San Diego Lightfoot Sue

by Tom Reamy

  San Diego Lightfoot Sue and Other Stories

  Tom Reamy

  For Pat Cadigan

  Table of Contents

  San Diego Lightfoot Sue and Other Stories Embrace the Departing Shadow

  Twilla

  Under the Hollywood Sign

  Beyond the Cleft

  San Diego Lightfoot Sue

  Dinosaurs

  The Sweetwater Factor

  The Mistress of Windraven

  The Detweiler Boy

  Insects in Amber

  Waiting for Billy Star

  2076: Blue Eyes 2076—Screenplay Cast of Characters:

  Synopsis:

  Script

  Blue Eyes (novel) Chapter 1:

  Acknowledgements

  copyright

  Embrace the Departing Shadow

  Introduction by Harlan Ellison

  Old men sit with a chill in their bones, lamenting the struggle of the sun through the steel of the sky toward dead winter. I wake up angry every day. My friends die around me. And here I remain, a rock in the ocean; wearing away a little more each year; but here, always here; watching my friends vanish. Wait just another minute, shadows; I’m not ready to let you go yet. A minute more, for a proper goodbye; it’s not that much to ask.

  Oh, sorry; didn’t mean to let you catch me like this. Give me a second and I’ll get it together.

  But if, occasionally during these words, you catch me choked up or even staring off into space murmuring softly so that you cannot tell what I’m saying, I ask your indulgence. Take no notice. Ignore it, pass by that pathetic shopping-bag lady pulling her little red wagon filled with cardboard flats, that maundering wetbrain lying with legs twisted and muscatel bottle empty in its paper sack. Go make yourself a cup of coffee and come back in a few minutes. The cleanup patrols will have the doorways emptied and the streets free of tacky embarrassments, honest to God they will. Pretend we’re all tough and cool and don’t make fools of ourselves in public places. No, thanks; I have some Kleenex.

  The final note, of course, whatever else I may say here, is that Tom is gone; and no closely-reasoned patterchat about how good or bad his stories were, or what a good guy he was, will make one twitch of difference. Don’t shove no live wire up that amputated frog leg because it’s cold; no galvanic twitch gonna alter the condition of gone, so leave it alone. Tom is done writing and what we’re left with is his testament: two books.

  One novel, BLIND VOICES; one gathering of short stories, this book.

  Which will hardly serve to establish him as one of the great Lost Artists of Our Time. He was a writer getting better all the time, and there’s no need to sloppify that, to moan and deify him, and try to make his passing more “significant” and thus more deserving of our sorrow. He was as good as he was when he died, and that’s enough to honor. He was a teller of tales whose work had the heft and the graceful line and the vibration of creatures readying themselves to fly. He had it in him, and he set it down on paper, that quiddity that made us lift our eyes. There is a lot of sky in Tom’s work. View of the celestial regions where great songs are sung.

  But he died in the middle of the work, and all we have are two books. And so I ask you, when I turn my face into the corner, that you avert your eyes. Tom would have.

  “Twilla” has emerged as one of Tom’s best-known stories, and it’s odd that it should have captured so much attention and stayed so long in the memory of the audience. Odd, because it’s such a simple story—simple in the sense of uncomplicated—but that was his way with his stories for so many years: directly to the point. (Only toward the end did Tom show signs of deepening the conceptual layers of his fables.)

  It’s hard to know what to say about this phylum of gently insinuative conceit. It does its job with such expertise that it has the intelligent reader by the throat before s/he knows the hex has been placed.

  Goes without saying that we’ve had this sort of setting in contemporary fantasy many times before, most fully developed in Zenna Henderson’s story-cycle of The People. But Tom brings to the familiar rural ambiance a kind of meiosis—a literary understatement—that ostensibly diminishes the importance of elements that are, on sum, irreducible in the plot equation. And he employs an artful psychic distance in the writing; what is referred to, in posh lit’ry circles, as the “aesthetic distance”; at some level of Tom’s apprehension there was an awareness of the formal unreality of art. A distancing from the beholder, an appreciation of the aesthetic qualities that did not confuse it with reality.

  For instance, he employs the Melvillean technique of “the catalogue” in the freighting of names: Gilbreath, Choate, Alice May Turner, Grace and Elizabeth Peacock, Wanda O’Dell, Carter Redwine, Ronnie Dwyer, Sammy Stocker, Raynelle Franklin, Leo Whittaker, Loretta McBride, and on and on. Three times as many names as one needs for the story, but cleverly inserted in such a way that they establish a sense of time and place and population, without confusing the reader by a congeries of walk-through spearcarriers without valid function in the story.

  Despite its length, “Twilla” seems almost pastiche.

  The plot is spare, lean, somewhat paradigmatic, the usually bolted-down overexplanations of fantastic elements nowhere in sight; the behavior of the principals is something less than rigorously logical; the prelude is rather longer than necessary to balance such an abrupt and violent ending.

  And those who have read BLIND VOICES will quickly recognize the similarity of the horror visited on Yvonne Wilkins in this piece and the one that befalls Francine Latham in the longer work. This leads me to believe that “Twilla”—in ways that Tom may only dimly have realized when he wrote it—was a preliminary effort intended as a practice run for the novel, a mental note to himself. It may be that BLIND VOICES grew out of this story.

  Else why such detail of Kansas, why such formidable laying-in of background for such a brief flash of plot? And like the novel, the sense and scent of the Kansas Tom remembered is here in full measure. Its length is used to convey a time and a place that are infinitely more important than the action.

  * * * * *

  He was a keek. Accurately and precisely, a peeping Tom; a keek. From the Scottish slang “to look.”

  I don’t know if he was always like that, from early childhood; you might ask his mother, Gertrude Reamy. She’d probably be able to tell you if he was always like that—always seeing what others looked at but never really saw. But I can extrapolate from my own childhood awareness, and that of Ray Bradbury, and Frank Herbert, and other writers with whom I’ve discussed just that aspect of what we call “the writer’s eye,” and I’ll be damned if I know which comes first—chicken or egg—the “eye” or the realization that the training of that eye makes one a writer. I have a hunch it’s the former, that special way of seeing: living with a shard of funhouse distorting mirror wedged into the anterior chamber just behind the cornea and the Canal of Schlemm, perceiving the decades of crooked moonlit roads stretching out behind that weary-looking old woman in the supermarket check-out line, her total buy being six tins of cat food and a quart can of Hawaiian Punch. Perceiving the story of that old woman; how she got here; the circumstances of abandonment by those she trusted and in whom she invested love; the potentiality that she does not even live with a cat. Only the keeks of the world get all that in a flash of agonizing pain, through the “eye.”

  Maybe Tom wasn’t like that all his life; but it’s six, ten, and even it was just like that for him. Good odds only if you’re one of those schmucks who thinks s/he can write… if only there was spare time to do it. A sucker bet, really; I know he was like that. He had to’ve been. We carnivores can spot our own kind. Keek is, as keek does.

  Whatever the lev
els of expertise reached as a writer grows in his/her craft, there is one trained dog-&-pony act s/he can pull off in a way no other writer can. In extreme rages of dramatic or intellectual intensity, every artist, no matter how flawed or hacklike otherwise, masters one trick that often becomes the trademark so easily parodied by lesser writers who spot the pinnacle but cannot penetrate the mist and fog of the lower, equally impressive, mountain range. (Example: all the imitators of Henry James reproduce his syntactical complexities and baroque flourishes, but fail to capture the intense passion and emotionalism. Another: pipsqueak parodists of Bradbury can rattle off endless copycatisms about how the summer days were like pistachio ice cream cones melting in the mouths of our minds, but the subtle horrors of the fruit at the bottom of the bowl are beyond them. One final: brute mimics of Robert E. Howard find no difficulty in festooning their cheapjack graverobbies with bloody swords and sweaty deltoids, but the arcane mysteries of Howard’s truly, individually deranged perception of reality and fantasy as merged images of the same lunatic face evade them entirely. )

  “Under the Hollywood Sign,” I think, is a perfect example of that one quadruple somersault from the highest bars that Tom could manage again and again, but which Reamy-clones never seem able to pull off. In this piece, as I say, we can hear the singular voice of Tom Reamy, singing a dangerous song of primal fears so deep and yet so commonplace that we automatically reject them, precisely because they may be universally shared. No one likes to imagine him-or herself as a potential point-beast ready to run with the slavering pack.

  Clifford Simak beats everyone else at injecting the bizarre element into folksy, very placid settings. Jack Vance cannot be excelled in the creation of human-populated alien worlds that sound real. Kate Wilhelm does personal stress better than anyone I’ve read since Conrad or B. Traven. And Tom—as personified in the auctorial voice of this story—pulls off, better than anyone else in the genre I can think of, the enormously difficult trick of tapping into the deepest wells of our id, and bringing up the dippers of redolent emotional sludge we struggle to deny comes from our own commonality of desperation as flawed human beings.

  This tale is, for me, one of the three best stretches of writing Tom did. Because of the fever in it, the burning, the inescapable danger in it… the horrors of the human condition we all share, with which we exist in uneasy liaison through all the moments of our lives.

  How sad for you. There’s the one novel, and this book of stories, and that’s all of it you’ll ever see. Oh, maybe there’ll be another film or two after BLIND VOICES (did I mention I’m writing the screenplay even as you read this… perhaps it slipped my mind… well, it’s true… but who knows if the film will be made… perhaps… perhaps not); there are at least thirteen Reamy scripts in various stages of completion. But from what I’ve seen of them—and there are a few bits and pieces herein awaiting your scrutiny and judgment—they won’t add much luster to Tom’s oeuvre. It’s sad for me, too, and for all of his buddies, because he was taken away much too goddam soon. But less sad for me and for his buddies because we at least knew him; we got to hang out with him, sometimes.

  Standard operating procedures for this kind of hommage include the obligatory assertion of bloodbrotherhood between the savant writing the introduction, and the subject. If, as happens here, the subject also happens to be deceased, how much easier it is to promulgate whole-cloth mythologies of the lifelong kinship of savant and subject. Well, chums and others, I ain’t gonna whip that number on you. I wasn’t a real close friend of Tom Reamy. We knew each other for a long time, we liked each other, we communicated often and we hung out sometimes when he was living here in Los Angeles. But if you want intimate details of Tom’s personal life, or close reminiscences from the Old Boys’ Network, you’d best seek out Howard Waldrop or Richard Delap or (for specific years) Al Jackson, Greg Benford, Alex Eisenstein and George Proctor (1950-1969); Bjo Trimble, George Barr or anybody who worked on the film Flesh Gordon (1970-1972); Ken Keller, Tim Kirk, Arnie Fenner or Pat Cadigan (1973-1977). They knew him in Kansas City and Hollywood and Dallas; and Arnie and Pat can probably furnish you with the issue of their magazine Shayol that contained a long interview with Tom, in which he viewed his career and his talent with very adult sensibilities.

  I, on the other hand, was on the fringe of Tom’s life. Mutual respect, I guess, yeah that always. I say “I guess” because I know I had respect for him and his work, but I can only assume he respected me and what I did because he asked me to write for his splendid magazine, Trumpet; and because we always talked as if we respected each other. That’ll have to do.

  Yet I won’t entirely disappoint those of you who expect the de riguer minutiae of this kind of screed. I can gift you with one of those terrific The first time I met Tom Reamy routines…

  The first time I met Tom Reamy, was through the mail. It was 1954. Tom was nineteen, I was twenty. He sent me samples of his artwork, hoping I’d accept something for my fanzine, Dimensions. Most of you, blissfully, have forgotten that I was a science fiction fan for a few years, back in the Fifties. Even more of you may have forgotten that I published what was considered one of the half dozen or so top amateur journals in fandom.

  Foreshadowing the DANGEROUS VISIONS anthologies (dedicated to the then-heretical concept that most of the science fiction being published was reactionary, semiliterate and just downright boring), I had instituted a series of stories I pompously called “taboo-breakers” in the magazine. The first one appeared in what would turn out to be my final issue of Dimensions (number 15, dated August-October 1954): a short story by Ray Schaffer, Jr. titled “Via Roma.” God only knows whatever became of Ray Schaffer, Jr. but the full-page illustration, and a nice piece of work it was, that appeared on page 53 was rendered by someone with whom I thereafter maintained sustained, if sporadic, communication. The drawing was signed Tom Reamy.

  Two years later I became a full-time professional writer. It took Tom seventeen more years to become a recognized professional writer.

  If you want to talk about jeezus what a shame, talk about those nineteen years during which Tom did many other kinds of things, before he realized he was a storyteller; nineteen years’ worth of stories that never got written. Now that’s jeezus what a shame.

  Some years ago, in the course of properly insulting some loathesome toad of my acquaintance, I said, “He’s the sort of man who takes little children into the basements of churches, then rapes, murders and eats his victims… not necessarily in that order.” Bill Rotsler has the remark in his QUOTE-BOOK. Tom laughed at the remark. I don’t remember if he was in Bill’s and my company when I first said it but (having gotten a good laugh from my listeners the first time, and being one of the garrulous sort who never waste a livid bon mot) I used the line again on several occasions, making certain never to repeat it around anyone who had heard it before (thereby buttressing my reputation for always having a fresh, vicious witticism on my lips) and Tom remarked that he thought it was a sufficiently ugly concept, containing the germ of a fascinating story-idea.

  I’d forgotten Tom had ever mentioned it to me, until I began reading “Beyond the Cleft”—which I’d missed when it was originally published—in order to comment on it for this introduction. It was a grisly little bon mot, and it’s become a terrifying story. Hardly what I had in mind, and a nice example (if “nice” can be applied here in any way) of standing the original on its head. Herewith, Tom has the meek inheriting the strong.

  Perhaps only those of us who get such ideas can read the stories of others who think similarly, without being utterly revolted. Perhaps that’s why we’re all part of such a tiny coterie of peculiar thinkers. Perhaps you’re one, too; and perhaps you’d better watch yourself: one is known by the company kept.

  “San Diego Lightfoot Sue” is a troubling story.

  There is much of Tom himself in this piece. But who dares say what parts are mere fictional construct and what parts the pain known and stored for later tran
slation?

  In some ways this is a story too simplistic, too calculatedly heart-tugging to be taken seriously. Nonetheless, defying codification, in other ways, utterly contradictory ways, it is too strong and familiar a story to be ignored. Its power, I think, lies in the realization that each of us, no matter how well we think we live our lives, has somewhere along the map of the battlefield lost the innocence of childhood or nature that sustained us. We all grow older. Some of us may even grow a bit wiser, or kinder, or more courageous. Yet we all wish someone dear could have seen us at an earlier stage of our life: when we were fifteen… or twenty… or thirty.

  And please notice: there is an almost total absence of evil in this story. At every juncture where we suspect John Lee will be masticated by the fangs of the corrupt, innocence wins the day. Goodness follows him. The sad and the bent and the damaged are compelled to treat him fairly, with affection, with honor. They are made better than usual by their association with him. Is this Tom, after experiences in Los Angeles that must have been alien and shattering to him, reasserting the potency of innocence? Even when an engine of destruction is turned loose on John Lee, in the form of the unrealized implement named Jocko, even then no evil can touch him.

  And yet, there is foreshadowing. When Sue goes to San Diego and returns in the dead of night to sketch John Lee’s portrait in black and white, it is a weary job of work. He looks older, tired… twenty. Why did Sue have to go to San Diego? Why did she return that night? Why did she need to sketch John Lee that night? How much urgency do we feel for her doing it? Why did she leave immediately for San Diego again? What did she know, or suspect, or have a vision of, that came through in the sketch? What was Tom trying to say about his own youth, his own discovery of the world seen (in Hemingway’s words) “complete and as a whole”? And what was he saying about the coin in which we pay for love?