by Jack Cady
"Tell that B.S. one more time . . ." Maxie felt in his back pocket for the sap that wasn’t there.
"If anyone reminds him to tell that again," Janice-Marie murmured, "what happens won’t be a misdemeanor." Janice-Marie is largish, muscular, and still wears her cop pants. If she took it to mind, she could work Deke up so he looked like a pothole in Chicago streets.
Beyond the window sunlight dimmed. Ducks rose from the lake, shed a few feathers, circled, dropped back down to the lake. Ducks paddling. Ducks jumping back into the air. Duck confusion, lots of it, a stiff breeze beginning to bend pine trees, and storm clouds rolling in. The click of Deke’s pool balls sounded hollow, like tiny echoes coming from some bad place; mausoleum, perhaps.
"Hush, now," Victoria-Elizabeth whispered, although it was not necessary. Folks all had their flappers shut. Expectation filled the dayroom. The ticking of the clock grew louder, but it slowed.
"He’s back," Winchester-the-pawnbroker murmured. "Party time." Winchester still dresses slick, like a college administrator, or a midlevel executive, or a high-level social worker. He wears polished and pointy shoes. His remaining hair is dyed black, and lies against his head like thickish paint. He spoke to the clock. "What are-ya? Chicken crap? Cold cuts? Or just confused?"
Nickie stepped from the clock. He smelled only a little of sulphur. He and Winchester regarded each other like two pooches sniffing.
"You," Nickie hissed at Winchester. "You won’t set no high standards, but you’ll do."
"You," Winchester told Nickie, "don’t know what trouble is." Winchester turned to Maxie-the-bartender. "How soon do we bounce this guy?"
"Give it a minute." Maxie pulled on his left ear lobe, rubbed his nose, and for all the world looked like a man about to snap a bar rag. "It beats watching television," he told Winchester. "I mean, this guy don’t come up around all that often." Maxie is the slender, wiry type—fast with a bar rag.
Deke set up a three ball combination and stroked the object ball into the right corner pocket. He snapped a red suspender. He looked Nickie. "Better a has-been than a never-was."
"Not kind," Dear-Gwendolyn whispered. "That was simply not kind." Dear-Gwendolyn seemed torn between defending Nickie and following the tortured life of a soap opera character (who even at that moment, threatened to divorce his third wife whilst in the presence of his first and second). Dear-Gwendolyn’s diaphanous skirts rustled.
It was then that Victoria-Elizabeth stepped forward, accompanied by fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Joyce-Ann Summerfield. Nickie found himself with a TV anchor on one side, and a K-12 teacher on the other. If between them the two had not seen everything, they’d seen most.
Joyce-Ann waved Nickie toward a seat. She waved Deke back to his pool table, and she turned away from Winchester and Maxie. In a voice that had intimidated legions of eleven-year-old boys, she told Nickie, "Sit, and stay sittin’. Don’t move an inch." To Victoria-Elizabeth, she said, "Do it."
The interview that followed fell into a conventional pattern: Part I, Early Years (Young Rebellion and The Fall From Heaven); Part II, Professional Development (Construction of the Seven Stages of Hell); Part III, Sexual Proclivities (Unmentionable); and Part IV, Future Plans. By the time Victoria-Elizabeth got Nickie to Future Plans, Deke chuckled, Joyce-Ann tsked, and Dear-Gwendolyn twisted her hankie because of sexual proclivities. Nickie wept.
He sat, a rather frail figure in what had become a frayed business suit. He shivered, although warm air gushed from heating vents.
"Maybe things went too well for too long," he whispered between sniffles. "I came to depend on promoting standard stuff, the oldies and goodies: murder, rapine, corrupt priests, torture. Historically, there’s a lot of promise in humanity."
"The good old days," murmured Maxie.
"I suffered a downturn," Nickie sniffled. "I didn’t keep up with all the changes going on . . . but who would ever thought of stuff like Stallone flicks and chemical weapons?"
"Is that a problem?" Victoria-Elizabeth managed to look puzzled, although she already knew the answer.
"Folks used to fear me," Nickie sobbed. "I used to haunt their dreams. They smeared gargoyles all over everything. They hung horseshoes over their doorways. They actually feared my trolls, although a troll is so damn dumb that . . . and they wore garlic and smelled like Purgatory. And when it came to orneriness, which was mostly, they looked to me for guidance."
"And now . . . ?" Dramatic pause from Victoria-Elizabeth. Her voice sounded soft, almost cuddly.
"They do it all by themselves." Nickie mourned. "And they do it better. I blame technology. I sort of blame myself. I mean, look around you for Hell’s sake. Even you people aren’t afraid."
"I been handling the human race for 80 years," Maxie grumbled. "Nothin’ Hell can show me is more’n a walk in the park."
"Welcome," Winchester sneered, "to Westwind Retirement Apartments."
The sum of it is that Nickie took up a vacation residence in the clock. For a while he traveled back to Hell most days, and reported on the power struggle that developed in his absence. Demons barbecued apostate Imps, and legions of renegade Imps tramped across burning plains and around molten pits, ignoring the customers while tearing the place to shreds.
"There comes a time to rack your cue," Deke finally advised Nickie.
Nickie took the advice. He retired to the clock in Westwind Retirement Apartments, a clock that ticks everyone’s remaining seconds. Of course, sometimes Nickie slows the clock.
And perhaps He has His regrets, since most folks do. And perhaps even now He enjoys lusts (after all, Dear-Gwendolyn has peculiar charms), and perhaps He grows a bit creaky in the joints because the clock is not all that comfy. Plus, like everything else at Westwind, He occasionally gets sick of hearing that story about how Deke once took Minnesota Fats to the cleaners, and made the Fat Man cry.
Our Ground and Every Fragrant Tree Is Shaded
On most days we thought of him as reliable, if we troubled to think of him at all as we walked the streets of this small coastal town. Our northwest harbor lies mostly wrapped with rain. Wind swirls the hallmark-mist of Pacific beaches lying north of California. The reliable James would appear walking toward you from the mist, like a specter risen from distant waves and on its course toward the haunting of a maritime museum, or a moored ship, or to blow wraith-like above rain-filled and empty streets. There seemed always something moist about him. He gave the impression of being soaked, as though a sheen of water silvered the sidewalks on which he strode. He would only, in fact, be on his way to work at a general store where the main preoccupations dealt with groceries.
And groceries being what they are, and James being who he was—which is to say, reserved and distant—we townspeople could scarcely have realized how that moist man might herald eternal sorrow. We do not exactly blame the reliable James for our troubles; and we will certainly not blame ourselves, but blame looks for somewhere to alight. We can say that trouble centers around the store, and the center of that store expresses the 19th century. The store rises Victorian and fanciful and filled with whispering shadows.
Today the place seems only an ornate notion from long ago, but in 1870 its customers delighted in cathedral stained-glass windows through which occasional northwest sun painted sacks of feed with roseate glow, or bluely and greenly illuminated racks of corn brooms, new harness, axes, flour barrels; the hodge-podge of items either useful or ornamental on which Victorian lives depended.
And, if there is a curse on this town—and if we are doomed in some peculiar way—(because we recognize that to be human is to be doomed, but not necessarily in ways peculiar) doom began when Able Andrewes came to these parts in the late 1860s. Guns of the Civil War stood stilled. Frontier spread before settlers. Tall ships swam in our harbor surrounded by a babel of languages: Italian, Chinese, Japanese, English, German, Norwegian, Swedish and French. Andrewes traced his ancestry to English gentry; thus acted as a very proper type of gentlemanly adventurer�
��a bearer of the white man’s burden—and he existed comfortably among Oriental faces, Mediterranean faces, Blacks, Indians, Hawaiians, and Samoans.
His Trading Post, as he chose to style it, became the largest building north of San Francisco. It rose four stories, with peaked Victorian roof and fanciful gables. Although structurally a warehouse, ten cathedral windows offered the impression of a church. The trading post stood more certainly, and certainly more handsomely, than any of the town’s several churches.
The main floor displayed foodstuffs in kegs, barrels, loaves, bundles, and boxes. Spices and teas perfumed the store, while gas lamps provided light. Stained glass windows portrayed frontier trades: Indians bartering skins of sea otter, Chinese working lime, and, in this town, master builders erecting Victorian mansions.
In the basement rested what was then a modern miracle, a pulley-operated elevator capable of lifting a ton. The elevator carried new wood-burning cookstoves, pumps, bollards, ship fittings, bull tongue plows, wrought iron railings to surround widows’ walks; heavy merchandise: ships’ anchors to carriage axles. Andrewes made claim that his Trading Post carried at least one of every item manufactured.
The second floor displayed hardware, rifles, steel traps for gathering pelts. The third carried furniture: Victorian love seats, armoires, beds with richly carved roses, dressers, commodes, pier mirrors, hatstands in walnut and oak. On the fourth floor Andrewes established living quarters.
There are still folk in this town who remember Andrewes as an old, old man greeting dawn above the eastern range of mountains. By then, any consequences of Andrewes’s actions lived among us. None of us can say that he engaged in criminal acts, but all of us know that he lived comfortably among those who did. He financed ships that carried bond slaves as well as goods. He discounted large orders of merchandise to men who dealt in marginally legal business, or in business that was neither moral or legal. People who remember Andrewes picture him standing on his fourth floor balcony, and he is clothed in proper Victorian attire. His hands reach toward the mountains, beckoning in the dawn, or, as some grumblers complain, calling for morning light to dispel his self-inflicted darkness.
By then and honorably, he was long married, siring sons Edward and Charles. And, by then, he was more wraith than man. The fine English figure became diminutive over years. Late one night he visited his sons in their rooms, spoke to his sons kindly, then departed. His physician suggested that Andrewes wafted away on winds because he weighed less than his clothes. Andrewes disappeared in 1935.
His sons, Edward and Charles, continued to mind the store and these two would, through the years, come to depend on their reliable employee James.
This is a Victorian tale, Gentle Reader, and I am thus allowed to take you by the arm as we stroll past echoes of horror. Although I tell the tale as if "we," the people of the town are speaking, it’s obvious a single person pens these words. I introduce myself as Baruch, a modern scribbler of records. During those times when I do not scribble, I make my living selling old books from a storefront on Ocean Street. Local opinion holds me as surly, aging, irascible, crusty—in short, a curmudgeon—and I foster the illusion.
But, Gentle Reader, since we are unlikely ever to meet, I need not be curmudgeonly with you. In fact, I beg your indulgence.
For a long time no one knew or cared where James spent his sleeping hours. If asked, we might suspicion that he never left the store. After all, did he not always range from cellar to fourth floor of that mammoth enterprise? Did he not continually move, nearly ghostlike, between bundles of fresh asparagus and cans of pie mix? The man and the store intermingled. Only recently did we townspeople begin to fear. Inquiry brought discovery. James walks as a symbol of fear more dreadful than any of us have, heretofore, owned the courage to imagine.
James, we now understand, steps nightly from his round of groceries, walks the short distance to the harbor; is then swallowed by the tides, only to be spit ashore half an hour before the store opens. James sleeps, or walks, or God-knows-what beneath those waves. He in no manner resembles the living dead, is not a zombie. Such creatures walk the realms of the fantastic. About that reliable employee James, there is nothing fantastic.
We turn now, you and I, to a burden weighing heavy in this tale. That burden is the entire Victorian period, and Victorian dreams that toil and churn and thrust from the past; the calamities and the curse.
They saw themselves, those olden Englishmen, as bearers of the lamp of progress. They, like Able Andrewes, set forth as missionaries to dark races, bringing Bibles and rifles and machines. They acted, sometimes unwisely, and did not understand the effects of their actions. Nations fell before them. In their grandest hours they bowed to the highest forms of duty, for "duty" intertwined them like strands of rope. The proper Victorian feared failure to his duty more than he feared dying.
They also spoke of purity, were sternly fascinated with sex, and romantically fascinated with death. They dreamed of progress as they fashioned the Industrial Revolution. It takes no scribbler of antiquities to note Victorian styles still alive within us. Are we not bound by duty, ofttimes obscene? Do we not bore the world with eternal tut-tuts and quacks concerning sex? Have we not turned technology into a hotly forged divinity? Are not most places close to them in spirit? Do we not now pilfer souls, whereas Victorians boldly stole them? Which brings us back to the reliable James.
Once the facts became known, our mayor, who administers the town after business hours, visited the store and asked James, "Whatever in the bird-brained world was he doing?"; which in this small town is the best we can manage in the way of diplomacy. James replied, but not distantly, that he "paid attention to his own business." He added that he was "minding the store."
The store has changed little during the 20th century, and to the store I went on behest of the mayor, for I am the town historian. James stood beneath soft light through stained glass. Fresh cabbages lay boxed at his feet. He made check marks on a packing list. His employers worked elsewhere: Edward handling receipts and deposits, Charles, who in his age is still sprightly, attending the cash register. Fatigue lined James’s face, but his erect posture denied tiredness that drove bone deep. Groceries encircled him. In the cellar, beneath our feet, ranged drill presses and parts for modern tractors. Above us the store held sofas and china; screws, turnbuckles, manila rope and fishing gear.
"The mayor is a proud though foolish man," I told James. "He is also vexed."
"The mayor runs a feed lot," James replied in a soft voice. "He fattens stock. Nothing foolish about it for as long as folks need beef." Always before, James carried a Victorian reserve. Now his voice held quiet compassion. Thin brown hair lay sideways across his skull in vague attempt to cloak a bald spot. Large hands with stubby nails carried calluses from years of stocking merchandise. Brown eyes were guileless as a child’s, though somehow moist. In any dry goods store he would be directed to ready-made shirts and pants marked "medium."
His reply slowed me for a moment. Although I’m in trade, I’ve never regarded my bookstore as a holy habitation. James spoke in Victorian terms. To him, the mayor’s feed lot justified the mayor’s ambitions. Victorians truly believed that commerce worked a missionary influence, and England was a great mercantile nation.
"Even were the mayor an angel," I replied, "you beg the question. You are presently the only subject of conversation. Our ladies suggest iniquities, our loafers make uncomfortable jokes, and our banker fears for business. You will soon be the subject of sermons."
"Business picked up last month." James folded invoices and looked across racks of foodstuff like a father regarding a favorite child.
"Because you are notorious."
"‘Afflicted’ is a better word. I could tell you more, but there’s enough sorrow in the world, so I’ll not add to it. Let us please allow ‘afflicted’ to be the last word." His was an anguished and weary spirit in a fatigued body, but only a sharp eye could uncover his distress. Victorians never
blinked before a downturn in fortune. He lighted in me a spark of compassion.
"I am not as harsh as my reputation would have me," I told him. "It is not ungentlemanly to accept assistance."
It was he who viewed me with compassion, looking beyond me finally to our quiet streets. "There’s enough trouble for everyone," he whispered. "I should say no more."
Momentary terror walked across my soul. I stood among cabbages burnished with light through stained glass windows. Only the banality of the store shone true, for all else seemed filled with threat. The terror passed. My mind changed from fear to hideous and alien knowledge that said I grow old in an alien country. I age in a shameless nation of strange language, which has no respect for old men.
"I do not understand," I told James in parting, "but fear that I will." I stepped from the store and into our streets.
Was James a modern Jonah—swallowed by the tides then belched ashore—and was not Jonah’s sin the sin of Pride? I walked toward the harbor, walking by congeries of houses and huts. Victorian mansions glowered in company with rusting house trailers. A few split levels nested beside two-story frames; yet Victorian houses dominated. Before the turn of the century this town lay awash in wealth. Its fortunes saw decline when the first transcontinental railroad drove to tidewater at a different port. These great houses rose from trade; but trade not always luminous. Irish serving girls earned fifty cents a week, plus stingy room and board. Chinese bond slaves cooked lime and died in thousands. Indian and Malay prostitutes fell ravaged before sailors and disease. Fortunes flowered from that infamous poppy, opium.
I felt the press of antique darkness. Andrewes’s spirit still touches here. Too many people died badly in these parts. Some townsfolk claim to hear spectral voices in the wind, or distant weeping at the beginning of each new day. Dirges moan beyond the cause of simple avarice. In the name of progress young boys died from shanghai to merchant ships. Indian children saw their parents lynched. When smugglers avoided apprehension by authorities, they bound illegal immigrants in chain and dropped them screaming overboard; while in these great houses sounded tinkling notes from harpsichords, sounded the assured voices of wealthy men, the lyrical voices of their ladies.