The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty

by R. A. Lafferty

  The bunch of splintered bones that was the dead man's hand rose out of the throat of the pipe. Old Amos put a dollar bill in the hand which closed over it and then withdrew back into the grave.

  “You next, Hector,” said the dead man below us, and Hector O'Day rolled. “Snake eyes, is it not?” the dead man called it; and, yes, Hector had rolled a two. Then the ankle-bone dice rattled below. “Seven,” said the dead man, and his hand came up from the pipe, “you owe me a dollar.” Hector put a bill in the bony hand which withdrew down below again.

  “You next, Barnaby,” wheezed the dead-man voice. Barnaby rolled the dice on the top of the monument by the light of the railroad lantern. “Eleven,” came the rusty dead-man voice below, and it was indeed an eleven that Barnaby had rolled. “Now I roll,” said the dead man, and the ankle-bone dice rattled. “Seven,” said the dead man. “You owe me a dollar, Barnaby.”

  “How do I know you rolled a seven?” Barnaby demanded.

  “Oh, I'll show you,” the dead man said, and his bony hand came up from the pipe with the dice in it. It was a seven the hard way, six and one. Barnaby put the dollar in the hand beside the dice, and it all disappeared into the iron pipe.

  “You next, Grover,” the dead man spoke, and Grover Whelk rolled the dice by the light of the railroad lantern. That railroad lantern made all our faces look almost as bony as the dead man's hand. “You have beat me, Grover,” the dead man said, “you have rolled a seven. Here is your dollar.” Grover had rolled seven, yes, a five and a two. And the bone hand came up with a crumpled paper in it, which Grover took.

  “That doesn't look like a greenback, Grover,” Hector O'Day protested.

  “It isn't,” old Amos said. “It's a faded gray-back now, but in its youth it was a yellow-back, a golden-back. The colors of Confederate bills fade after a few years, especially in the stuffy atmosphere of the grave.” It was a Confederate One Dollar Bill that Captain John Diehard had given to Grover Whelk.

  “The dog Gray Ghost has left me now,” the dead man spoke below them, “but he always was a come-and-go dog. I remember at the Battle of Pea Ridge, he would be with me, and then he would be gone; but as a ghost dog, he put the fear of Old Clootie into the Unionists. Yes, I guess it's time for him to run his race. You next, Laff.”

  I rolled a three. Dead man Captain John said that he had a seven. I put a dollar bill in his bony hand when it came up. I shivered when I touched its bones. I was never meant to play games with a dead man.

  “You next, Dirty Dugan,” the dead man said. Dirty Dugan rolled a six. “I have a seven,” the dead man said. “You owe me a dollar, Dirty.”

  “I don't have a dollar,” Dirty Dugan said sullenly.

  “I knew you didn't, Dirty,” the dead man said. “Houseboat kids never have any money. Now, instead of owing me a dollar, you owe me a trick. When you find out what the trick is, in a week or a year or five years, it'll scare you liverless. But pay it you must.”

  “No, you won't scare me liverless, dead man,” Dirty Dugan said. Dirty left us then and disappeared into the dark. But we heard him go into the river, and then we heard him swimming with strong but splashy strokes, home to the houseboat.

  There was a great increase in the volume and delight of the noise at Electric Park, the dog track. “That was Gray Ghost winning the fifth race,” old Amos said. “He's a favorite with the Tulsa dog track fans.”

  “There was dog racing very early in the Old South,” dead man Captain John spoke up informatively. “There was even an early mechanical rabbit. It was invented by Yves Denis Montalba in New Orleans in 1850. The rabbit ran on steam. It ran only once. It blew up and killed eleven dog-racing patrons. But humanity builds on such mistakes and moves ever forward.”

  “How do you pick dog-race winners for Captain Diehard, Amos?” Grover asked him. (Captain Diehard was snoozing loudly now.) “Oh, I get the winners from him, though he is not conscious of the part that he plays,” Amos said. “He has mantic bones. Though he's quite dead, except possibly on this one night of the year. I have but to stand on his monument here and call out to him below, and his bones will guide my hand in making the Xs opposite the names of the dogs that will win.”

  “The way I envision things,” said dead man John Diehard, waking up (well, the return from the dead is a very spotty and broken thing), “is that about ten thousand of us great leaders of the Confederacy shall all rise from our graves at the same time. For best effects we should not be fleshed but should rise in our skeleton bones only; and yet we will be lively and completely competent skeletons. Coming so, we will send a wave of fear through all our enemies. On our rising we will raise our great voices like ten thousand powerful doomsday trumpets, and the entire South will rise with us. “Our horses will likely rise out of the earth also, saddled and bridled and ready to ride, but the details of that are in the hands of the appropriate gods. My preference for my own horse (for I had eleven different horses during the various campaigns) is Roan Rex who was shot from under me at Vicksburg. No better horse ever lived. No better horse will ever rise out of the ground and live again.

  “Well, that's enough talk and stuff for one night. I'll return to my death for another year.”

  “Just a minute, Captain John Diehard,” Hector O'Day spoke sharply. “This already begins to seem like a dream. Could you give us some sign so we'll know that it was real? A lightning bolt, maybe?”

  “It would be better if I blew the Resurrection Reveille on my bugle. It's the regular reveille with some exceptionally hot licks added. I notice though that wasps have made a nest in the mouthpiece of the horn. I'll clear them out if I can, and you may be able to hear my bugle when you're under way. A lightning bolt I can do, yes. That should be a good enough sign for the moment. And then good night to you till a year from tonight.”

  Then there was a lightning flash that you wouldn't believe. The lights of Electric Park shone black for a moment as though they were a negative of the lightning. The runt apple trees stood out like X-ray pictures of themselves in that lightning. The thunderclap was instantaneous and earth-shaking, and sudden rain could be heard in the near distance. Then everything was wet — well, everything was wet except the dog Gray Ghost. He had appeared suddenly, with a winner's blue ribbon around his neck, and dry as a bone. He yipped a hello. Then he disappeared right down through the stone top of the monument and yipped another hello to dead man Captain John Diehard there below.

  The four of us boys ran hard for Electric Park through the banging rain. Barnaby's father, Anselm Sheen, was trying to put the side curtains on his Overland touring car and it wasn't easy to do in the high wind that was blowing.

  “What are mantic bones, papa?” Barnaby Sheen asked his father.

  “I don't know, Barnaby,” Anselm Sheen said. “We'll look it up in the dictionary when we get home.” Anselm always made an effort to find answers to his son's questions.

  He finally got the side-curtains on the car with our help, and we rode back into Tulsa. We were soaking wet but we sure did feel good. We sang one hundred rousing songs on our ride back to Tulsa (hey, we sure did sing good), we sang:

  “We saw a man without a foot, and one without a head,

  And one without no legs at all, and all of them were dead.”

  “Did old Amos give you some of his graveyard cider?” Anselm Sheen asked.

  “Oh, did he!” Hector cried, “three big cups of it each.”

  We sang:

  “Jack of Diamonds, Jack of Diamonds, your real name is mud!

  In your hand are four aces, all covered with blood.”

  Hey I didn't know we could sing like that. Whenever we missed a beat it was supplied by a dozen enraptured winged spirits outside of us.

  We sang:

  “Oh give me a nickel, give me a dime.

  It does cost money to bury this body of mine.”

  “That graveyard cider was hard,” Anselm Sheen said. “You've all got a snootful.”

  We sang:

&
nbsp; “Down with the dead men.

  Down with the dead men,

  Down with the dead men let him lie!”

  We sang ninety-nine other songs on our ride back to town. We were getting some amazingly hot licks in our singing, but we didn't know where we were getting them till we pulled up at the Sheen's and Anselm Sheen shut off the motor of the car. Then we heard it, loud and total, the “Resurrection Reveille” with the hottest licks this side of Hell. We should never have doubted that dead man Captain Diehard would get off that bugle song for us. And we knew that he hadn't bothered to clean that wasp nest out of his bugle. He was blowing right through those angry wasps: they were the dozen enraptured (were they mad, boy!) winged spirits. We heard that bugle from four miles away.

  We had a lot of fun that Halloween night.

  Oh Happy Double-Jointed Tongues!

  By Major Audifax O'Hanlon

  (unretired)

  “Of the great war of the 1940s, what do you remember most?” a forty-five year old child asked me today. “Was it the heroism, the pageantry, the blood and death? Are these what you most remember?” “No, I don't remember those things hardly at all,” I said. “If they happened, and I doubt it, they didn't leave much impression. I remember hard work, and tedium interspersed with it, and I remember the happy double-jointed tongues that made it all bearable. Oh, those tongues!”

  “I don't understand you,” he said. “Do you mean real tongues that people have in their mouths and talk with?”

  “Yeah, those,” I said. “Our guys kept them in their mouths most of the time, except when they took them out to sharpen them with emery stones. Oh, those double-jointed tongues and their double-jointed talk!”

  “Could you give me an example of that double-jointed talk?” he asked.

  “Yeah, Corporal Lonnie Sweetwater is an example,” I told him.

  “If this thing is ever over with and I get home, there'll be a brass band playing for me there,” Lonnie told me one day. “I bet there's not one guy in three who'll have a brass band playing for him when he gets home.”

  “There's many a slip between the stops and the mouthpiece, Lonnie,” I said. “Maybe the brass band won't be there the day you return. Maybe they won't know you're coming. Maybe somebody else will have your celebration crowded out at the railway station.”

  “We don't have a railway station in my town. It'd be stupid to have a railway station when we don't have a railroad. We don't have a road either. We don't have a post office or a telephone. What we got when we want to send a message up from Flatland to Our Town is a female crow named Roxie. She can talk up a storm. I'll just ask her to tell my folks that I'm home, and she'll fly up that steep air to my place and tell them with embellishments. And I'll bet you that our eleven-piece band will be blowing and banging when I get there.”

  “An eleven-piece band, Lonnie? That's an unusual number. What are the instruments?”

  “We don't know the names of the instruments in our town. They're just horns and drums. There was a bunch of people having a festival in Green Peach Valley a few years ago, and they had a brass band. A quick flood came up and swept them and all their things away. ‘Save them!’ my grandfather bawled out, and each of us (there were only eleven of us in our town besides my old grandfather) ran down the mountain and each of us saved one of them from the torrent. Then we carried them up to the mountain-top and were mighty pleased with ourselves. ‘I meant for you to save the people, not save the damned drums and horns,’ my grandfather hollered. ‘Well, it's too late to do anything about it now. Maybe this will work out better anyhow,’ grandpa said.

  “So we had eleven instruments from the brass band and we learned to play them that very day. But there were twelve of us in town, including grandpa, and only eleven instruments. We hoped grandpa would die to make it come out even, but he never did. Then I went down the mountain and joined the army, so that made everything even behind me. I'm going to try to bring my bugle home with me if I ever go, and then we'll have a twelve-piece band for the twelve of us.”

  “Lonnie Sweetwater was the bugler for our company,” I said. “And he was good. He could jazz a bugle, or rag it, or swing it. There is much more to Lonnie's account, but I don't believe you're quite ready for it.”

  “I begin to get a hint of what you mean,” the forty-five year old child said, “but only a hint. Could you give me another example?”

  “Adolph. PFC Adolph Martin,” I said. “Adolph had a letter in his hand, and I knew that he was going to show it to me, when he gave me the story that went with it. Adolph did tell some pretty tall stories. One of them was about thirteen feet tall at the shoulder.”

  “A thing that many people don't believe is that the North American Elephant still survives in the salt-water thickets of Louisiana,” Adolph told me this day. “This creature is halfway between the Mammoth and the Mastodon, and ‘North American Elephant’ is as good a name as any for it. People who don't know their way around the salt-water thickets don't believe that it still survives, but it's the biggest and survivingest land animal in the world. We have one at home. Her name is Aunt Emma. She is the sweetest natured beast in creation, and the most intelligent. My wife, I'll confess it, is off to the brush-arbor honky-tonks most of the time, to the neglect of our children. But big old Aunt Emma takes care of our kids perfectly. My wife, I'll confess it, can't write; but Aunt Emma writes her letters for her. Aunt Emma, she'll take a pencil in the end of her trunk, and write. And she writes a fine hand, or maybe I should say ‘a fine trunk’. Here's one of the letters now. Look at it. I want you to be convinced of this. Isn't that good writing for an elephant?”

  “Uh, in French? I didn't know that the North American Elephant could write French. But Aunt Emma isn't a very good speller, is she?”

  “That's what they call ‘fanatic spelling’,” Adolph said. “She spells it just the way that my wife pronounces it. My wife, I'll confess it, isn't a very good pronouncer. But Aunt Emma knows that I want to hear my wife's voice, and I sure can hear it in that fanatic spelling. There are experts who analyze handwriting. Show this to one of them. A real expert would look at this and immediately say that it was written by a female North American Elephant. Look at the way she makes those T's. She's all elephant.”

  I did give the letter to a fellow in Battery C who had a book on Handwriting Analysis and who said that he was an expert. And this was the analysis of the handwriting that he came up with:

  “This was written by a female in her mid-twenties. She is an up-beat, uncomplicated, unworried creature, happy and high-spirited, probably given to joking and pranking. Look at the way she makes those T's. Perfectly well-adjusted. Nothing wrong with her at all.”

  “But the handwriting analyst didn't know that she was an elephant,” the forty-five year old child protested when I had quoted the report to him.

  “Probably didn't think it was necessary,” I said.

  “I begin to get a little more of the flavor,” the child said. “Do you have another example of this double-jointed talking?”

  “Then there was Sergeant Robert Graygoslin,” I said.

  “Hey,” Graygoslin told me one day. “They're talking about keeping me in the army after the war is over to be a special rifle instructor. Well, I am the best rifle shot in our company, and ours is the best rifle-shooting company in the world. And I could teach the guys to shoot as well as I do, but I'd have to take them back to East Tennessee to do it.”

  “Tell me about it, Robert,” I said.

  “We have a ravine three miles wide in our county,” Graygoslin said. “That's too far to holler across. So we talk across the ravine with a rifle. We'd cut a message in the nose of a bullet. In our country we all have good eyes and can read the leastest writing there is. Then we put the bullet in the rifle and shoot it across the ravine, and we take the fellow we're trying to talk to in the right round. Then he…”

  “In the right round, Graygoslin? What's the right round?”

  “Ho
w do you get along as well as you do when you don't know the name of the most fundamental thing there is? In the right round of the rump. Or we shoot him in the left round if he's left-arsed. Then he cuts the bullet out of his round with a pocket knife, reads the message on it, scratches the answer on a bullet of his own, and he shoots it off and catches the first fellow in his right round, and then…”

  “At three miles, Robert? That's shooting!”

  “That is shooting. We're all good. We can really shoot where I come from. You shoot the bullet anywhere else and the fellow's going to have trouble finding it. But you shoot it into his right round, and he knows where it is. We used to carry on conversations like that for a long while. They were a fine bunch of fellows around there, on both sides of the ravine. They had only one defect.”

  “Oh, what was that, Robert?”

  “They all walked a little bit tender. Hey, I courted a girl by rifle that way all one summer. She was quite a talker, quite a talker. You might say that I got just about full of her talk by the time the summer was over. She wasn't a very original thinker, and half the time she shot unmarked bullets. But I appreciated the thought of them.”

  So was Robert Graygoslin quite a talker.

  The forty-five year old child began to look as though he had eaten too many green apples. “Yes, I begin to get the flavor,” he said. “Maybe too much flavor. Could you give me another sample of the stuff?”

  “There was PFC Benedict Boudreau,” I said. “Boudreau's wife broke out in technicolour rashes every time she ate the special local variety of ramps. Ramps are ugly cousins of onions, but of a much greater power and scope.”

  “That rash that breaks out on her, it's special,” Boudreau said. “You look at it close and it's newsprint, or it's news picture. Well, it's really different newsprint from the Camptown Daily Delineator. She even breaks out in funny papers. That's a fact, and they're funnies that nobody ever saw before. They're pretty good too. Well, people come from miles around to read the newsprint and pictures on my wife after she's eaten some of our special ramps. But, due to her extreme modesty, there's always a couple of type inches on her that she won't let anybody look at. And it's always interesting and critical news where they have to break it off.”