The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories

by Rod Serling

  This man was Mr. Luther Dingle who sold the aforementioned vacuum cleaner, or at least went through the motions. His volume of business was roughly that of a valet at a hobos’ convention. And while he was a consummate failure in almost everything else, he was an exceptionally good listener and, whenever Mr. Kransky had a mad on, Mr. Dingle proved a most accessible. vulnerable prominent-jawed scapegoat.

  Kransky’s voice blasted through the room like a bugle call at Hialeah. “Don’t gimme that, Callahan,” he roared, pushing the bookie’s forefinger out of the way. “I told yuh before—I don’t pay off on a bum call!”

  Callahan opened a toothless mouth and slammed his beer glass on the bar. “T’ree umpires called him out,” the bookie said positively. “I called him out. Eleven thousand fans called him out. Final score, Pittsburgh three, Dodgers nothin’. You and me got an even bet. I got the Pirates—hence you owe me five bucks.”

  Hubert Kransky left his stool like Discoverer II off a launching pad at Canaveral. He stuck a gnarled fist in front of Callahan’s face. “I know a bum call when I see one,” he announced. “That ball was foul when it hit him. So instead of an out, it was a foul ball. So who’s to say he wouldn’t’ve got on base so that when Pignatano hit the single, a run would have scored, and like that! And furthermore, Callahan”—Kransky’s voice shook with rage—“you’re a cheatin’ insult to the American bookie.”

  Callahan too rose from his stool and put two hands on his breast like Sarah Bernhardt, his toothless mouth working furiously as injured innocence rose up from deep within. This was shortly replaced by a pugnacity that made O’Toole the bartender reach down to a shelf under the bar where he kept odd and assorted items like blackjacks, a World War I revolver, and one half of a broken bottle. He pointed the bottle menacingly at Callahan.

  “I told you once before awready, Callahan! You start a brawl in here again and I’ll fix that mouth of yours so that you’ll be doin’ your drinkin’ through a tube stuck in a vein.”

  The bookie’s hands stroked his breast and he looked positively outraged. “Me?” he asked. “Me? I give you trouble?” He pointed to Mr. Kransky. “Tell that to the number one welsher of all the western states over there! This guy still owes me money on the second Dempsey-Tunney fight.”

  Kransky’s answering shout had the volume and carry of the brass section of the Boston Pops. “Yeah, yeah, yeah! Mainly on account of that was a bum call! And I don’t pay off on bum calls.”

  His bullet head slowly revolved atop the bull-like shoulders uninterrupted by anything remotely resembling a neck. His eyes fixed finally on Mr. Luther Dingle who sat smiling happily over his beer.

  “You remember that fight, Dingle?” Kransky shouted as if the vacuum cleaner sales man were five blocks away. “Tunney’s out of the ring and the ref gives him a long count Like everybody in the room coulda gone out for a beer, engaged in some small talk, and then come back and still sit down before the ref is finished counting. Now how about that? I’m askin’ you—you—how about that?”

  Dingle pointed to himself. “Me?” he asked.

  Kransky walked over to him. “You. Yeah, you. You talk about bum calls. You see the game on television last night? Ninth inning? Snider’s up with two down and we got Howard and Moon on first and second and this umpire with no pupils in his eyes calls a foul ball an out! You see that?”

  Dingle nodded happily “As a matter of fact, I did watch the game on television,” he said, sipping the head off his beer. “Exceptional defensive play, exceptional. Abner Doubleday would have been proud.”

  “Never mind Abner Doubleday,” Kransky said, poking a finger against Dingle’s chest. “I leave it up to you. Was that a foul ball or was that an out?”

  Dingle thoughtfully wiped the foam from his mouth. “Well, it appeared to me,” he said, “that the ball was hit in fair territory. Consequently, upon its striking the ground and then hitting the batter, the rules would very plainly indicate that the batter was out.”

  He sat back contentedly and smiled up at the chunk of concrete that glared back at him.

  “You realize, of course, pal,” Kransky said softly, “that you’re calling me a liar! Now I ain’t an unreasonable man, so I’ll give you one more chance.” He put his face an inch away from Dingle’s. “Was that a foul ball or was it an out?”

  Luther Dingle stared intently into the red-hazed retinas, smiled again, and began, “Well, it’s my considered opinion—”

  The sentence was fractured by a looping right hand that Mr. Kransky threw with great precision and considerable verve. It landed with impact somewhere between the bridge of Mr. Dingle’s nose and his right cheekbone. It catapulted his one-hundred-and-eighteen-pound frame over the back of the chair and propelled him through the air to land within spitting distance of the brass bowl close to the bar.

  Mr. Anthony O’Toole lifted Dingle easily to his feet, dusted him off and patted him back into consciousness. With equal finesse, he placed Mr. Dingle on the bar stool where the salesman wafted gently to and fro like a willow stalk in a north wind. (Mr. O’Toole felt very strongly that a reputable place of business simply could not have unconscious customers on the floor.) He waited a moment for the color to come back into Dingle’s face, then turned accusingly toward Kransky.

  “How come you always gotta hit Dingle, Kransky? You hit him last week, you hit him the week before.”

  “A man can only stand so much,” Kransky said, as he marched back to his stool at the bar. “I’m tired of this guy contradictin’ me! And when somebody calls me a liar—there’s my honor to consider.” He drained the beer from his glass and looked threateningly into the glazed eyes of Luther Dingle.

  “Your honor?” Callahan, the bookie, snorted deprecatingly “Why you’ve got nothin’ but larceny in you all the way from your crotch to where you part your hair. When you die, Kransky, they’re gonna have to screw you into the ground.”

  Once again Kransky leaped to his feet. A thick left arm shot out to grab the gently oscillating Dingle by his coat front.

  “How about that?” he roared. “Is that true? I’m crooked? I leave it to you, Dingle. Am I crooked?”

  Dingle was having a dream. He was standing in the wings of Minsky’s burlesque on 46th Street. A tall, statuesque blonde had just beckoned to him from the other side of the stage. Dingle nodded happily, his absolute, unequivocal acceptance of whatever the young lady had in mind. The affair was ended by Mr. Kransky’s right hand, which landed on the side of Dingle’s face and sent him sprawling head first off the stool.

  Once again O’Toole ministered to him with at least a perfunctory professionalism if not tender loving care.

  Mr. Kransky began another battle with Mr. Callahan on the kind of odds any decent and legitimate bookie would give on Saturday’s St. Louis-Cincinnati double-header and Mr. Dingle lapsed into another dream.

  And, though none of the aforementioned gentlemen knew it, they were being observed very closely and with great attention by a large, two-headed figure, complete with antennae and a radar-like, protuberant wand that undulated, revolved, and let out small metallic bleeps at regular intervals.

  To the human eye this figure was quite invisible and the voices of the two heads were inaudible to the human ear. This figure was in fact a visitor from the planet Mars and of sufficiently advanced intelligence to know beyond any doubt that no leaders were to be found in this nondescript Earth bar.

  One waxen, slightly greenish face nodded toward the other, as Kransky’s voice traveled through their hearing apparatus and was automatically translated into a Martian tongue “...and I say that anybody who tells me that the Philadelphia Phillies had any right winning the pennant that year is out of their green grass mind! And furthermore if you’re going to sit there and tell me—”

  Kransky’s voice continued its strident blare as Head One of the Martian creature said to Head Two, “Are you sure we’re invisible?”

  The second head nodded and answered, “Beyond any doubt
.” Its slightly orangish eyes stared toward the group of men. “I wish they were!” Then with a shudder, “Did you ever see such jerky-looking creatures?”

  The other nodded in agreement. “Typical Earth men.” The antenna atop his head vibrated slightly. “Not all of them, though,” the head continued. “The one in the middle. The one who’s just suffered the physical damage. Now this might be the very one we’re looking for. Sssh,” he added hurriedly after a pause. “I’m receiving his waves now.”

  The two heads remained motionless for a moment as the “waves” left Mr. Dingle’s battered little frame.

  “He’s referred to as a Dingle,” Head Two announced. “He’s an abject coward. He doesn’t even possess what the Earth creatures call ‘minimum muscles.’ He’s a decidedly subphysical type.” He turned to his companion head and announced positively, “I believe we have found our subject!”

  “You intend to give him the additional strength?”

  “We haven’t found anyone weaker, have we? Yes, this one will make an exceptional subject. I would think...oh, about eleven secograms, atomic weight. That should make him roughly three hundred times as strong as the average man.” He paused, staring across the room at “the Dingle.” “Yes,” he continued with a nod, “I believe that ought to do it. We’d better check with central laboratories. Tell them we’ve picked a subject and they can start observing him now.” He turned to the other head. “You may proceed.”

  At this moment the bartender was patting Luther Dingle’s face, mumbling something about just why the hell Dingle couldn’t learn to be neutral. “Luther,” he said into the blinking eyes of the vacuum cleaner salesman, “you don’t got to answer this guy at all. Just because he didn’t happen to like the Phillies—”

  “Let him tell me,” Kransky interrupted. “You got a brain, don’t you, Dingle? You got a point of view? All right, what did you think of the Phillies in 1953?”

  Dingle looked from one to the other. “The Phillies in 1953,” he repeated dully.

  “That’s right,” Kransky prodded him. “You tell me for example if you think Robin Roberts was one half the pitcher that Clem Labine was that year.”

  The bartender closed his eyes and shook his head, waiting for the sound of Dingle’s voice and then the inevitable crack of knuckle against face.

  “Well,” Dingle began, clearing his throat. “Of the two...I’d be inclined to take...” He looked up wistfully. “Roberts,” he whispered.

  Kransky’s bloodshot eyes narrowed. “Buddy,” he said softly, “why alla time you got to fight me? Now let’s run through it one more time. You say that Robin Roberts had more stuff than Clem Labine?”

  Dingle’s smile was a pathetic grimace. “To be perfectly honest,” Dingle said, simply because he could be nothing else, “as to the two men, as good as they both are, all things being equal—”

  “So c’mon awready,” Kransky interrupted. “Who do you pick?”

  Dingle’s voice was a frail murmur. “Roberts?”

  The bartender flinched and looked away as once again Mr. Dingle landed spread-eagle on the floor, a small, dark mouse appearing under his right eye. And while O’Toole helped Dingle to his feet he informed Kransky, “I’m tellin’ you for the last time, you pull any more rough stuff around here and I ain’t gonna let you in that front door.” He slapped Dingle’s cheeks. “How do you feel, Dingle?” he asked with concern.

  “Clem Labine was definitely superior,” Luther Dingle announced, though his eyes were atilt and it was quite obvious he had no idea where he was.

  “You see,” Kransky shouted triumphantly, “all I’m doin’ is makin’ him see things clearer!”

  As Dingle felt consciousness slowly stream back into him he became aware of yet another odd and indefinable sensation. It was a warm tingle that ran through and through him and it lasted for perhaps three or four glowing minutes. The ray of light that shot across the room from the invisible two-headed creature could not be seen by any of the sports enthusiasts, but it had landed directly on Dingle’s face and remained on him for several minutes.

  “How do you feel, Dingle,” O’Toole asked again, patting his cheeks. “You doin’ O.K. now?”

  Dingle blinked his eyes and looked across at Kransky. “Definitely Clem Labine!”

  Kransky looked satisfied and Dingle allowed himself to be helped to his feet once more by the bartender, who picked up the vacuum cleaner and the accessories and crammed them into Dingle’s arms. At the same time he gently urged the little man toward the door.

  “Dingle,” the bartender said to him confidentially as they walked, “you mind a word of advice? There’s some guys in this world that are gonna get punched in the nose no matter who they pick in a ball game, who they vote for, or the color of the tie they put on in the morning.”

  At the door the bartender patted Dingle’s arm. “You’re one of those guys, Luther,” he said sadly. “So do you know what I think you ought to do from now on? Don’t talk. Just nod. If a guy asks you who you like in the third, you just smile at him. If somebody asks you who you’re votin’ for—you just nod. And if you’re sittin’ in the ballpark at some double-header and you hear some guy yellin’ for the Dodgers—you don’t go yellin’ for the Pirates. You just leave your seat and go buy a hot dog. Understand, Dingle?”

  Dingle nodded and then suddenly looked surprised. He put down the vacuum cleaner, then held up his hands in front of him and studied his fingers.

  “Whatsa matter?” the bartender asked.

  “That’s odd.”

  “What’s odd?”

  “I feel...I feel so funny,” Dingle said in a strained voice.

  Then he shook his head as if shrugging off the whole thing and bent over to pick up the vacuum cleaner. He did indeed lift it off the floor. As a matter of fact he lifted it high over his head, then—with the same look of surprise—juggled it in his arms.

  “Now what do you suppose caused that?” he said.

  “Caused what? the bartender asked him.

  “The vacuum cleaner,” Dingle explained. “It feels as light as a feather.” With a hasty, apologetic smile he added, “Not that the machine isn’t light. It happens to be one of the lightest on the market. It’s a handy-dandy, jim-cracker, A-one piece of merchandise, guaranteed to lighten the labor and lengthen the life of the wonderful partner in the American home—the housewife!” He lifted the vacuum cleaner above his head several times. “But...” he stammered, “but I never thought it was this light!”

  He looked at the vacuum cleaner, bewildered, then reached for the doorknob. A moment later he stood gaping at O’Toole. The doorknob was still in his hand, but the door was completely ripped off three metal hinges. Both Callahan and Kransky at the bar gulped their beers and examined the insides of the glasses. The door weighed a good eighty-five pounds and there stood Dingle holding it aloft as if it were a single sheet of balsa.

  Dingle slowly put down the door and leaned it against the wall. He looked at Mr. Anthony O’Toole who quite obviously took a dim view of small vacuum cleaner salesmen pulling doors from their hinges.

  “Dingle,” O’Toole said with vast hurt, ‘With all your faults—despite the fact that you cost me in iodine what I normally have to put out for the water bill—you’ve always been a nice type fellah who never gave me no trouble. Now why all of a sudden you got to wreck my front door?”

  “Believe me, Mr. O’Toole,” Dingle said in a tone that would have convinced the most hardened skeptic, “I am mystified. I am absolutely mystified. The door just seemed to—to come off in my hand.” He reached over to touch the knob by way of illustration and then gasped as he heard the sound of wrenching wood. The doorknob was now in his hand and a large, gaping hole was in the door where it had been.

  Kransky and Callahan goggled at one another and reached for a bottle of house whiskey from which they each gulped in turn. Dingle hurriedly went out through the opening where formerly had hung the heavy door, leaving behind him the incredulou
s Anthony O’Toole, his bar companions who kept on drinking and shaking their heads, and a two-headed Martian whose name was roughly translated as “Xurthya.”

  A little later Mr. Dingle was walking briskly along an attractive tree-lined residential street, feeling younger and more exuberant than he could ever remember feeling before. He carried the vacuum cleaner and the attachments under his left arm and had almost forgotten their existence. Two small boys were playing catch with a football in front of one of the white picket-fenced yards. The smaller of the two boys, whose freckled face bore just a passing resemblance to that of John J. Dillinger, held the ball and turned to Dingle as he approached.

  “You here again?” the boy asked. “Didn’t my old man say he was gonna punch you in the jaw if you came around here botherin’ us again?”

  Dingle checked the jut of the little boy’s jaw, looked down at his notebook, then up at the numbered address on the house. Somewhat relieved, he nodded. “You’re quite right, little man,” he said, smiling. “Wrong address. I was heading next door.”

  He continued to walk down the sidewalk past the picket fence. The freckled little gargoyle threw the football straight and unerringly at the back of Dingle’s head, knocking off his hat. Dingle smiled a little wanly, waggled a finger, retrieved his hat, then awkwardly picked up the ball.

  “Now that’s not the best of all possible manners, is it?” he said gently.

  The little boy leered at him and made some kind of indefinable sound with a tongue sticking out. “Aww, go peddle your vacuum cleaners, ya little creep! And throw my ball back.”

  Dingle again moved his mouth around in the shape of a smile and, as pleasantly as he knew how, said, “Go out for a pass. Isn’t that what they say? Go out for a pass?”

  He daintily, albeit inexpertly, hauled back and threw the ball toward the boy. It soared up into the air as if filled with helium and disappeared over a church steeple several blocks away. The tan underneath the boy’s freckles paled as he gaped toward the disappearing ball. His companion simply sat on the porch steps and closed his eyes. Three doors down the street a painter on a ladder looked up toward the sky, dropped his bucket, and slid halfway down the ladder before he could collect himself.