Year's Best Science Fiction 01 # 1984

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “Has Blackie a name, Margaret, like regular people?”

  “Of course he has, dear, he is W.K. Wallingsforth.”

  Now that was interesting. The true name of the devil was sought by Faust, as to know it gives a power over him. And to learn it so casually was unheard-of luck. And if he had a name, then possibly he had also a habitation as though he were human.

  The lamplighter turned out the lights in the barroom and fired the eerie gas torches at each end of the stage. For every evening was the melodrama. This was loud and wide, with pistols and boots and whips, and the bull-roarer voice of Blackie. Clancy O’Clune was the hero. Jenny, bustled and bosomed, was the thrilling heroine. And Blackie was the villain, that filthy old snake of a man.

  The crowd would howl out “No! No! No!” to his monstrous demands, and hiss and catcall. And Jeannie at the piano ran a marvelous accompaniment as her sister Jenny fluted her outraged innocence and terror.

  This was a Monday night that Barnaby first saw the villain. And an old passion came on him; for beyond the comic and burlesque he felt a struggle and a terror. The sandy hair raised on his neck, and he knew the villain for what he was.

  Barnaby sat with a middle-aged couple and drank beer from a pitcher large beyond all believing.

  “We love to come here,” said Anne Keppel, “We have so much fun just watching the other people have fun. This is the only place this old bear will ever take me. I love to sing, but I wouldn’t dare sing anywhere else. He makes jokes about the ghost of a dead cat coming back, and why does it have to suffer like that.”

  “The only place I ever sing,” said Aurelius Keppel, “is here and in the bathtub. In the tub, I have to keep up a great splashing, or this shrew will beat on the door and announce that the doctor will be here in a minute, and to be brave. It isn’t that I haven’t a wonderful voice. It isn’t that I haven’t a wonderful wife. But my wonderful wife doesn’t appreciate my wonderful voice.”

  If one is to hate the villain properly, he should love the heroine. Barnaby loved passionately, but knew only slightly, the heroine, Jenny. A little better he knew, a little more he loved her sister, Jeannie, the pretty piano player. But he knew Margaret, the mother of the two girls, quite well.

  Margaret was more beautiful than her daughters. She was the tallest and best liked of those wonderful waitresses. And she was the owner of the Golden Gate.

  And the girls were onto him. “It isn’t us, it’s mama you like. How does she do it?”

  “I’ll tell you. She’s younger than her daughters. You’re a couple of old maids. Young and pretty, but still old maids. You’re not in your mother’s class.”

  “Oh, we know it.”

  But they were no such thing. They were as exciting and heady a pair as were ever met. Jenny, the frail heroine, might toss a man over her shoulder like a sack and spin away with him. And there was never any telling what Jeannie would do.

  The melodrama was over, and the little stage was dark. And it was then that Barnaby knew that he must kill the villain.

  Clancy O’Clune, still in his hero’s habiliments, picked a slightly gray and quietly amused pretty lady. He sat on her lap and sang to her softly a good-night lullaby. Afterwards, Jeanie brought the piano to a great volume, and everybody sang “We Won’t Go Home Till Morning.”

  But they all went home at midnight when the Golden Gate closed.

  And when Barnaby was home, he took out a little six-shot and fondled it as though it were a jewel.

  2

  Now it was Tuesday, the second day of the involvement. Barnaby was sitting in the company of four sophomores from City College. It is known by all, though not admitted by all, that sophomores are at the same time the most ingenuous, ingenious, and disingenuous people in the world. They are a wonder and a confrontation. Their hearts are ripe and their minds are on fire, and the door of the whole cosmos is open to them. Now, at the end of their second spring, they are imbued with clarity and charm.

  “A survey reveals that eighty percent of the people believe in Heaven but only twenty percent in Hell,” said Veronica. “That is like believing in up but not down, in a disc of only one side, a pole with a top but no bottom, Making Love to Alice Bly, in light but not in darkness.”

  That one line in the middle was not part of the argument. It was a line in the ballad that the crowd was singing, and Veronica sang it with them. And yet it too was part of the argument, for Miss Bly, who looked like an angel, had roots that went down to Hell.

  It was odd that they would be talking of things like that. And only Barnaby knew the reason: that Blackie was so much a Devil that they were reminded of his homeland.

  “If it weren’t for the evil in it the world would be a fine place,” said Simon. “But it is only the Evil who do not believe in evil, and only the Hellish who do not believe in Hell. There’s Seven Men Going to the Graveyard.”

  “And Only Six are Coming Back,” sang Hazel. Then she said, “It is there like a cold wind, and curls in the corner like a dog. A whole room full of people can turn evil in a minute. The world grinds and shudders. It can come like a bolt and stand in the middle of you.”

  It did come like a bolt and stand in the middle of them, but perhaps only Barnaby knew what it was and shivered for it. And yet the rest shivered as with sudden cold. For the Villain had appeared costumed in his villainy, and the melodrama began.

  Once more the short red hair rose on the nape of Barnaby, and the odd passion came over him. He breathed heavily, as did others in the room. There was a terror in the comic, and excitement danced like lightning over the burlesque stage.

  And when the crowd howled “No! No! No!” in simulated fury, it was not entirely simulated. And there were some who crowed “Yes! Yes!” wickedly against the crowd; and one of these was Hazel, bright-eyed and panting, as she felt the evil, like a dog in the corner, rise within her.

  So it thrashed to a climax. Did not Jeannie know that the accompaniment she played on the piano was diabolic? For the temptations of the dark villain were manifold. But for a word of his, the crippled brother of the heroine would go to prison; and he withheld the word. But for his testimony, the mine of the heroine’s father would pass into the domain of the Fast Buck Mining Company, and he would not give the testimony. There was even evidence, clear to the more perspicacious, that he was himself the Fast Buck Mining Company. But for him, the dastardly lie about the heroine’s mother would spread and spread; and perhaps he would be the one to spread it. There would be no bread in the cupboard, nor coal in the scuttle, nor milk for the small children. And against all this only the frail virtue of the thrilling heroine.

  “She ought to go with him,” said the girl at the next table. “He only wants her for the weekend. I’d go with him. Yes! Yes!” cried the girl at the next table.

  And then Barnaby knew for sure that the old dark villain had to die.

  Now the melodrama was over and the lamplighter lit the lights again. The suds rose in a hundred-headed fountain; everybody had a dozen more beers and sang the ballads of Jeannie. Clancy O’Clune put on his sheriffs badge that was eighteen inches across, and there was law and order, though a great deal of noise, in the Golden Gate Bar.

  And when the midnight tide pounded under the pier, Clancy came and sat on the silken knees of a little houri named Maybelline, and sang to her “Good Night Little Sweetheart.”

  And after everybody sang “We Won’t Go Home Till Morning,” they all went home. Except those who went to the Buccaneer, and the Alamo, and the Town House, and places like that.

  3

  Wednesday morning Barnaby had a breakfast date with Jenny. It may not have been made clear that Jenny was really beautiful. Just how beautiful, it is impossible to say. Not, perhaps, as beautiful as her sister Jeannie. Not, certainly, as beautiful as her mother, Margaret. But nevertheless breathtaking, fantastic, and clear out of the world.

  But she asked the oddest questions.

  “Why don’t you work? You’re not wo
rking today. You didn’t work yesterday. I don’t think you even worked Monday.”

  “Listen,” said Barnaby. “You can believe it or not, but before that I worked for four weeks straight. Naturally I’m entitled to a vacation. How could I work this week when I’ve met you wonderful people and have you to think about? If it wouldn’t make you conceited, I’d tell you how wonderful you really are.”

  “No. It won’t make me conceited. Please tell me. I know, of course, but I like to have people tell me.”

  “You are just a dream. You are that little heroine all the time. All of you are wonderful except that villain. I would like to strangle him with my hands.”

  “Why, he’s the most wonderful of us all. He’s a real flesh-crawler. I know what’s the matter. You’re jealous because it’s really mama you’re in love with. I guess all villains are really marvelous.”

  “I know a devil when I see one. I’ll bring a gun some night and kill him.”

  “He says sometimes people do. Not kill him, but shoot at him. Then he knows he’s getting across. But it’d be terrible if something happened to him.”

  “It would be grand.”

  “Don’t talk like that. I have to go. I’m glad you asked me, but I’m mad that you asked Jeannie first. If I’m a dream, why did you ask her first? Now I have to leave because I’m always so busy. Wait till the waitress goes by, and then kiss me. Be in tonight and see how pretty I look.”

  Now it was Wednesday night, the third of the epic. Barnaby was at a table with three seamen. These were not unknown. Long John in particular was known all over town. He was not merely lantern-jawed, he was jawed like an eighteenth-century ship’s lantern, copper bound and brass bottomed, and the nose on him as livid and red as an old beacon at night. His clothing was beyond description, and the hat on his head older than any man now living in the world.

  And most know Benny Bigby and Limey Lynd, the other two. To know them, however, was not to like them. Benny had a muzzle like a fox and was always looking over his shoulder. Limey was a cockney dude. They were loud and obscene. If they hadn’t been friends of Barnaby, he wouldn’t have liked them either.

  Already, through the early crowd there was running a tide of resentment toward the seamen; and this only for their insistence that all the songs that night should be sea songs. Now there is nothing wrong with

  “As I Was A-walking Down Paradise Street—with a Ho Ho Blow the Man Down,” but it has seventeen choruses, and when it is sung seventeen times, that makes either two hundred and eighty-nine or two hundred and ninety-nine. That is too much.

  And when another ballad slipped in sideways:

  “I only ask you, Jack, to do your duty, that is all;

  You know you promised that we should be wed,”

  they sat in towering silence and would not sing.

  “It isn’t as though they were high-sea seamen,” Blackie, the villain, said to Clancy O’Clune. “One of them works on a garbage scow, and one on a pile-driving barge, and one on a ferryboat.”

  But Barnaby was loyal to his friends, and he considered only the evil source of the remark. So he also howled for sea songs.

  Now the crowd came like snow and filled the room.

  “I have been in every Hell Hole of the world,” said Long John. “Zanzibar, Devil’s Island, Port Royal (that was before the earthquake), Oklahoma City, Cote der Pirates, Newport News, Mobile, Alabama; but I have never seen a more evil-looking man. Who is he?”

  Barnaby was pleased. He had found a friend. Someone else who hated Blackie. “That is Blackie, the Villain.”

  “Ah, Le Noire, I should have known. I heard of him once in Marseille.”

  And yet that was hardly possible, for neither of them had ever been there.

  The thing about Blackie, is that he was very easy to be afraid of. He had arms like a python. And if one cannot conceive of a python with arms, no more can he of Blackie. Barnaby was a handy young man. Though he fought less than he once did, yet he always won more fights than he lost. He measured Blackie with his gray eyes, and he knew that he was afraid of him.

  “I wonder how it will be when he is dead,” said Barnaby. “When the soul leaves the body, they speak of the Wings of the Dove. With him it will be the pinions of the vulture.”

  The little houri named Maybelline came over and made herself acquainted with Barnaby, and he was entranced with her. And however it happened, she was soon sitting on his knee, and they were drinking beer from the same mug.

  It wasn’t as though he weren’t still in love with Jeannie, who now smiled and frowned at him together from her piano.

  It wasn’t as though he weren’t still in love with Jenny who winked at him as she went by. And it was a wicked wink.

  It wasn’t as though he weren’t still in love with Margaret who now wagged a finger at him from across the room. But an houri is different from other girls, and when you are entranced, what can you do?

  Everybody sang:

  “In a cottage down in Sussex

  Live her parents old and lame,

  And they drink the wine she sends them,

  But they never speak her name.”

  And they sang:

  “Shoot me like an Irish soldier,

  Do not hang me like a dog.”

  Everybody sang together to the music of Jeannie, and the only lights in the place were those old gas lights. Something went out of the world with them. These new lights, they have no smell to them, they have no flicker or real glow. You can’t reach up and light a cigar or dramatically burn a letter. It’s almost as though they weren’t alive.

  And after a while, Jeannie began to play devil’s music, and Evil uncoiled like a snake and slid into the room. The lights in the world went out, and the torches were lit in Hell; and the melodrama began on the little stage. The world shuddered on its axis, and the villain was prince of the world. Once more the odd passion came on Barnaby. An animal surge went through the crowd as the noble hero and the trilling heroine and the dark villain acted out the oldest epic in the world.

  “No! No! No!” But tonight virtue would not triumph. The more he was hissed, the more powerful the villain became. For he also had his supporters, and now they rose like a ground swell. Virtue was howled down in a crescendo of devil’s music played by Jeannie at the piano.

  “O.K.” said Jenny, the heroine, “let’s go and get it over.” So Jenny went with the evil villain, and everybody laughed as the lights were lit again with a taper.

  Now they all had a dozen more beers and sang:

  “Just break the news to Mother,

  She knows how dear I love her,

  And tell her not to wait for me,

  For I’m not coming home.”

  And the words had a double meaning for Barnaby.

  They sang:

  “The cook she was a kind old soul.

  She had a ragged dress.

  We hoisted her upon a pole

  As a signal of distress.”

  And this seemed inexpressibly sad to Barnaby, and not even the houri on his knees could cheer him up.

  For over in the corner was Jenny, and she was sitting with Blackie, the villain, in a condition of extreme friendliness; and for all he knew they were drinking their beer from the same pitcher.

  Then, as the night ran on, Clancy O’Clune picked out an eleven-year-old girl who was drinking cider with her father, who was a barber, and he came and sat on her lap and sang to her “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms” for a good-night song.

  Afterwards everybody sang “We Won’t Go Home Till Morning.”

  And they all went home at midnight.

  4

  Thursday morning Barnaby had a breakfast date with Jeannie, the outrageously beautiful piano player.

  “Did Jenny turn you down? Why did you ask me first today?”

  “I always ask you first.”

  “Jenny says you’re mad at her because she’s friendly with Blackie. But he’s so nice. Don’t yo
u know that? He’s one of the nicest men we ever met.”

  “He is a devil. He makes my flesh crawl.”

  “He is supposed to. But only on the stage. He’s a consummate actor. I think that’s the word that mama says he is. And mama says for us to keep an eye on you because you’re acting so peculiar. We tell her you only act peculiar over her. Don’t you think we’d make nice daughters-in-law?”

  “You would be nice anything, Jeannie.”

  “And don’t you wish you were a sultan and could have us all at once?”

  “Yes I do. I never thought of it, but that’s just what I wish.”

  “And the houri too?”

  “How did you know she was an houri? I thought I was the only one who knew.”

  “I’m never sure you’re serious. I do have to go, dear. Isn’t it too bad that everyone always has to go all the time? You eat the rest of my jelly and egg. Kiss me. Good-bye.”

  And it was morning and evening, the fourth day.

  And in the evening Barnaby sat with a table full of refinery workers. He had brought with him tonight his little six-shot loaded. And five were blanks and one was not.

  The refinery workers were named Croesus Kahlmeyer, Midas Morressey, and Money-Bags Muldoon. These are the names that the waitresses gave to them, for refinery workers are the biggest tippers in the world. They tip lavishly. The reason they can do this is that all refinery workers get a hundred hours a week overtime, and the money they make is fantastic.

  Gaiety Garrett was waiting their table. The boys all called her Gaiety Unrestrained. And in a larger sense gaiety unrestrained reigned through the whole of the Golden Gate.

  Now the surf pounded loudly under the pier. It always seemed noisiest when the melodrama was about to start. For after the hours had passed, the lamplighter turned out the lights in the barroom and flared the torches on the stage. The smell of them came over the room like a weird fog.