Humpty Dumpty in Oakland

by Philip Kindred Dick

  “You’re the driver?” Ross said.

  “I guess so,” Al said. “I was just hired.”

  “Milton,” Ross said.

  “No,” he said. “Miller.”

  “Can you handle a four-speed truck box?”

  “Sure,” Al said.

  “Let’s go,” Ross said. “Let’s get the stuff in the truck and take off; there’s no point in hanging around here.”

  Al began picking up equipment; the recording engineer did so, too, while Ross examined a clipboard of papers. The recording engineer led the way downstairs and out onto the parking lot, where a ton-and-a-half GM truck, several years old, was parked.

  “Where to?” Ross said to Al, as the last of the stuff was being put into the truck.

  Without hesitation, Al said, “Fort Bragg.”

  “That’s where we’ll find it?” Ross said.

  “Right,” Al said. He had picked the town at random. He had never been there. It would take all day to get up there and back, and he looked forward to the trip.

  “Shouldn’t we start closer to home?” Ross said. “There’re a lot of towns between here and Fort Bragg.”

  “They’ve been picked over,” Al said.

  “Hell,” the recording engineer said. “If we go all the way up there we might not get back for a couple of days.”

  “Let’s be realistic,” Al said. “We have to get out of the good TV reception area. TV has ruined the natural folk-culture for a radius of a hundred miles around here.”

  Ross said, “You sound pretty confident of your judgment.”

  “I’ve been in this business a long time,” Al said.

  “If we’re going that far I better call my wife,” the recording engineer said. He excused himself to go and phone.

  Getting out a pipe and a self-sealing plastic pouch of tobacco, Ross said to Al as he lit up, “Frankly, going out of the metropolitan Bay Area doesn’t appeal to me. So far we’ve done most of our taping in clubs in San Francisco. Most folk singers are willing to come down here, and we get plenty of pop and jazz personalities at places like Fack’s Number Two and the Blackhawk and the Hungry I.”

  “Okay,” Al said. “You wait around Fack’s Number Two and see how long it takes for a truly authentic barbershop quartet to show up. One that isn’t already signed up.”

  Soon they were on the road, with Al behind the wheel of the truck. Bob Ross puffed on his pipe and read a trade journal. The recording engineer propped himself against the door of the cab on his side and soon fell asleep.

  “I admire your courage,” Ross said, glancing up from his magazine. “In speaking up and defending your point of view.”

  “Thanks,” Al said.

  “We’ll get along,” Ross said. “However, I think we’ll stop off at my father-in-law’s house for a moment and check with him. Before we go that far.”

  He directed Al up into the Piedmont hills, along streets of tall trees and large terraced gardens with stone walls overgrown with ivy. Presently they were parking before a house set well back from the street, behind a row of poplars.

  “We’ll both go in,” Ross said, as he slid past the sleeping recording engineer and stepped from the cab onto the sidewalk. “He’s taking the day off. Attack of hay fever.”

  Together, they climbed a path of flagstones, past beds of old roses and gladioli. Ross led the way around the side of the house, to the patio in the rear. They found Chris Harman stretched out on a terry-cloth towel, wearing bathing trunks, listening to a portable FM radio and sunbathing. He had a tall glass of iced tea beside him and a pile of U.S. News & World Reports. As they approached, he turned his head.

  “Hello,” he said genially.

  Ross said, “We won’t bother you for more than a minute.”

  “Not at all,” Harman said, resting his chin on his folded arms in order to see them.

  “We’re heading for Fort Bragg,” Ross said, “to track down some unsigned barbershop quartet groups.”

  At once Harman said, “Oh no.”

  “Why not?” Al said.

  “That’s not the area at all. Fort Bragg is too close to the water. It’s cold and foggy up there along the coastline. That’s lumber country. Where you’ll find barbershop is in the farm towns. In the Sacramento Valley, or the Sonoma Valley. Where it’s hot and dry and flat. I’ll tell you.” He scrambled to a sitting position. “This is not to deride your judgment, Miller, but you go over to Sonoma County and have a look around Petaluma.”

  “You’re familiar with Petaluma?” Al said.

  “Oh certainly,” Harman said, smiling. “I’m over there all the time. The chicken and egg capital of the world.”

  “We’ll go there,” Ross said. “That’s only about two hours at the most.”

  “And remember,” Harman said, with his cultured, affable smile, “there are other towns nearby. Sebastopol, Santa Rosa, Novato. That’s a well-settled farm area, and very hot. A very dull area. Just right for barbershop.” He rose to his feet and began putting a blue and white robe around him, which he tied with a cord sash. “You’ll have plenty of opportunity to exercise your judgment as time goes on, Miller,” he said. “Sorry to have to overrule you, but as Ross well knows, I have a good sense about this sort of thing.”

  “That’s been my experience,” Ross said.

  “I’m glad to learn something,” Al said. “I consider myself as being reasonably good in this particular field, but I can always learn. A man is never finished in the school of life.”

  Harman said, “How about something to drink? Before you take off on that long hot trip?”

  “That would be terrific,” Ross said.

  “Thanks,” Al said. “It really would be appreciated.”

  “Excuse me then,” Harman said. He disappeared through a French door, into the house, leaving the two men alone on the patio. The FM radio continued to play music.

  “You’ll learn a lot more,” Ross said, presently, “working in the Harman organization. Chris is truly an astonishing man, a real giant. You’ve probably got the idea, for instance, that Chris is mainly involved in the record business. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Basically, he’s an investor.”

  “I see,” Al said.

  “He’s worth about two million dollars,” Ross said. “All told. And yet he’s one of the major contributors to the A.D.A. in Oakland. He’s supported all manner of liberal causes, over the years. He’s a kindly, educated man, with a great deal of background in the humanities. For one thing, I know he’s read Plato in the original Greek. One of his hobbies is stamps. He’s got as good a collection of early British as anyone on the West Coast.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Al said.

  “He’ll be having you over to the house,” Ross said, “now that you’re a part of the group. Everyone comes over. Chris has absolutely no sense of snobbery; he wouldn’t even know what it meant. When he goes into a store to buy something, the morning paper for instance, he’s as gracious and polite to the clerk—” Ross gestured “—as he is to his family and friends. He makes no distinction. To him a man is a man. I’m not kidding.”

  “I’ll be darned,” Al said.

  “That’s the mark of a real aristocrat,” Ross said.

  “I guess so,” Al said.

  “Even those who can’t stand him say that,” Ross said.

  “Who can’t stand him?” Al said. “How can that be?”

  “A lot of people can’t stand him,” Ross said. “You’d be surprised. He’s got a lot of enemies who wish him the worst luck in the world and don’t mind putting in a bad word for him, about him—not to his face, generally—any chance they get.”

  “Why?” Al said.

  “I’ve puzzled over it for a long time. It’s because of his luck. They could forgive him his breeding, his education, his talents along business lines and cultural lines. But not his luck. They could even forgive his wealth. But luck—” Ross gestured, spilling tobacco from his pipe. A burning fragm
ent landed on the ground and he carefully wet his fingers and put it out.

  “They think they ought to have luck, too,” Al said.

  “Right,” Ross said. “It ought to be evenly distributed throughout the civilized world. Of course, if that was true, there wouldn’t be any such thing as luck anymore; nobody would even know what the word meant. I mean, let’s consider what luck is.”

  Al said, “Luck is when things are breaking for you.”

  “Luck is being able to make use of chance,” Ross said. “It means that when something goes wrong you can turn it to your own advantage. It doesn’t mean, say, always drawing a good hand. It doesn’t mean getting three aces and two kings every time.” Turning to face Al, he said, “It means that when you draw a nothing hand you can still win, because in some way that eludes the rest of us you can make that nothing hand a winning hand. Do you follow me?”

  “Yes,” Al said. “And it’s a really fascinating new concept.”

  “Then maybe you’ll explain it to me,” Ross said. “I’ve watched him for six years now, and frankly I can’t make it out. Say he buys into a watch-repair outfit. The next day an automatic watch-repairing machine is invented, and some guy sticks one out on the sidewalk directly across the street; all you have to do is drop your busted watch in, and in five seconds out it comes again, fixed. For, say, six bits. That would put any other man out of business.”

  “Absolutely,” Al said.

  “But not Chris.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe he has enough capital to write it off.”

  “No. He turns it to his advantage somehow. He benefits. He profits, in the long run anyhow. That machine, that five-second watch-fixing machine across the street from him, actually causes him to make more in the long run than he would have if the operator hadn’t set up the machine there, or there had been no such machine.”

  “It’s amazing,” Al said.

  “I’ve seen him drop into somebody’s business office,” Ross said, “to give them a present, like a record sample or a bottle of whiskey, and because he happens to be there at that moment, some big golden opportunity falls his way. If he walked across the street to personally hand you a free hundred dollars, he’d happen to notice a ‘for lease’ sign on some place near you, and he’d immediately rent it and in six months he’d have made a killing in whatever he used the place for. It would turn out to be just what he needed, or what the public needed. Take this barbershop stuff. That was his idea, you know.”

  “Yes,” Al said.

  “He’s never wrong. If he goes into barbershop in a big way, you can bet it’ll be the next trend. Maybe it becomes a trend because he goes into it. I don’t know. And this relationship he has with reality spreads out to some extent through the whole organization. I swear my own luck has been substantially better since I met Chris Harman eight years ago. It’s good luck to meet him, even; you can date the process as starting there. Your good luck, Miller, has already begun. Don’t you feel that?”

  “And how,” Al said.

  “I mean, now you’re going somewhere. You’re not just standing still. You’ve been noticed.”

  The French door opened and Chris Harman reappeared, in his blue and white robe, carrying a tray on which stood a silver Martini shaker and three frosty-looking Martini glasses, an olive in each.

  “Here we are,” Chris said.

  12

  Jim Fergesson, on his first errand that morning, left his house and drove to the Bank of America. There, he transferred his money, except for ten dollars, from his savings account to his checking account. As he left the bank, he looked into his commercial passbook and read with satisfaction the sum $41,475.00.

  Should he go back home? He wanted to be dressed right. I guess maybe I’ll stop and get a new tie, he told himself. One of those narrow ties. So he drove along San Pablo until he saw a clothing store; parking, he got out, taking care to move slowly and not to exert himself too much. Soon he was inside the store, examining the ties in the rack by the coats.

  A plump young Chinese man in shirtsleeves came toward him, smiling. “Good day,” he said to Fergesson. He had on a good-looking tie: gray with bits of red. The old mart, searching, found a tie exactly like it in the group. It cost four-fifty, which seemed to him a lot for a tie. “That’s a nice one,” the Chinese man said. “That’s handmade by a fellow over in Sausalito. He’s got a patent on it.”

  Fergesson bought several ties and left the store, feeling pleased.

  But he still did not want to go home. Lydia was there, and he felt nervous at the idea of running into her. Seated in his car he opened the paper bag of ties; by use of the rear view mirror he began to fasten one of the new ties around the collar of his shirt. While he worked at it—he wore ties so seldom that his fingers got in the way and he could not make out the length to let the small end fall—he realized that the Chinese man had come out of his store onto the sidewalk and was nodding to him sympathetically. So he got out of his car and let the Chinese man fix the tie. The man did a good job, and his fingers felt deft and friendly.

  “Thanks,” Fergesson said, a little embarrassed but at the same time gratified. “I have this big business appointment I have to get to.” He looked at his pocket watch to show how much pressure there was on him.

  The Chinese smiled at him, and watched him get back into the car and start up. He wishes me luck, Fergesson thought as he drove away into traffic. It’s a good sign.

  Now he felt better than he had in months. This is really an occasion, he said to himself.

  He had bought over twenty-five dollars’ worth of ties, he realized. Wow! That was something; that proved something.

  That’s a service they do, he thought, those Chinese. That’s how they make those little businesses pay; they add something extra for nothing; that a white man won’t do. I wouldn’t mind going in there for all my clothes. I know I’d get real individual attention.

  He made a note of the location. So I can find it again, he thought.

  I’ll bet that Chinese guy has made a lot of money, he thought as he made a left turn at an intersection.

  This is really a nice day, he said to himself as he noticed the sky and the sun; he rolled down the car window and sniffed the air. I hope that damn smog doesn’t show up, he thought. That really slays people; it causes lung cancer as much as cigarettes.

  I can’t feel this good all day, he said to himself. Already he was beginning to feel tired; the driving was hard on him, the having to watch other cars, the stops and starts. That’s what makes the smog, he thought. The car exhausts, all these buses and trucks; too many people moving into Oakland—too overcrowded.

  Now he felt the weight of an enormous flu come onto him. It was like the time he had been laid up with the Asiatic virus; he had had it a week before he had realized that he was sick, because the symptoms of the thing did not so much make him feel different as just worse. It had made his fatigue greater, his irritability greater, his gloom, his sense of defeat, more overwhelming. He had gone around snapping at everyone, and been unable to do his work; he had stayed on his feet, and then one morning he had been too tired to get up from the breakfast table. So Lydia had kept him home.

  Like that again, he thought, slowing his car. Heavy all over, his arms in particular; his hands flopped like cement gloves on the wheel. His head wobbled. Even my eye muscles, he thought; his view of the traffic ahead became disfigured. Objects merged and then separated. My God damn left eye is swimming off on its own, he reasoned. Walleyed. Muscles must be pooped.

  Well, he thought, what I need is vitamin B-one. That’s that nerve vitamin. Keeping his car in motion he continued on until he could turn back on San Pablo; he made a left turn against a red light and swung over to the far lane. That’s what took care of me before, he said to himself. That and a couple of good steam baths. But he could not go get into a steam bath this time, because of his being taped up. He had to stay out of
the water; the doctor had warned him. The vitamin would have to do.

  There was a yellow zone in front of the drive-in, and he parked there. Getting out, he carefully made his way up the sidewalk to the health food store. His feet, he discovered, seemed to sink down into the sidewalk, as if the pavement had become ooze. Sinking down a full six inches, he said to himself, lifting his right foot back up and out, setting it down again, lifting his left; left, right, left, and so on, to the screen door of the health food store. Stuck there, for a moment he rested, grinned to himself with anger, and then opened the door with the side of his hand.

  “Morning, Jim,” Betty said.

  He sat down, dropping abruptly and grunting, on the first stool. He folded his arms on the counter and rested his head for a moment; he had done that, years ago, in school; he felt his forehead pressing his wrist. Like in the third grade, he thought. Midday nap. He beckoned to Betty and she came over.

  “Listen,” he said. “How about a bottle of those health vitamins again. Those therapy vitamins.”

  “Oh, now what did you have?” Betty murmured. “Was it the theragrams?” She moved away to the shelf. “Big red pills?”

  He saw the bottle he wanted, pointed to it; she got it down.

  “I remember,” she said. “The B-complex. The niacinamide and panthenol group. This is very good, Jim. This has the liver fraction in it; they use it with anemic people. But it doesn’t have B-twelve in it; that’s the only drawback.” She reached for another bottle. “This has your B-twelve, but it’s a little more expensive. They’re both hematinic formulas.” She eyed him, holding up both bottles.

  “I just want the nerve one,” he said. “B-one.” He reached out for the familiar bottle and she handed it to him. “Can I have some water?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, going to fill a glass.