Orbit 8 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  We talked about a great many things.

  “I’d better get you home now,” I said.

  “Okay.” We got up. “Hey, Mr. Rosenthal?”

  “You’d better wipe the chocolate off your face.”

  He wiped. “Mr. Rosenthal...how’d you know I like crushed nuts, and not whipped cream or a cherry?”

  * * * *

  We spent a great deal of time together. I bought him a copy of a pulp magazine called Startling Stories and read him a story about a space pirate who captures a man and his wife and offers the man the choice of opening one of two large boxes—in one is the man’s wife, with twelve hours of air to breathe, in the other is a terrible alien fungus that will eat him alive. Little Gus sat on the edge of the big hole he’d dug, out in the empty lots, dangling his feet, and listening. His forehead was furrowed as he listened to the marvels of Jack Williamson’s “Twelve Hours to Live,” there on the edge of the fort he’d built.

  We discussed the radio programs Gus heard every day: Tennessee Jed, Captain Midnight, Jack Armstrong, Superman, Don Winslow of the Navy. And the nighttime programs: I Love a Mystery, Suspense, The Adventures of Sam Spade. And the Sunday programs:The Shadow, Quiet, Please, The Molle Mystery Theater.

  We became good Mends. He had told his mother and father about “Mr. Rosenthal,” who was his friend, but they’d spanked him for the Startling Stories, because they thought he’d stolen it. So he stopped telling them about me. That was all right; it made the bond between us stronger.

  One afternoon we went down behind the Colony Lumber Company, through the woods and the weeds to the old condemned pond. Gus told me he used to go swimming there, and fishing sometimes, for a black oily fish with whiskers. I told him it was a catfish. He liked that. Liked to know the names of things. I told him that was called nomenclature, and he laughed to know there was a name for knowing names.

  We sat on the piled logs rotting beside the black mirror water, and Gus asked me to tell him what it was like where I lived, and where I’d been, and what I’d done, and everything.

  “I ran away from home when I was thirteen, Gus.”

  “Wasn’t you happy there?”

  “Well, yes and no. They loved me, my mother and father. They really did. They just didn’t understand what I was all about.”

  There was a pain on my neck. I touched a fingertip to the place. It was a boil beginning to grow. I hadn’t had a boil in years, many years, not since I was a . ..

  “What’s the matter, Mr. Rosenthal?”

  “Nothing, Gus. Well, anyhow, I ran away, and joined the carny.”

  “Huh?”

  “A carnival. The Tri-State Shows. We moved through Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, even Kansas...”

  “Boy! A carnival! Just like inToby Tyler or Ten Weeks with the Circus? I really cried when Toby Tyler’s monkey got killed, that was the worst part of it, did you do stuff like that when you were with the circus?”

  “Carnival.”

  “Yeah. Uh-huh. Didja?”

  “Something like that. I carried water for the animals sometimes, although we only had a few of those, and I mostly in the freak show. But usually what I did was clean up and carry food to the performers in their tops—”

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s where they sleep, in rigged tarpaulins. You know, tarps.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I know. Go on, huh.”

  The rash was all the way up to my shoulder now. It itched like hell, and when I’d gone to the drugstore to get an aerosol spray to relieve it, so it wouldn’t spread, I had only to see those round wooden display tables with their glass centers, under which were bottles of Teel tooth liquid, Tangee Red-Red lipstick and nylons with a seam down the back, to know the druggist wouldn’t even know what I meant by Bactine or Liquid Band-Aid.

  “Well, along about K.C. the carny got busted because there were too many moll dips and cannons and paperhangers in the tip...” I waited, his eyes growing huge.

  “What’s all thaaat mean, Mr. Rosenthal?”

  “Ah-ha! Fine carny stiff you’d make. You don’t even know the lingo.”

  “Please, Mr. Rosenthal, please tell me!”

  “Well, K.C is Kansas City, Missouri...when it isn’t Kansas City, Kansas. Except, really, on the other side of the river is Weston. And busted means thrown in jail, and...”

  “You were in jail?”

  “Sure was, little Gus. But let me tell you now. Cannons are pickpockets and moll dips are lady pickpockets, and paperhangers are fellows who write bad checks. And a tip is a group.”

  “So what happened, what happened?”

  “One of these bad guys, one of these cannons, you see, picked the pocket of an assistant district attorney, and we all got thrown in jail. And after a while everyone was released on bail, except me and the Geek. Me, because I wouldn’t tell them who I was, because I didn’t want to go home, and the Geek, because a carny can find a wetbrain inany town to play Geek.”

  “What’s a Geek, huh?”

  The Geek was a sixty-year-old alcoholic. So sunk in his own endless drunkenness that he was almost a zombie...a wetbrain. He was billed as The Thing, and he lived in a portable pit they carried around, and he bit the heads off snakes and ate live chickens and slept in his own dung. And all for a bottle of gin every day. They locked me in the drunk tank with him. The smell. The smell of sour liquor, oozing with sweat out of his pores, it made me sick, it was a smell I could never forget. And the third day, he went crazy. They wouldn’t fix him with gin, and he went crazy. He climbed the bars of the big freestanding drunk tank in the middle of the lockup, and he banged his head against the bars and ceiling where they met, till he fell back and lay there, breathing raggedly, stinking of that terrible smell, his face like a pound of raw meat.

  The pain in my stomach was worse now. I took Gus back to Harmon Drive and let him go home.

  * * * *

  My weight had dropped to just over a hundred and ten. My clothes didn’t fit. The acne and boils were worse. I smelled of witch hazel. Gus was getting more antisocial.

  I realized what was happening.

  I was alien to my own past. If I stayed much longer, God only knew what would happen to little Gus...but certainly I would waste away. Perhaps just vanish. Then...would Gus’s future cease to exist, too? I had no way of knowing; but my choice was obvious. I had to return.

  And couldn’t! I was happier here than I’d ever been before. The bigotry and violence Gus had known before I came to him had ceased. They knew he was being watched over. But Gus was becoming more erratic. He was shoplifting toy soldiers and comic books from the Kresge’s and constantly defying his parents. It was turning bad. I had to go back.

  I told him on a Saturday. We had gone to see a Lash La Rue Western and Val Lewton’s The Cat People at the Lake Theater. When we came back I parked the car on Mentor Avenue, and we went walking in the big, cool, dark woods that fronted Mentor where it met Harmon Drive.

  “Mr. Rosenthal,” Gus said. He looked upset

  “Yes, Gus?”

  “I gotta problem, sir.”

  “What’s that, Gus?” My head ached. It was a steady needle of pressure above the right eye.

  “My mother’s gonna send me to a military school.”

  I remembered. Oh, God, I thought. It had been terrible. Precisely the thing not to do to a child like Gus.

  “They said it was ‘cause I was rambunctious. They said they were gonna send me there for a year or two. Mr. Rosenthal...don’t let’m send me there. I didn’t mean to be bad. I just wanted to be around you.”

  My heart slammed inside me. Again. Then again. “Gus, I have to go away.”

  He stared at me. I heard a soft whimper.

  “Take me with you, Mr. Rosenthal. Please. I want to see Galveston. We can drive a dynamite truck in North Carolina. We can go to Matawatchan, Ontario, Canada, and work topping trees, we can sail on boats, Mr. Rosenthal!”

  “Gus...”

  “
We can work the carny, Mr. Rosenthal. We can pick peanuts and oranges all across the country. We can hitchhike to San Francisco and ride the cable cars. We can ride the boxcars, Mr. Rosenthal... I promise I’ll keep my legs inside an’ not dangle ‘em. I remember what you said about the doors slamming when they hook’m up. I’ll keep my legs inside, honest I will...”

  He was crying. My head ached hideously. But he was crying!

  “I’ll have to go, Gus!”

  “You don’t care!” He was shouting. “You don’t care about me, you don’t care what happens to me! You don’t care if I die...you don’t—”

  He didn’t have to say it: you don’t love me.

  “I do, Gus. I swear to God, I do!”

  I looked up at him; he was supposed to be my friend. But he wasn’t. He was going to let them send me off to that military school.

  “I hope you die!”

  Oh, dear God, Gus, I am! I turned and ran out of the woods as I watched him run out of the woods.

  I drove away. The green Plymouth with the running boards and the heavy body; it was hard steering. The world swam around me. My eyesight blurred. I could feel myself withering away.

  I thought I’d left myself behind, but little Gus had followed me out of the woods. Having done it, I now remembered: why had I remembered none of it before? As I drove off down Mentor Avenue, I came out of the woods and saw the big green car starting up, and I ran wildly forward, crouching low, wanting only to go with him, my friend, me. I threw in the clutch and dropped the stick into first and pulled away from the curb as I reached the car and climbed onto the rear fender, pulling my legs up, hanging onto the trunk latch. I drove weaving, my eyes watering and things going first blue then green, hanging on for dear life to the cold latch handle. Cars whipped around, honking madly, trying to tell me that I was on the rear of the car, but I didn’t know what they were honking about, and scared their honking would tell me I was back there, hiding.

  After I’d gone almost a mile, a car pulled up alongside, and a woman sitting next to the driver looked down at me crouching there, and I made a please don’t tell sign with my finger to my freezing lips, but the car pulled ahead and the woman rolled down her window and motioned to me. I rolled down my window and the woman yelled across through the rushing wind that I was back there on the rear fender. I pulled over and fear gripped me as the car stopped and I saw me getting out of the door, and I crawled off the car and started running away. But my legs were cramped and cold from having hung on back there, and I ran awkwardly; then coming out of the dark was a road sign, and I hit it, and it hit me in the side of the face, and I fell down, and I ran toward myself, lying there, crying, and I got to him just as I got up and ran off into the gravel yard surrounding the Colony Lumber Company.

  Little Gus was bleeding from the forehead where he’d struck the metal sign. He ran into the darkness, and I knew where he was running ... I had to catch him, to tell him, to make him understand why I had to go away.

  I came to the hurricane fence and ran and ran till I found the place where I’d dug out under it, and I slipped down and pulled myself under and got my clothes all dirty, but I got up and ran back behind the Colony Lumber Company, into the sumac and the weeds, till I came to the condemned pond back there. Then I sat down and looked out over the black water. I was crying.

  I followed the trail down to the pond. It took me longer to climb over the fence than it had taken him to crawl under it. When I came down to the pond, he was sitting there with a long blade of saw grass in his mouth, crying softly.

  I heard him coming, but I didn’t turn around.

  I came down to him, and crouched behind him. “Hey,” I said quietly. “Hey, little Gus.”

  I wouldn’t turn around. I wouldn’t.

  I spoke his name again, and touched him on the shoulder, and in an instant he was turned to me, hugging me around the chest, crying into my jacket, mumbling over and over, “Don’t go, please don’t go, please take me with you, please don’t leave me here alone...”

  And I was crying, too. I hugged little Gus, and touched his hair, and felt him. holding onto me with all his might, stronger than a seven-year-old should be able to hold on, and I tried to tell him how it was, how it would be: “Gus...hey, hey, little Gus, listen to me ... I want to stay, you know I want to stay...but I can’t.”

  I looked up at him; he was crying, too. It seemed so strange for a grown-up to be crying like that, and I said, “If you leave me I’ll die. I will!”

  I knew it wouldn’t do any good to try explaining. He was too young. He wouldn’t be able to understand.

  He pulled my arms from around him, and he folded my hands in my lap, and he stood up, and I looked at him. He was gonna leave me. I knew he was. I stopped crying. I wouldn’t let him see me cry.

  I looked down at him. The moonlight held his face in a pale photograph. I wasn’t fooling myself. He’d understand. He’d know. I turned and started back up the path. Little Gus didn’t follow. He sat there looking back at me. I only turned once to look at him. He was still sitting there like that.

  He was watching me. Staring up at me from the pond side. And I knew what instant it had been that had formed me. It wasn’t all the people who’d called me a wild kid, or a strange kid, or any of it. It wasn’t being poor or being lonely.

  I watched him go away. He was my friend. But he didn’t have no guts. He didn’t. But I’d show him! I’d really show him! I was gonna get out of here, go away, be a big person and do a lot of things, and some day I’d run into him someplace and see him and he’d come up and shake my hand and I’d spit on him. Then I’d beat him up.

  He walked up the path and went away. I sat there for a long time, by the pond. Till it got real cold.

  I got back in the car, and went to find the way back to the future, where I belonged. It wasn’t much, but it was all I had. I would find it ... I still had the dragoon...and there were many stops I’d made on the way to becoming me. Perhaps Kansas City; perhaps Matawatchan, Ontario, Canada; perhaps Galveston; perhaps Shelby, North Carolina.

  And crying, I drove. Not for myself, but for myself, for little Gus, for what I’d done to him, forced him to become. Gus...Gus!

  But...oh, God...what if I came back again...and again? Suddenly, the road did not look familiar.

  <>

  * * * *

  AVRAM DAVIDSON

  RITE OF SPRING

  “The winter meat is about all gone,” said Mrs. Robinson.

  “So’s the winter, for that matter,” her husband said. “Almost...”

  “...and the potatoes...”

  Mr. Robinson got up rather quickly and looked in the bin. “Guess there’s enough, though. I can do without greens with my meat. If I have to. But I sure hate to do without potatoes.”

  “Yes,” she said, drily. “I’ve noticed.”

  He looked at her, as though for a moment mildly surprised or puzzled. Then, with a faint smile, he put his arm around her. For a moment she stood there, her head bent and touching his. With a little sound of content, next, she moved away. She gestured toward one of the cabinets. “There’ll be all that to do.”

  He nodded. “Not time yet, though...Alice...”

  “Yes?”

  Mr. Robinson coughed. “Boy was trying to get in the girl’s room again last night.”

  She whirled around, quicker than you might have thought. A look of alarm or concern faded from her face. “He didn’t, though...”

  Mr. Robinson shook his head. “Scuttled off quick enough, he heard me coming.” And did quick brief mimicry of himself, bleary-eyed, clutching an imaginary bathrobe, coughing a rheumy, old-man’s-nighttime cough, and shuffling along noisily. Abruptly he stopped and straightened up, ceased to be an ill and probably querulous old man, was once again stalwart, thickset, and vigorous, for all his grey hairs. He and his wife chuckled.