it was called Wall Street, Pine Street, Bowling Green and Boulevard Line. The Boulevard, ask any old-timer in them days, was upper Broadway. Ask any one or more old-timer as to at what point “upper” Broadway begins: watch them flail at each other with their walking-sticks and ear-trumpets.

  There is a Secret Station in the State Bank Notes Registry Room of the old Counting House (Where no state bank notes have been registered since about 1883, owing to a confiscatory Federal Tax on the process).

  There is a Secret Station in the marble men’s room of the original Yale Club.

  There is one beneath Trinity Church and one behind the North River Office of the State Canal Authority and one next to the Proving Room (Muskets) of the Mercantile Zouaves and Armory.

  There are a few others. Find out for yourself…if you can.

  The fare is and has been and always will be, one silver dollar each way. Or. For a six-day ticket good for round trips, one half-eagle (a five-dollar gold piece, to the ignorant).

  The ticket agents are the color of those fungi which grow in the basements of old wood-and-stone houses on Benefit Street in Providence, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. It is intimated that these agents once held offices of responsibility above grounds, but Blotted Their Copy Books.

  One of them is named Crater.

  Crater, if you just think about it a moment, is very much like Carter.

  La Belle Belinda lived upstairs over Mossman’s, which she insisted had the loveliest smell in the world.

  And there are those who say that this distinction belonged to The Fair Belinda herself.

  The Sodality of the Decent Dress (a branch of the Legion of Utmost Purity) had just let out into the street after its monthly meeting at Our Lady of Leghorn, and was threatening to cut up rough with John Carter: just then Gabriel C., Wendell G., Edward and myself chanced by; we caught his arcane references at once—although, of course, we did not believe a word of them, still, it was a madness which we not only recognized but respected—and, under pretense of assisting the man to send his message, we spirited him away; after having first clothed his virility under Wendell’s naval cloak.

  We told the man that it had belonged to the Commanding Officer of the Confederate Ram Pamunkey. A faint mist of tears rose in his sparkling eyes, and his protests died away on his lips. His finely-chiseled lips.

  “They’re after me, boys, you know,” he said, simply. “But they mustn’t find me. Not until I’ve obtained a replacement for the wore-out part of the oxygen machine. All Mars depends on that, you know.”

  Exchanging significant glances, we assured him that we did indeed know.

  We further assured him that we would with despatch arrange for sleeping silks and furs; meanwhile he consented to doss down for a much-needed nap on Gabriel’s Murphy bed (for once, not occupied by a listing wife). Edward agreed to stand by. Just In Case.

  There we left him, his strong chest rhythmically rising and falling, and stepped down to the courtyard, where we exchanged a few more significant glances, also shaking our lips and pursing our heads. We were thus occupied when Mary Teresa passed by, holding Kevin Mathew Aloysius, her great-grand-nephew, in a grip which would have baffled Houdini.

  “Stop tellin them lies,” she was adjuring him, “or yez’ll burn in Hell witt the Prodissint Bastidds.”

  “No I won’t either, because I’m still below the age of reason, nyaa, and anyway, I did too seen it, Aunty Mary T’resa, it was all tall as the second-floor window and it looked in at me but I made the sign of the cross, I blessed myself, so it went away,” said Kevin Mathew Aloysius, rubbing some more snot on his sleeve.

  Wendell, august and benevolent, asked, “What was it that you saw, my man?”

  Kevin Mathew Aloysius looked at him, his eyes the same color as the stuff bubbling from his nostrils. “A mawnster,” he said. “A real mawnster, cross my heart and hope to die. It was green, Mr. Garrett. And it had four arms. And tux growing out of its mouth.”

  Did some faint echo, some dim adumbration or vibration of this reach the sleeping man? Edward said some had. Edward said that the sleeping man stirred, half-roused himself, flung out an arm, and, before falling back into deep slumber, cried out:

  “Hark! Was that the squeal of an angry thoat? Or the sound of a hunting banth in the hills? Slave! My harness—and my sword!”

  Manatee Gal, Won’t You Come Out Tonight

  INTRODUCTION BY PETER S. BEAGLE

  When I began corresponding with Avram, he was living in Belize, still British Honduras in those days. I mention this because Belize—under the alias of “British Hidalgo”—is not merely the setting for Avram’s stories about Jack Limekiller, but is in fact the real protagonist of these tales. We never learn much more about Limekiller than that he is Canadian, pushing thirty: an amiable, adaptable man who, longing for adventure and a new life in tropical waters, sold his car, bought a small sailboat, and now lives aboard it, mostly in the Port Cockatoo harbor, in company with his first mate—a tailless, off-white cat. He seems a pleasant sort, and can play a bit of banjo.

  But British Hidalgo we know; or at least Avram persuades us that we do. Long before “Manatee Gal, Won’t You Come Out Tonight” has rambled peaceably to its terrifying conclusion, we have come to believe in our own long acquaintance with the steamy, fly-ridden beauty of land and water, of the parrot-bright sky, the patient bush always waiting to take over, and the seductive imminence of what Avram calls its “timeless tropical forever.” It’s an ingratiating place, British Hidalgo, and a sleepily dangerous one.

  I’ve never known a writer who so clearly understood the relationship between the rhythms and usages of a language or a dialect and the daily rhythms of its speakers’ lives. In the same placidly deliberate way that the inhabitants of British Hidalgo move through their days and tell their stories, so “Manatee Gal” at first seems to be meandering around all manner of irrelevant switchbacks and detours. Only in Avram’s own sweet, sinister while do we come—far too late for our comfort—to the realization that those were not digressions at all, but coils…

  MANATEE GAL, WON’T YOU COME OUT TONIGHT

  THE CUPID CLUB WAS the only waterhole on the Port Cockatoo waterfront. To be sure, there were two or three liquor booths back in the part where the tiny town ebbed away into the bush. But they were closed for siesta, certainly. And they sold nothing but watered rum and warm soft-drinks and loose cigarettes. Also, they were away from the breezes off the Bay which kept away the flies. In British Hidalgo gnats were flies, mosquitoes were flies, sandflies—worst of all—were flies—flies were also flies: and if anyone were inclined to question this nomenclature, there was the unquestionable fact that mosquito itself was merely Spanish for little fly.

  It was not really cool in the Cupid Club (Alfonso Key, prop., LICENSED TO SELL WINE, SPIRITS, BEER, ALE, CYDER AND PERRY). But it was certainly less hot than outside. Outside the sun burned the Bay, turning it into molten sparkles. Limekiller’s boat stood at mooring, by very
slightly raising his head he could see her, and every so often he did raise it. There wasn’t much aboard to tempt thieves, and there weren’t many thieves in Port Cockatoo, anyway. On the other hand, what was aboard the Sacarissa he could not very well spare; and it only took one thief, after all. So every now and then he did raise his head and make sure that no small boat was out by his own. No skiff or dory.

  Probably the only thief in town was taking his own siesta.

  “Nutmeg P’int,” said Alfonso Key. “You been to Nutmeg P’int?”

  “Been there.”

  Every place needs another place to make light fun of. In King Town, the old colonial capital, it was Port Cockatoo. Limekiller wondered what it was they made fun of, down at Nutmeg Point.

  “What brings it into your mind, Alfonso?” he asked, taking his eyes from the boat. All clear. Briefly he met his own face in the mirror. Wasn’t much of a face, in his own opinion. Someone had once called him “Young Count Tolstoy.” Wasn’t much point in shaving, anyway.

  Key shrugged. “Sometimes somebody goes down there, goes up the river, along the old bush trails, buys carn. About now, you know, mon, carn bring good price, up in King Town.”

  Limekiller knew that. He often did think about that. He could quote the prices Brad Welcome paid for corn: white corn, yellow corn, cracked and ground. “I know,” he said. “In King Town they have a lot of money and only a little corn. Along Nutmeg River they have a lot of corn and only a little money. Someone who brings down money from the Town can buy corn along the Nutmeg. Too bad I didn’t think of that before I left.”