Universe 15

by Terry Carr

  The pamphlet probably contained the text of a paper done for a pre-WWI class in Night School, the Author of which, intoxicated by getting a fairly good grade, had rushed it off to a job printer; it was suggested in Fred’s mind that he was probably (probably?) a Huzzuk.

  Back at Fred’s new apartment-to-be, lo! the painters were no longer painting; the painters were no longer, in fact, there; and neither was the painting finished. Only, in the middle of the drainboard of the kitchen sink sat a white bread and sardine sandwich with a single symmetrical bite missing out of it. Another unsolved mystery of the sea; or had it come there by a fortuitous concourse of the atoms: why not? Down went Fred and rang Mrs. Keeley’s bell. By and by the door opened a crack long enough to transmit heavy breathing and the odor of gin and onions; almost at once the door closed shut again and by and by the volume of the radio went up. Mrs. Keeley was not one of your picky listeners out there in Radioland who require very fine tuning, and Silberman was unable to say if she was listening to an old recording of the Tasty Yeast Jesters or maybe one of a love song by President Harding. He went away.

  A cote chez Brakk, an aunt said, as he came in, “I saved you some fruit stew,” and also Wes poured him something powerful-looking. Evidently the conventicle/potlatch was still going on, with Fred’s presence still acceptable. Although—A newspaper was lowered; behind it was Nick. “Don’t make the Old Lady show ya that jee-dee stove no more,” he said. “She’s all wore out.”

  Fred said, easily, “Okay, Nick.—Who else has got one?” he asked the world at large. There was a thinking pause. Wes said, No one that he knew of.

  “It’s the last of the Mohicans,” Wes said.

  Nick slapped down the paper. “She better get ridda it. Y’hear me? I’m gonna smash it up, I’m gonna throw it offa the bridge; I don’ wanna even hear about it—no wonder they make funna us all the time!” No one said a word, so Nick said a word, a short and blunt one; and then, as though shocked himself, slammed out of the room. In a moment a car drove rapidly away. Wes was expressionless and, seemingly, emotionless.

  Fred sampled the fruit stew. Was it the same as stewed fruit? no it wasn’t. Good, though. As soon as his spoon scraped the bottom, a bowl of something else was set down beside him. And a plate of something else. “Here is beaten-up bean soup with buttermilk and vinegar. This is lamb fritters with fresh dill.” Golly, they sounded odd! Golly, they were good!

  In a corner across the room an old man and an old woman discordantly sang-sung religious texts from, shared between them, an old wide book in Old Wide Huzzuk or something of the sort. “That’s supposed to benefit the soul of the late deceased,” said a very young man with a very large and shiny face, in a tentatively contentious tone.

  “College boy,” said Wes. “Could it hurt?”

  Fred Silberman put down his spoon. (Eating fritters with a spoon? Sure. Why not? Hurts you?) “Listen, where was ‘the Old Home Place by the Big Water’?” he asked.

  The college boy instantly answered, “Gitehe Gurnee.”

  Wes said, with a shrug of his own, far heavier than Mat. Grahdy’s, “Who the hell knows? Whoever knew? You think they had maps in those days? I suppose that one year the crops failed and there was no nourishment in the goat turds, so they all hit the road. West. And once they crossed a couple mountains and a couple of rivers, not only didn’t they know where they were, they didn’t even know where they’d been. ”

  Fred said, “Listen. Listen. Nick isn’t here, the Huzzuks aren’t here, nobody is here but us chickens, cut-cut-cut-cut, God should strike me dead if I laugh at you: Where did the stoves come from? The Slovo stoves?”

  “Who the hell knows?”

  “Well, did they have them when they left… wherever it was? Lake Ontario, or the Yellow Sea? Did they…?”

  Wes just sighed. But his, probably, sister took to answering the question, and the further questions, and, when she didn’t know, asked her elders and translated the answers. According to old stories, yes, they did have the stoves before they left the Old Place. The black parts they came from the mountain and the blue parts they came from the Big Water. From the inside of the mountain, what mountain, nobody knows what mountain, and from the bottom of the Big Water. How did they get the idea? Well, Father Yockim said that the angels gave it to them. Father Yockim said! That’s not what the old people use to say… what did the old people used to say? The old people used to say it was the little black and white gods but Father Yockim he thought people would think that meant like devils or something, so he changed it and—Well, there aren’t any little black and white gods, for God’s sake!—Oh, you’re so smart, you think you—

  “Maybe they were from outer space,” said Silberman, to his own surprise as much as anyone else’s.

  Silence the most profound. Then the “college boy,” probably either a nephew or a cousin, said, slowly, “Maybe they were.” Another silence. Then they were all off again.

  The trouble all began with Count Cazmar. Count Cazmar had, like, a monopoly on all the firewood from the forest. The king gave it to him. Yes, but the king didn’t just “give” it to him; he had to pay the king. Okay, so he had to pay the king. So anybody wanted firewood they had to pay Count Cazmar. Then he got sore because the Slovo people weren’t buying enough firewood, see, because he still had to pay the king. Which king? Who the hell knows which king? Who the hell cares? None of them were any damn good anyway. What, old King Joseph wasn’t any good, the one who let Yashta Yushta out of the dungeon? Listen, will you forget about old King Joseph and get on with the story!

  So Count Cazmar sent out all the blacksmiths to go from house to house with their great big sledgehammers to smash up all the Slovo stoves to force the Slovos to buy more firewood and—What? Yeah, that’s how Gramma’s stove is, like, broken. They all got, like, broken. Of course you could still use them. But dumb Count Cazmar he dint know that. So, what finely happen, what finely happen, everybody had to pay a firewood tax irregardless of how much they used or not. So lotta the Slovo people they figured, ya gotta pay for it anyway? so might as well use it. See? Lotta them figure, ya gotta pay for it anyway, so might as well use it. And so, lotta them quit usin’ their Slovo stoves. Y’see.

  “That’s your superior Huzzuk civilization for you,” Wes said. Just then the deacon and deaconess in the corner, or whatever they were, lifted their cracked old voices and finished their chant; and everybody said something loudly and they all stamped their feet. “Here, Fred,” said Wes, “have some more—have another glass o’ mulberry beer.” And promptly an aunt set two more bowls down in front of Fred. “In this one is chopped spleen stew with crack buckwheats. And in udder one is cow snout cooked under onions. Wait. I give you pepper.”

  Eventually Silberman got moved into his new apartment and eventually Silberman got moved into his new job; his new job required (among other things… among many other things) a trip to the diemakers, a trip to the printers, a trip to the suppliers: how convenient that all three were located in a new or newish commercial and industrial complex way out on the outskirts of. As he drove, by and by such landmarks as an aqueduct, a cemetery, an old brick foundry, reminded him that, more or less where the commercial and industrial complex now was, was where old Applebaum used to be. Lo! it seemed: still was! Shabby, but still reading m. applebaum cash and carry wholesale groceries. The complicated commerces and industries perhaps didn’t like shabby Old Applebaum’s holding out in their midst? Tough. Let them go back where they came from.

  Afterwards, business finished elsewhere, thither: “Freddy. Hello.”

  “Hello, Mr. Applebaum. How are you?”

  “How should I be? Every week seems like another family grocery bites the dust. Nu. I own a little swamp in Florida and maybe I will close up the gesheft and go live on a houseboat with hot and cold running crocodiles. Ah-ah, here comes an old customer with his ten dollars’ worth of business if we are both lucky; Mat. Grahdy.”

  Sure enough. Beat him to the punch. �
��Hey, Mr. Grahdy, did it get hot yet?”

  Grahdy laughed and laughed; then gave the counterword: “It didn’t even get warm! Ho ho ho ho.” He gestured to another man. “This is Petey Plazzek, he is a half-breeth. Hey, Petey, did it get hot yet? Ho ho ho ho!—Mosek!”—this to Old Applebaum. “A little sugar I need, a little semolina I need, a little cake flour, licorice candy, marshmallow crackers.” M. Applebaum said he could give him a good buy on crackers today. They went inside together.

  Petey Plazzek, a worn-looking man in a worn-looking lumber jacket, came right to the point. “If you’re driving by the bus deepo, you could give me a ride.”

  “Sure. Get in.” Off they went. Silberman’s glance observed no Iroquois cheekbones. “Excuse me, but what did he mean, ‘A half-breed’? No offense—”

  “Naa, naa. Half Huzzuk, half Slovo.”

  A touch of the excitement. “Well, uh, Mr. Plazzek—”

  “Petey. Just Petey.”

  “Well, uh, Petey, how many people have one of those old Slovo stoves anymore?”

  “Nobody. Them stoves are all a thing o’ the past nowadays. Watch out for that truck.”

  “How come, Petey? How come they are?”

  Petey rubbed his nose, sighed very deeply. “Well. You know. Some greenhorn would come to America—as we used to say, ‘He had six goats and he sold five to get the steamship ticket and he gave one to the priest to pray for a good journey.’ I’m talking about a Slovo now. Huzzuk, that’s another thing altogether. So the poor Slovo was wearing high boots with his pants tucked innem and a shirt smock and a sheepskin coat and a fur hat. This was before Ellis Island. Castle Garden in those days. He didn’t have a steamer trunk, he didn’t have a grip, he only had a sort of knapsack; so what was in it? A clean smock shirt and some clean foot rags, because they didn’t use socks, and a little iron pot and some hardtack-type bread and those two stove parts, the black part and the, uh, the, uh—”

  “The blue part.”

  “—the blue part, right. Watch out for that Chevy. Well, he’d get a job doing the lowest-paid dirtiest work and he’d rent a shack that subsequently you wouldn’t dast keep a dog in it, y’understand what I’m telling you, young fellow? Lights, he had no lights, he didn’t even have no lamp, just a tin can with some pork fat and a piece of rag for a wick. And he’d pick up an old brick here and an old brick there and set up his Slovo stove and cook buckwheat in his little iron pot and he’d sleep on the floor in his sheepskin coat.”

  But by and by things would get better; this was America, the land of opportunity. So as soon as he started making a little money he brought his wife over and they moved into a room, a real room, and he’d buy a coal-oil lamp and a pair of shoes for each of them, but, um, people would still laugh attem, partickley the Zunks would still be laughing at them because of still using the Slovo stove, y’see. So by and by they’d buy a wood stove. Or a coal stove. And they’d get the gaslight turned on. And they’d even remember not t’ blow it out.”

  “Yes, but, Petey. The wood and coal cost money. And the Slovo stove was free. So—”

  Petey sighed again. “Well. To tell you the truth. It could cook: sure. Didn’t give out much heat, otherwise. Boil up a lotta water, place’d get steamy. ”

  Fred Silberman cried, “Steam heat! Steam heat!”

  Petey looked startled, then—for the first time—interested. Then the interest ebbed away. He sighed. “None of them people were plumbers. They never thought of nothing like that, and neither did anybody else. The Slovo stove, what it come to mean, it come to mean poverty, see? It come to mean ridicule. And so as soon as they quit being dirt-poor, well, that was that. ”

  Fred asked, eagerly, “But aren’t there still a lot of them in the attics? Well… some of them? In the cellars?”

  Petey’s breath hissed. “Where you going? You going to the bus deepo, y’ shoulda turned leff! Oh. Circling the block. Naa… they juss, uh, thrown’m away. Watch out for that van.”

  The new job and its new responsibilities occupied and preoccupied most of Silberman’s time, but one afternoon as he was checking an invoice with the heating contractor fitting up the plant, lo! the old matter came abruptly to his mind.

  “Sudden thought?” said Mr. McMurtry.

  “Uh. Yuh. You ever hear of a… Slovo stove?”

  Promptly: “No. Should I have?”

  Suppose Fred were to tell him. What then? Luddite activity on the part of McMurtry? “Let me ask you a make-believe question, Mac—”

  “Fire when ready.”

  So… haltingly, ignorantly… Fred (naming no names, no ethnic groups) described matters as well as he could, winding up: “So could you think, Mac, of any scientific explanation as to how such a thing could, or might, maybe, work? At all?”

  Mac’s brow furrowed, rolling the hairs of his conjoined eyebrows: a very odd effect. “Well, obviously the liquid in the container acts as a sort of noncontiguous catalyst, and this amplifies the vortex of the force field created by the juxtaposition of the pizmire and the placebo”—well of course McMurtry did not say that: but that was what it sounded like to Silberman. And so McMurtry might just as well have said it.

  McMurtry said one last word or two. “If these things weren’t make-believe it would be interesting to examine them. Even a couple of little pieces might do. What can be analyzed could maybe be duplicated.”

  Once things got going well at work, Fred thought he would go and ask old Mrs. Brakk… go and ask old Mrs. Brakk what? Would she let the sole extant Slovo stove be examined by an expert? be looked at in a lab? be scraped to provide samples for electronic microscopic analysis?

  ???

  He might suggest that, if she didn’t trust him it might be done through a Brakk Family Trust… or something… to be set up for that purpose. Via Wes… and, say, Nick…

  Sure he might.

  But he waited too long.

  Silberman of course knew nothing; how could he have known? The people of the house had just learned themselves. All he knew, arriving early one night, was that, as he came up to the house, a tumult began within. Lots of people were yelling. And as he came into the Brakk kitchen, Nick was yelling alone.

  “We’re Americans, ain’t we?” he yelled. “So let’s live like Americans; bad enough so the Huzzuks make fun of us, I’m tired of all them Old Country ways, what next, what else? Fur hats? Boots? A goat in the yard?” He addressed his wife. “A hundred times I told your old lady, ‘Throw it away, throw the damned thing a way, I-am-tired they making fun of us, Mamma, you hear?’ But she didn’t. She didn’t. So I, did. ” He stopped, breathing hard. “And that’s all…”

  A sick feeling crept into Silberman’s chest.

  “Where did you throw it? Where? It wasn’t yours!”—his wife. Nick pressed his lips together. His wife clapped her hand to her head. “He always used to say, ‘I’ll throw it off the bridge, I’ll throw it off the bridge!’

  That’s where! Oh, you hoo-dlom!” For a moment his eyes blazed at her. Then he shrugged, lit a cigarette, and began to smoke with an air of elaborately immense unconcern.

  Old Mrs. Brakk sat with her faint smile a moment more. Then she began to speak in her native language. Her voice fell into a chant, then her voice broke, then she lifted her apron to her eyes.

  “She says, ‘All she had to remind her of the old home country. All she wanted to do was sometimes warm the baby’s bottle or sometimes make herself a bowl of tea in her own room if she was tired. She’s an old lady and she worked hard and she never wanted to bother nobody—’ ”

  Nick threw his cigarette with force onto the linoleum and, heedless of shrieks, stamped on it heavily. Then he was suddenly calm. “All right Listen. Tomorrow I’ll buy you a little electric stove, a, a whadda they call it? A hotplate! Tomorrow for your own room I’ll buy y’a hot plate. Okay?”

  The effect was great; Nick had never been known—voluntarily—to buy anything for anyone.

  Old Mrs. Brakk exclaimed, in English, “Yo
u will?”

  He gave a solemn nod. “I swear to God.” He crossed his heart. “Tomorrow. The best money can buy. Mamma can come with me,” he added. His wife kissed him. His older brother-in-law patted him on the back. The old woman began to smile again.

  Silberman felt his heart pounding at twice its regular rate. He dared say nothing. Then, by and by, Nick strolling out into the yard and lighting up another cigarette, he strolled out after him.

  “Nick.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m going to ask you something. Don’t get mad.”

  “Gaw head.”

  “You really threw the stove parts off the bridge?”

  “Yeah. Well… the pieces.”

  “Pieces?”

  Nick yawned. Nodded. “I took the damn thing to the shop. Where I work. You know.” Fred knew. “An I runnum through the crusher. And what was left… I puttum in a bag. An I threw it offa the bridge.” He wasn’t angry or regretful. He let fall his cigarette, stomped it, went back into the house. Fred heard him working the television.

  The shop. Sneaky as could be, Fred lurked and skulked and peeked. The light was on, the door was open. Had Nick left them so? No matter; surely some crumbles of blue, of black, would be left, and he would zip in, scoop them off the floor by the crusher, and—A long shadow oozed across the floor. The janitor, humping his broom. A real, old-time Slovo, immense moustache and all, of the real, old-time Slovo sort; in a minute he was gone. Fred zipped, all right. But he didn’t scoop; there was nothing to scoop. No crumbles. There wasn’t even dust Tanta Pesha was not physically present but her voice sounded in her great-nephew’s ears: The Slovos? They are very clean… you could eat off their floors…