These words were said with a first-grade teacher’s kind and crisis-easing voice.
“And when you do not pick the peaches for Mr. Johannsen?”
“Then I pick the beef tomatoes for Mr. Predieu and the iceberg lettuces for Mr. Scarpio. When I am not picking other people’s various things it is my taste to sit against the wall and pick my teeth.”
“For that,” she said, “it is first necessary to chew on something.”
“I agree with a whole heart. I will ask only why you bother to make this very true and intelligent observation?”
“Because if you do not build the two needed rooms you will very soon be without the things to chew on. Do I make this plain? Your cook will be home in Durango, where human beings do not live like animals. You can write me a long letter about how you do not pick the teeth any more.”
She went in the house with both hands made into fists, her rounded belly leading the way. Five children’s voices came up in a soprano thunder, asking mama, dear and nice mamacita, for some pieces of crisped tortilla.
Life could be hard in this California. Troubles here had the tendency to grow like peaches and lettuces, in bunches. Though it was to be understood that even the much-accepting Herminia would not wish to bring out still another child in one cramped room. Yet adobe bricks would not grow in bunches, like peaches, lettuces and troubles.
He got to his feet and walked down close by the pig, to the well, to get himself some water. Standing there in his envelope of constant trouble, the tin dipper at his mouth, he said more or less to the pig, “I wish I had the miraculous penny.”
This was what people like him sometimes said when they felt their troubles forming into a sealed envelope, themselves inside.
The pig maneuvered over on his back and flopped his happy feet in the air, perhaps trying to kick the sun.
From the bottom of the well a voice said, “What?”
When spoken to, Diosdado liked to give straight and full answers. So he explained:
“I was speaking of the penny that never ends, that when it is spent is replaced in the pocket with another penny. It is the poor man’s idea of great wealth, of all the riches of the world, to have a penny in his pocket that always gives birth to another penny—”
The voice said, “If you have to empty out your head every time you’re asked a question, write a book or hire a hall.”
Then Diosdado realized that he was leaning into the well, talking to somebody at the bottom of his well.
A man with a one-room house guards what is his with more spirit than a man who owns international strings of castles.
He leaned over some more and said, “What do you think you’re doing there in my well?”
“I do this without thinking,” the voice said, “because it’s my job and the thing I’m trained to do. These days we all specialize.” “What is that, your job?”
“Listening. You think it’s easy when you mumble?”
“Then you listen to this,” Diosdado said. “This is my well and I want you to get out of it and off my property.”
“This well,” the voice said, “is as much Mr. Bixby’s as it is yours.”
“Who owns a hole is who did the digging. You go back to this liar of a Mr. Bixby of yours and you—”
“Man, will you use your damned head for once? For more than to keep your ears in place? You dug this hole, yes, what belongs to you is the hole. You did not make the water that comes into the hole, I stress this, the water comes down from those San Berdoo mountains, from certain forest lands owned by a certain Mr. George Carol Bixby. Now, will you stop wasting my time and answer one simple question? Did I understand you to say you would like the miraculous penny, the never ending penny?”
“These were my words. It is only an expression—”
“All right.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, all right”
“All right what?”
“All right, you can have the never ending penny. You’ve got it. Spend it in good health.”
Diosdado turned a sympathy-seeking face to the lurching, wallowing pig. “Mister,” he said, “you get down in my well where you have no right to be, a person I have never been introduced to, and you tell me bad jokes. It is impossible to have such an article as the never ending penny. This is only an article people wish for. It is an express—”
“I know what it is without speeches from you,” the voice said. “The self-perpetuating penny, you might say, is my business. If you don’t want it, fine, just say so. If you do, it’s yours. What coins do you have in your pocket?”
Diosdado made another face at the pig, one pleading for the two sane parties left in the world to join against a general madness, and pulled all the coins from his pocket.
“Four pennies, two dimes and a quarter. This is what I have in my pocket and in the world.”
“Fine. Now, put them in your shirt pocket, all but one penny. Put this single penny back in your pants.”
“If it gives you pleasure.”
“Now take the penny out, then feel in the pocket again.”
Diosdado withdrew the penny, placed it in his right hand, reached inside again with his left.
There was another penny in his pocket.
He pulled this one out and explored once more.
There was a third penny.
There was a fourth. There was a fifth.
~ * ~
When there were fifteen or more pennies in the sweaty hand he looked for explanations to the pig, with beggar’s eyes. The pig was busy juggling the sun with his paws. Diosdado began to shiver.
He thought he understood, partly, anyway, the excitement of this moment. Once, when a boy in Durango, while walking down a country road, he had seen a shine in the dust. His foot explored the mystery. The shining objects were bright new centavo pieces. At the sight of these unexpected riches he had felt precisely this kind of throat-tightening and eye-widening heat in a flash flood through his body. For one ballooning, scooping moment Diosdado had thought, what a glory if this place of miracles should turn out to be a well, a cornucopia, a production line of pennies. Can there be too much of a good thing?
Maybe this, the centavo with a big fertility, has always been a general dream of seven-year-olds. Maybe this is why it finally became a saying, an expression. But even, a six-year-old , even one not very bright, knows that the nice idea is finally in the head and not in the world. Some young sense of the true nature of things tells him that the perpetual penny is a pleasant wish, not a reasonable expectation. Dreams, he somehow knows, circle around the impossible.
Now here he was, he, Diosdado, with the dream of dreams in his pocket. He was a small boy again, kicking at the Durango road and finding the road fully co-operative, sensitive to his balloons and scoops of moods, jumping to his large orders.
“If you have the power to give this thing,” he said shakenly into the well, “why do you give it to me, a nobody?”
“For one thing,” the voice said, “you asked for it.”
“It is enough only to ask?”
“Oh, no, oh, no, we can’t go around giving these things out just for the asking. A lot of our countrymen come up north here, you know, many of them have troubles and ask for the repeating penny. We follow them and we listen to them. In my territory, for example, Southern California, I give out two or three of these pennies in a year, an average year. There’s no set quota.”
“People around here call for the miraculous penny all the time, why am I the one to get it, sir?”
‘‘One, you’re a steady worker. Two, you don’t spend all your earnings in the nearby bars. Three, you’re reasonably good to your wife, though you make silent comments at her. Four, you have another child coming and could use the penny, or think you could. Don’t ask for more reasons. Let’s just say I like your curly hair.”
Diosdado scratched his head. Absent-mindedly he pulled two more pennies from the production line in his pocket.
>
“But, listen, if two or three people around here get the penny each year, how have I never heard about this?”
“News like this doesn’t get around, fellow. The owners of these family-bearing pennies develop a very strong urge not to tell anybody about it. You’ll see.”
Diosdado pulled three more coins from his penny garden of a pocket.
“I’ve got to run now,” the voice said. “Somebody over at the Bixby place is making a racket about wanting the penny. It’s probably nothing, just a false alarm. Most of my calls come from drunken bums in roadside bars who have just run out of tequila and pulque money, but I’ve got to go and see. Oh, one more thing. I have the power to grant you two wishes. Now you have the first.”
“And the second, what is that?”
“You make the wishes, I grant them. Do you expect me to do all the work around here?”
That night Diosdado did not eat his supper. The kids hooted and threw frijoles at each other and he sat there over his food seeing and hearing nothing. The newly, acquired pennies in his pocket were a ton of hotness against his thigh, several times he was on the verge of blurting out to Herminia the incredible thing that had happened but each time his tongue got stiff.
Herminia wanted to know why he did not eat his frijoles. He said he had eaten many peaches this afternoon at Mr. Johannsen’s and was not hungry. With embroidered casualness he announced he was going to cut some kindling and went out.
As soon as he was inside his wood and tool shed he bolted the door and went to work.
Diosdado soon discovered that he could pull pennies from his pocket at the rate of one a second, sixty a minute, three thousand six hundred an hour. This meant he was making thirty-six dollars an hour, roughly what he got for a full week’s work in Mr. Johannsen’s orchards. It was good pay for a job that could be done with one hand, without climbing a ladder.
For one hour he stood drawing out the coppers and dropping them on the dirt floor. His arm was tired, a cylinder of hurt. He thought he might sit down for a time but it was too hard to reach into his pocket from a sitting position. Next he tried taking his pants off and lying down, but it was a strange thing, the penny would not reproduce itself when the pants were not actually on his body. He had to become a rich man standing up. At the end of the second hour he had almost seven thousand pennies on the floor, almost seventy dollars, and his arm was full of fever and gassy beer, there were shooting pains from the wrist to the shoulders. He was getting rich and he was getting lumbago.
He considered how much faster the harvesting of this penny crop would go if he could call in Herminia and the kids to help with the picking. With his whole family working they could go through the night in shifts. But it did not seem right to bring others into the secret, not even his near and dear.
Herminia called to him to bring some wood and he answered that he would be right there.
Now there was a problem. He could not leave a small fortune in pennies lying around in plain sight on the shed floor. He felt it was better if his family did not know about the pennies that grew like toadstools that wish to make headlines.
In the corner there were some coarse burlap bags, left over from last year’s flood season when he had prepared sandbags to build up the banks of the nearby stream. His seven thousand pennies almost filled one bag, which he hid under some odds and ends of lumber.
He went toward the house wondering why it was that he kept looking back. He was about to be the richest man in the world and he looked over his shoulder as though he had something to hide.
~ * ~
During the next days, whenever he had a minute, he went to the shed to pull pennies and fill burlap bags. Before the week was up he had to buy a new supply of bags at the general store, and his arm was so sore that he was not able to pick many peaches for Mr. Johannsen.
Finally he had so many full bags that there was no way to hide them in the shed. Some new thing had to be done with them to keep them out of sight.
He began to discuss the matter with himself:
“What are pennies for, exactly? For spending, this is certain, yet I do not consider the possibility. Why not? Well, the first thing is, there is no way to spend ten thousand pennies, then ten times ten thousand, and so on. If I ordered adobe bricks from the brickyard and offered the man bags of pennies for them he would say, where did you get all these pennies, Diosdado? Could I answer that I got them from my left pocket, boss? He would get suspicious and tell the chief of police about it, or the tax collector, or both. Pennies can be deposited in the bank of course, just like dollars. Yet peach pickers do not usually have money of any type to place in the bank. The president of the bank would think the matter over and report it to the tax collector, or the chief of police, or both. There is but one way. I must hide these bags from all eyes. From my wife and my children, them especially. I did not know what a trouble it can be to have money. Surely it is not robbery if I take pennies from my own left pocket, so why do I feel like a robber and keep looking over my shoulder?”
So he did not spend the pennies. Neither did he tell his wife about them. He hit on a way to hide the bags. He ordered a quantity of planks from the lumberyard and these he placed firmly in the ground in upright pairs, exactly along the lines where the walls for the extra rooms would eventually have to go. Between each pair of planks, using them for supports, he piled a vertical row of his plump bags, exactly as he had piled them to make a new bank for the flooding stream. Each bag contained ten thousand pennies, one hundred dollars’ worth of pennies. The piles formed continuous walls, they looked exactly like walls.
Herminia watched with narrowing eyes.
“You wanted more rooms?” he said to her. “How can I make rooms if I do not first make walls?”
“I tell all the neighbors you are a good husband,” she said, “but now I see you want to kill your whole family. What way is this to build walls without adobe? Make walls of sand and when the bags rot away in the weather the walls will fall down on our heads and we will be killed and buried in the same time. True, this way we save burial expenses. We have to cut down somewhere.”
“This is a new procedure of making the bricks,” he said, hating himself. “First, a special sand is put in the bags, second, they are permitted to shape and harden in the sun. It is a totally new process, woman. It was invented by the authorities on such things in the U.S.A. Department of Agriculture, Adobe Brick Division. Those of the government know the wall business better than you.”
He wanted to kick and punch himself when he saw the full trust and respect in her eyes. But at least the pennies would be safe in this homemade bank. Because of the protecting planks the children could not feel around with their fingers to find out that these walls were filled with a sunshiny sand of dreams and sayings.
But the chief of police did take notice. He saw the walls going up and he drove in to have a look.
“Pretty big house you’re putting up there,” he said. “Where’d you get the money for the materials? Come on, Diosdado, come clean, you rob a bank some place?”
Diosdado said he seldom had the occasion, let alone the constitution, even to go in a bank, let alone rob it, the funds came from picking the good peach crop.
But the chiefs words were a worry.
The tax collector came by too.
“You’re turning the place into a regular mansion,” he said with too much arithmetic in his eyes. “A four-star palace. You must have had a peachy year, ha, ha, to afford improvements like these.” There were dollar signs in his eyes as he drove away.
This was another worry.
By now the walls, the deceitful walls, were up ten feet or more. Diosdado took a pencil and paper and did some figuring. According to his count he had piled up two thousand bags, which came to twenty thousand dollars’ worth of pennies. He was a man worth twenty thousand dollars and he did not have the cash to go in the store to buy a side of bacon or a new kitchen table, let alone more burlap bags. Added to this
, the chief of police and the tax collector had their mathematical eyes on him.
If no more bags would fit into the walls, any he filled from now on would have to be hidden in another way. There was no other way. Besides, Diosdado was beginning to wonder if there was any sense to piling up more pennies in secret. To collect bigger and bigger moneys and be further and further away from the possibility of spending them, to do all this heavy work and have no pay from it, nothing but some false wails put up with backbreaking labor, more labor by far than it would have taken to make true and useful adobe walls, that is, walls about which a man would not have to tell rotten lies to his trusting wife, this did not seem reasonable. His arm was very tired. It hung limp at his side, a tube of misery. He was now the slowest picker in Mr. Johannsen’s orchards.
The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 10