Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003

by Howard Waldrop

  He and Elizabeth, as Neptuna, are in the rocket interior set, putting on their spacesuits, giving their lines. Bill’s suit wasn’t going on right; he made a small motion with his hand; Fred moved his camera in tight on Bill’s face; Philip would switch to it, or Harry’s shot on Neptuna’s face; the floor manager reached up while Bill was talking and pulled at the lining of the spacesuit, and it went on smoothly; the floor manager crawled out and Fred pulled his camera back again to a two-shot. Then he and Neptuna moved into the airlock; it cycled closed. Harry swung his camera around to the grille of the spacephone speaker; an urgent message came from it, warning Major Spacer that a big Martian dust storm was building up in their area.

  While the voice was coming over the speaker in the tight shot, Bill and Elizabeth walked behind the Moon command center flats and hid behind the rocket fin while the stage crew dropped in the Martian exterior set and the boom man wheeled the microphone around and Fred dollied his camera in.

  “Is Sam okay?” Elizabeth had asked, touching her helmet to Bill’s before the soundman got there.

  “I hope so,” said Bill.

  He looked out. The floor manager, who should have been counting down on his fingers five-four-three-two-one was standing stock still. Fred’s camera wobbled—and he was usually the steadiest man in the business.

  The floor manager pulled off his earphones, shrugged his shoulders, and swung his head helplessly toward the booth.

  It’s got to be time, thought Bill; touched Elizabeth on the arm, and gave his line, backing down off a box behind the fin out onto the set.

  “Careful,” he said. “Sometimes the surface of Mars can look as ordinary as a desert in Arizona.”

  Elizabeth, who was usually unflappable, stared, eyes wide past him at the exterior set. And dropped her Neptuna character, and instead of her line, said: “And sometimes it looks just like Iowa.”

  Bill turned.

  Instead of a desert, and a couple of twisted Martian cacti and a backdrop of Monument Valley, there was the butt-end of a big cow and a barn and silo, some chickens, and a three-rail fence.

  Bill sat in the dressing room, drinking Old Harper from the bottle.

  Patti Page was on the radio, singing of better days.

  There was a knock on the door.

  It was the government goon. He was smiling. There was one sub-poena for Bill, and one for Sam Shorts.

  June 2000

  Bill came out the front door of the apartments on his way to his job as a linotype operator at the New York Times.

  There were, as usual, four or five kids on the stoop, and as usual, too, Rudy, a youngster of fifty years, was in the middle of his rant, holding up two twenty-dollar bills.

  “. . . that there was to trace the dope, man. They changed the money so they could find out where all them coke dollars were. That plastic thread shit in this one, that was the laser radar stuff. They could roll a special truck down your street, and tell what was a crack house by all the eyeball noise that lit up their screens. And the garage-sale people and the flea-market people. They could find that stuff— Hey, Bill—”

  “Hey, Rudy.”

  “—before it All Quit they was goin’ to be able to count the ones in your billfold from six blocks away, man.”

  “Why was that, Rudy?” asked a girl-kid.

  “’Cause they wasn’t enough money! They printed the stuff legit but it just kept going away. It was in the quote ‘underground economy.’ They said it was so people couldn’t counterfeit it on a Savin 2300 or somebullshit, or the camel-jocks couldn’t flood the PXs with fake stuff, but it was so they didn’t have to wear out a lotta shoe leather and do lotsa Hill Street Blues wino-cop type stuff just to get to swear out a lot of warrants. See, that machine in that truck make noise, they take a printout of that to a judge, and pretty soon door hinges was flyin’ all over town. Seen ’em take two blocks out at one time, man. Those was evil times, be glad they gone.”

  “So are we, Rudy; we’re glad they can’t do that even though we never heard of it.”

  “You just wait your young ass,” said Rudy. “Some devious yahoo in Baltimore workin’ on that right now; they had that knowledge once, it don’t just go away, it just mutates, you know. They’ll find a way to do that with vacuum tubes and such . . .”

  Rudy’s voice faded as Bill walked on down toward the corner. Rudy gave some version of that talk, somewhere in the neighborhood, every day. Taking the place of Rudy was the voice from the low-power radio station speakerbox on the corner.

  “. . . that the person was dressed in green pants, a yellow Joe Camel tyvek jacket, and a black T-shirt. The wallet grab occurred four minutes ago at the corner of Lincoln and Jackson, neighbors are asked to be on the lookout for this person, and to use the nearest call-box to report a sighting. Now back to music, from a V-disk transcription, Glenn Miller and His Orchestra with ‘In the Mood.’”

  Music filled the air. Coming down the street was a 1961 armored car, the Wells-Fargo logo spray-painted over, and a cardboard sign saying TAXI over the high windshield. On the front bumper was a sticker that said SCREW THE CITY TAXI COMMISSION.

  Bill held up his hand. The car rumbled over to the curb.

  “Where to, kindly old geezer?”

  Bill said the Times Building, which was about thirty blocks away.

  “What’s it worth to you, Pops?”

  “How about a buck?” said Bill.

  “Real money?”

  “Sure.”

  “Hop in, then. Gotta take somebody up here a couple blocks, and there’ll be one stop on the way, so far.”

  Bill went around back, opened the door and got in, nodding to the other two passengers. He was at work in fifteen minutes.

  It was a nice afternoon, so when Bill got off work he took the omnibus to the edge of the commercial district, got off there and started walking home. Since it was summer, there seemed to be a street fair every other block. He could tell when he passed from one neighborhood to another by the difference in the announcer voices on the low-power stations.

  He passed Ned Ludd’s Store #23, and the line, as usual, was backed out the door onto the sidewalk, and around the corner of the building. In the display window were stereo phonographs and records, transistor radios, batteries, toaster ovens, and none-cable-ready TVs, including an old Philco with the picture tube supported above the console like a dresser mirror.

  Some kids were in line, talking, melancholy looks on their faces, about something. “It was called Cargo Cult,” said one. “You were on an island, with a native culture, and then WWII came, and the people tried to get cargo, you know, trade goods, and other people were trying to get them to keep their native ways . . .”

  “Plus,” said the second kid, “you got to blow up a lotta Japanese soldiers and eat them!”

  “Sounds neat,” said the third, “but I never heard of it.”

  A guy came out of the tavern next door, a little unsteady, and stopped momentarily, like Bill, like everyone else who passed, to watch the pixie-vision soap opera playing in black and white.

  The guy swayed a little, listening to the kids’ conversation; then a determined smile came across his face.

  “Hey, kids,” he said.

  They stopped talking and looked at him. One said “Yeah?”

  The man leaned forward. “Triple picture-in-picture,” he said.

  Their faces fell.

  He threw back his head and laughed, then put his hands in his pockets and weaved away.

  On TV, there was a blank screen while they changed the pixievision tapes by hand, something they did every eight-and-a-half minutes.

  Bill headed on home.

  He neared his block, tired from the walk and his five-hour shift at the paper. He almost forgot Tuesday was mail da
y until he was in sight of the apartments, then walked back to the Postal Joint. For him there was a union meeting notice, in case he hadn’t read the bulletin board at work, and that guy from Ohio was bothering him again with letters asking him questions for the biography of James Dean he’d been researching since 1989, most of which Bill had answered in 1989.

  He was halfway back to the apartments, just past the low-power speaker, when six men dragged a guy, in ripped green pants and what was left of a Joe Camel jacket, out onto the corner, pushed the police button, and stood on the guy’s hands and feet, their arms crossed, talking about a neighborhood fast-pitch softball game coming up that night.

  Bill looked back as he crossed the street. A squad car pulled up and the guys all greeted the policemen.

  * * *

  “Today was mail day, right kids?” said Rudy. “Well in the old days the Feds set up Postal Joint-type places, you know, The Stamp Act, Box Me In, stuff like that, to scam the scammers that was scammin’ you. That shoulda been fine, but they was readin’ like everybody’s mail, like Aunt Gracie’s to you, and yours to her, and you know, your girlfriend’s and boyfriend’s to you, and lookin’ at the Polaroids and stuff, which you sometimes wouldn’t get, you dig? See, when they’s evil to be fought, you can’t be doin’ evil to get at it. Don’t be lettin’ nobody get your mail—there’s a man to see you in the lobby, Bill—”

  “Thanks, Rudy.”

  “—and don’t be readin’ none that ain’t yours. It’s a fool that gets scammed; you honest, you don’t be fallin’ for none o’ that stuff like free boats and cars and beautiful diamond-studded watches, you know?”

  “Sure, Rudy,” said the kids.

  The guy looked at something in his hand, then back at Bill, squinted and said: “Are you Major Spacer?”

  “Nobody but a guy in Ohio’s called me that for fifty years,” said Bill.

  “Arnold Fossman,” said the guy, holding out his hand. Bill shook it.

  “Who you researching? Monty Clift?”

  “Huh? No,” said Fossman. He seemed perplexed, then brightened. “I want to offer you a job, doesn’t pay much.”

  “Son, I got a good-payin’ job that’ll last me way to the end of my time. Came out of what I laughingly call retirement to do it.”

  “Yeah, somebody told me about you being at the Times, with all the old people with the old skills they called back. I don’t think this’ll interfere with that.”

  “I’m old and I’m tired and I been setting a galley and a quarter an hour for five hours. Get to it.”

  “I want to offer you an acting job.”

  “I haven’t acted in fifty years, either.”

  “They tell me it’s just like riding a bicycle. You . . . you might think—wait. Hold on. Indulge me just a second.” He reached up and took Bill’s rimless Trotsky glasses from his face.

  “Whup!” said Bill.

  Fossman took off his own thick black-rimmed glasses and put them over Bill’s ears. The world was skewed up and to the left and down to the right and Fossman was a tiny figure in the distance.

  “I ain’t doin’ anything with these glasses on!” said Bill. “I’m afraid to move.”

  The dim fuzzy world came back, then the sharp normal one as Fossman put Bill’s glasses back on him.

  “I was getting a look at you with thick frames. You’ll be great.”

  “I’m a nice guy,” said Bill. “You don’t get to the point, I’ll do my feeble best to pound you into this floor here like a tent peg.”

  “Okay.” Fossman held up his hand. “But hear me out completely. Don’t say a word till I’m through. Here goes.

  “I want to offer you a job in a play, a musical. Everybody says I’m crazy to do it; I’ve had the idea for years, and now’s the time to do it, with everything like it is. I’ve got the place to do it in, and you know there’s an audience for anything that moves. Then I found out a couple of weeks ago my idea ain’t so original, that somebody tried to do it a long time ago; it closed out of town in Bristol, CT, big flop. But your name came up in connection with it; I thought maybe you had done the show originally, and then they told me why your name always came up in connection with it—the more I heard, and found out you were still around, the more I knew you had to be in it, as some sort of, well, call it what you want—homage, reparation, I don’t know. I’m the producer-guy, not very good with words. Anyway. I’m doing a musical based on the paintings of Grant Wood. I want you to be in it. Will you?”

  “Sure,” said Bill.

  It was a theater not far from work, a 500-seater.

  “Thank God it’s not the Ziegfeld Roof,” said Bill. He and Fossman were sitting, legs draped into the orchestra pit, at the stage apron.

  “Yeah, well, that’s been gone a long time.”

  “They put it under the wrecking ball while I was a drunk, or so they told me,” said Bill.

  “And might I ask how long that was?” asked Fossman.

  “Eight years, three months, and two days,” said Bill. “God, I sound like a reformed alcoholic. Geez, they’re boring.”

  “Most people don’t have what it really takes to be an alcoholic,” said Fossman. “I was the son of one, a great one, and I know how hard you’ve got to work at it.”

  “I had what it takes,” said Bill. “I just got tired of it.”

  He heard on the neighborhood radio there had been a battery riot in the Battery.

  Bill stretched himself, and did some slow exercises. Fifty years of moving any old which way didn’t cure itself in a few days.

  He went over to the mirror and looked at himself.

  The good-looking fair-haired youth had been taken over by a balding old man.

  “Hello,” said Marion.

  “Hello yourself,” said Bill, as he passed her on his way to work. She was getting ready to leave for her job at the library, where every day she took down books, went through the information on the copyright page, and typed it up on two 4x6 cards, one of which was put in a big series of drawers in the entryway, where patrons could find what books were there without looking on all the shelves, and one of which was sent to the central library system.

  She lived in one of the apartments downstairs from Bill. She once said the job would probably take herself, and three others, more than a year, just at her branch. She was a youngster in her forties.

  Bill found rehearsals the same mixture of joy and boredom they had been a half-century before, with the same smells of paint and turpentine coming from the scene shop. The cast had convinced Arnold to direct the play, rather than hiring some schmuck, as he’d originally wanted to do. He’d conceived it; it was his vision.

  During a break one night, Bill lay on the floor; Arnold slumped in a chair, and Shirlene, the lead dancer, lay face down on the sofa with a migraine. Bill chuckled, he thought, to himself.

  “What’s up?” asked Fossman.

  “It was probably just like this in rehearsals when Plautus was sitting where you are.”

  “Guess so.”

  “Were there headaches then?” asked Shirlene.

  “Well, there were in my day, and that wasn’t too long after the Romans,” said Bill. “One of our cameramen had them.” He looked around. “Thanks, Arnold.”

  “For what?”

  “For showing me how much I didn’t remember I missed this stuff.”

  “Well, sure,” said Fossman. “OK, folks, let’s get back to the grind. Shirlene, lie there till you feel better.”

  She got to her feet. “I’ll never feel better,” she said.

  “See—” said Rudy—“it was on January third, and everybody was congratulatin’ themselves on beatin’ that ol’ Y2K monster, and was throwin’ out them ham and lima bean MREs into the dumpsters. Joyful, you know—ano
ther Kohoutek, that was a comet that didn’t amount to a bird fart back in them way old ’70s. Anyway, it was exactly at 10:02 a.m. EST right here, when them three old surplus Russian-made diesel submarines that somebody—and nobody’s still sure just who—bought up back in the 1990s surfaced in three places around the world—and fired off them surplus NASA booster rockets, nine or ten of ’em—”

  “Why ’cause we know that, Rudy, if we don’t know who did it?”

  “’Cause everybody had electric stuff back then could tell what kind of damn watch you was wearin’ from two hundred miles out in space by how fast it was draggin’ down that 1.5-volt battery in it. They knew the subs was old Russian surplus as soon as they surfaced, and knew they was NASA boosters as soon as the fuses was lit—’cause that’s the kind of world your folks let happen for you to live in—that’s why ’cause.”

  “Oh.”

  “As old Rudy was sayin’, them nine or ten missiles, some went to the top of the atmosphere, and some went further out where all them ATT and HBO and them satellites that could read your watch was, and they all went off and meanwhile everybody everywhere was firin’ off all they stuff to try to stop whatever was gonna happen—well, when all that kind of stuff went off, and it turns out them sub missiles was big pulse explosions, what they used to call EMP stuff, and all the other crap went off that was tryin’ to stop the missiles, well then, kids, Time started over as far as ol’ Rudy’s concerned. Not just for the U S of A and Yooropeans, but for everybody everywhere, even down to them gentle Tasaday and every witchety grub-eatin’ sonofagun down under.”