by John Sladek
‘No, no, I mean the LORD moves me to carry on His work. I wanna work on the wall,.’
‘Oh, that.’ She unloaded herself in the creaky tube-frame chair again, and at the same time took up a slice of sticky coffee cake. Billikins rose to go.
Her mouth, poised over the cake, curved in a nasty smile. ‘All I can say is, if that wall is the LOORD’S work, then the LOORD oughta have his mouth washed out with soap.’
Nurse Harriet Saga took a hairpin out of her coffee cup. What a crummy job. She picked up the paper and leafed through it, tasting her thumb to hasten past meaningless headlines toward the horoscope page.
POPE’S BULL ON VIRGIN MARY
CHINESE DELEGATES NOT RECOGNIZED
MORE EAST BERLINERS COME OVER WALL
‘We almost didn’t make it’
SCIENTIST: BEARS CAN TALK!
She felt cheated by the paper this morning. There were no sexational movie star drug raid shocking truth stories, nothing. Even her horoscope was vague.
The Big Cheat was this crummy job, looking after a feeb like that. She’d only taken on the job because her niece, Marilyn, who worked for the Crusade, had told her they needed a nurse for some secret project—and because Billy was so handsome. No one had told her his handsomeness was all show, all for the old ladies from Cedar Rapids…
True, the Crusade paid her a hundred a month over her salary, but that was to keep her quiet. The funny part was, they wouldn’t even let her talk to Marilyn about it. All the girl knew was that her aunt was taking care of some ‘old man’. Which was just as well, all around, because otherwise Marilyn would be over here every day—she had autographed pictures all over her little room—and there wouldn’t be those pleasant afternoons with Jerry.
‘Huh? That’s funny.’ She looked at the headline and even some of the small type under it. ‘BILLY TO PREACH AT FERTILIZER PALACE’, it still said. Some big place in Kansas City. And how could he be out preaching when he was right here? And all those TV programs—maybe they weren’t taped re-runs. A twin brother? An actor 3 ringer? She’d have to ask Jerry. Something wrong, anyhow, and it was worth more than a hundred a month to keep quiet about It.
At noon, Nurse turned on the TV and sat with him, watching a cartoon. Billikins saw that the cartoon was really a message from Jehovah to His Person on Earth, showing forth through the simple parable of Bill the Cat, Mary the Canary and Mike Mouse the divine drama:
Beelzebub (Baal-Ze-bul, the shit god, or just plain Bill) wanted to catch and eat Mary, but he always ended up in trouble: running through a brick wall to leave a Bill-shaped doorway, receiving his own bomb in the mail (a Negrofying blockbuster) or flattened by a mallet. But—and this was the important part—Baal would also be restored to his full powers! There was no hint that Mike and his legions would ever, finally, triumph over the powers of dark-seeing Bill!
The cartoon finished with Bill holding his hotfoot and running off into the flat perspectives of distanceland (whence Lucifer shall return, bearing the same light), a fade…and Bette Cooke, looking wonderfully substantial, smiled right at him.
‘Something from the oven,’ she said, ‘for Baby and me.’
And it clarified everything. The three chillun of God melted together with love in the burning heart of Jesus, where Bill was Mary was Mike, where Bette Cooke was Billy Koch, being the light and bearing the light and bearing witness to the light. And the light was the sun of God, Baal.
Ten
One Man’s Fight (against the Black Conspiracy), by Wes Davis, became a national best-seller that month, nudging down on the non-fiction list two cookbooks and a factual account of the way lions live. Many found in Wes’s simple phrases and clumsy constructions the honesty of the blunt backwoodsman who speaks his mind. That Wes had been born and brought up in New York, and lived less than a year in the Midwest, made no difference. So broadcast was the fear of a Negro conspiracy that the reviewers were merciful, the media congratulatory, and the public delighted. At last, at long last, they said, someone is saying it out loud.
A Southern Congressman demanded to know why this man was in jail. A Northern preacher used sections of the book in his sermons (especially: ‘Why Jesus Chose White Disciples’, ‘Why Washington Kept Slaves’, and ‘The Black Beast: Human?’). An old lady who had been ‘receiving’ dark presences on the gold rims of her glasses began the Free Wes Davis Society. A schoolteacher, fired for carving the word SIN on the neck of a Negro child, formed the Organization for the Rights of Gentile Anglo-Saxon Man. The Klan revived, and the American Nazi Party gained new strength. Of all right-nut organizations, only the Jess Hurchists stood still.
From their tiny St Paul office, Amy and Grover carried on underground work on the largest scale they could afford. Amy spent her days writing anonymous letters to Congressmen, the President and the FBI. (‘We wondered if you had noticed how the little cent-sign ¢ on our government’s postage stamps looks a lot like a hammer and sickle…’) while Grover worked on his deciphering.
He was sure that almost anything, if you looked into it, could yield up a Communist plot. The number and arrangement of milk bottles on doorsteps in the neighborhood, for example. That had proved an ingenious code, and through breaking it Grover discovered that They were poisoning the money with radioactives. He wasn’t able to get an unrigged Geiger counter anywhere, but Grover had a special dowsing stick that did just as well. Whenever he saw a dollar bill (alas! not often enough) he would suspend the forked stick over it. If it dipped, the dollar was ‘hot’—riddled with radioactives.
One of his richest sources of ciphers was the morning paper, especially the daily ‘Crypto Cutie’ feature. Through this he had already found out that the ‘Red’ Cross was a front organization, that most accidents happened in the home because Communists had flooded the market with booby-trapped home items, ranging from fluoride toothpaste and can openers designed to give a ragged edge to the more insidious items like ‘fry-o-matic’ electric blankets and exploding furnaces.
‘Eureka, Amy!’
‘You have found it?’
‘You betcha I have! Another plot of the International Cummunisk Conspiracy. Just feast your eyes on this, yesterday’s Cutie.’
He was not, of course, calling her a name. Amy realized her mistake and read the clipping he was holding out:
CRYPTO CUTIE
DKGTQ DTZDXQ AEQ RGB ET ZAD UGEX.
(Hint: Someone in a jam? Quite the reverse,
although he may be in a state!)
‘What on earth can it mean?’ Amy tilted her glasses to reread the inscription, but it remained a mystery.
‘Well here’s the “official” solution from today’s paper,’ he said, handing her another clipping.
EVANS ENTERS HIS JAM IN THE FAIR.
‘And here’s the real solution.’ He held up a sheet of paper.
‘CIGAR CANCER YDR UGS DA NYC PGDE,’ the top line read. The next was a re-grouping of the same letters: ‘CIGAR CANCERY DRUGS DA NYC. (signed) PGDE.’ He read it aloud, adding that ‘da’ was Russky for ‘okay’.
‘This is serious, Amy. We’d better get off a wire to the FBI.’
‘Yes, Grover.’ She looked at him, into his eyes, beaming at him all the love and admiration that could penetrate her lenses and his.
Grover turned away. ‘Yes, and I want to look into the possibility that the Redskies are running the Supreme Court by radios planted in the heads of all the justices. So get me that book from the library, on the Great Pyramid.’
He had found the dimensions of the Great Pyramid invaluable in learning things about the Supreme Court. The lengths of its secret passages in feet gave him numerical indices: one representing fidelity; two, deception; three, conspiracy; four, a quarrel and so on. The turns of the passages to left or right were self-evident, while upward or downward turns meant improvement or decline.
Likewise many other codes had tipped him off: The names of towns on the bottoms of coke bottles were used to dispatch agents of the
conspiracy to their new locations; car license plates (along with the position and number of cars parked on certain streets each morning) delivered the ‘orders of the day’; supermarket shoppers’ elaborate code of purchases revealed a plan to bombard the television waves with subliminal messages (‘QUIT WORK TODAY, CIVIL SERVANTS’ and ‘KIDS, DON’T DRINK MILKP).
If Amy had had the courage to write ‘GROVER, AMY LOVES YOU’ into an elaborate cipher and run it in the personal column of the Minneapolis Sun, she might have got through to him. Anything more direct was useless.
MacCormick Hines put down One Man’s Fight and rubbed his eyes.
‘Maybe I’m getting old. I always thought the real fight was individuality and private enterprise against atheistic communism. Now this fella says the Negroes are…No, I just can’t believe that. I used to watch Amos-n’-Andy. Why, those people are happy’.
‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that, sir,’ said one of his bright young men. ‘The natural state of the Negroes may be one of simple ignorance and happiness—but they’ve been stirred up by left-wing bastards of all kinds.’
Mac sighed. ‘You may be right. You may be right, there. In my day, a man could earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, tuck away a little next egg, bring home the bacon, plan for his family’s future. And the next thing he knew, he was…’
‘The owner of National Arsenamid, sir? Speaking of which, I have the figures…’
‘Don’t interrupt!’ Mr Hines reached out and tweaked the young man’s nose. ‘I don’t want to hear anything more about the National Whatever it is! Get out of here!’
Holding his injured nose, the young man retreated. Mac was not to be left alone, however. Almost at once another b.y.m. strode in, bearing a thick file like a fasces.
‘Hail Wes Davis!’ he said.
Mac shook a fist at him. ‘None of that! I’ve just been reading Wes Davis’s book, and he doesn’t have a speck of sound business sense. I doubt if the fellow knows the value of a dollar! If you want to hail someone, hail me. On second thought, why don’t you hail a cab and leave me alone? Put it on the expense account. Put a letter of resignation on the expense account while you’re at it. What’s that file supposed to be?’
‘Sir, you requested the complete dossier on the Muller-Fokker tapes.’
MacCormick Hines took the file, turned over pages for a few seconds, then closed it. ‘Tell me what it says.’
The young man stood at parade rest, hands locked together behind his back, feet apart. ‘There seem to be only four reels of the tape in existence, sir,’ he said, or rather shouted. ‘Dr Müller-Fokker himself manufactured them, and the process is lost—gone with him to Black Power Russia.’
Which Russia?’
‘If they aren’t, why was one of their writers, Pushkin, a nigra? And how about the Black Sea? Why did all the White Russians flee the revolution?’
‘The tape, the tape.’
‘Yes sir. The Russians deny that Müller-Fokker has defected, so far, sir. Anyway, the tapes were used for some of Dr Müller-Fokker’s private research. Then they went to the Mud Flats Biomedical Research Project.’
‘I know what happened there. Go on.’
‘The four reels were put up for sale in a surplus store here in town, sir. Two of them were sold to the Billy Koch Crusade, but we’ve only been able to find one of them there. That one is being used to run a robot replica of Billy Koch, and the key man to see is a Mr Jerry Zurkenhall. If you wish to interview him, sir, we can arrange that. The replica is due to speak in town soon.’
‘Where are the other three? You can’t make a heart out of a right auricle.’
‘Another surplus store bought one of them, sir. The fourth went to the government, oddly enough. To the Pentagon Logistics Office.’
‘Hmmm. That’ll take a fine bribe. Well, let’s get the one that went to another store.’
‘We already have, Mr Hines. Our own marketing division is…’
‘I don’t have any marketing division!’
‘I mean, National Arsen…’
‘I don’t want to hear that name! Out—get out of here and let me get some work done!’
‘Hail Wes D…’
‘Out!’
In fact he had no work at all to do. Nothing to do but to dream or dread, whatever it was. Whatever it was, the picture of Marge (635 lines/inch) came to him, hot, hurting and magnificent. Her eyes were swords, her breasts mounted horns, her breath an acid bath. Now here was something nice. Mac ran the video tape of her first commercial, then her second, the next and the next. There was something…
For the first time in years, he began to wonder if another person might not be real.
No? Then what was happening in the auricles and ventricles of his heart? They felt crammed full of spinets and timetables and brass nameplates and daffodil telephones, all those old and awkward and lovely commodities.
I’m not too old to love, he thought. Anyway, I’m not too old to love. He embraced her in oceans of suds; they made a little pink cake. He embraced…
He became aware of a figure on the horizon, hailing Wes Davis. The camera zoomed in on a young man with a red nose, standing right here before the desk.
‘Mr Hines?’
He put his hands on the desk and asked the b.y.m. what he wanted.
‘But I thought you wanted something, sir. You were shouting.’
‘I was? What’d I say?’
‘“I’m rich! I’m rich!”’
‘Well I’m not.’
‘No sir. But just how did you get so much money?’
‘By the sweat of honest toil. By working my fingers to the bone, shoulder to the wheel, nose to the grindstone. I didn’t hide my light under a bushel. I didn’t waste my God-given talents, of which I am just the steward. Value for money! Build a better mousetrap…’
‘Yes sir. But just what kind of mousetrap did you build?’ The young man’s smile hardened.
‘Don’t borrow from Peter to pay the devil! A penny saved is money in the bank! Give me elbow grease and I’ll move the world! Yankee ingenuity, boy, and…’
‘Yes sir. Applied to what?’
Crimson to the roots of his thick white Yankee hair, Mac fought back valiantly: ‘WHEN I HIRE A MAN, I ALWAYS LOOK AT HIS SHOES! IF YOU’VE GOT BACKBONE AND SAND, GO TO THE HEAD OF THE CLASS! WASTE NOT, WANT NOT! MORE HASTE, LESS SPEED! THERE IS PLENTY OF ROOM AT THE TOP…oh, what the fuck, I might as well tell you.’
The young man sat down and helped himself to a cigar. Mac lit it for him, then commenced his story.
Eleven
Our family [he said] had always been lucky on both sides. My great-grandfather Franklin Hines, who (spelled it H-Y-N) won his wife in a game of Russian roulette. Her name was Hero Rwcz, and I believe she had just escaped a pogrom.
My great-grandfather Leonardo Fox, who was to be the only survivor of Little Big Horn, married Galilea Avaka, who could smell water.
My great-grandfather Archimedes Mutt actually made the first gold strike in California, months before the Sutter’s Mill strike. Being a lazy man, he pocketed a few nuggets and declined to stake a claim. Archy married a Swedish girl, Bernoullia Bjld, whose talents were culinary. She could cook any dish to perfection after tasting it just once, and she was good at finding double yolks.
Then there was my great-grandfather Watt Peqeq, the so-called ‘Unlucky Balloonist’. Over seventy serious accidents, and his only injury was a broken wisdom tooth. He married Dedalie Gissigi, who found at least a dollar in change every day of her life.
Franklin and Hero Hyn had twins, Dagurette and Fulton. The infant Dag was kidnaped by white slavers, but the gang was wiped out by smallpox before they could get her to market. She was found, two thousand-odd miles from home, by a next-door neighbor who happened by. He brought her home to the Hyns, then himself caught smallpox and died.
Fulton, aged four, fell out of a boat during a family outing on Lake Michigan. The lake at this point was fifty feet deep. For one r
eason or another, he was not missed for several hours. The family rowed back to find him standing upon the mast of a submerged shipwreck, barely keeping his head above water.
Leonardo and Galilea Fox also had twins, Howe and Jenny. Howe became a poker player, and so incredibly lucky that many times his life was threatened. One sore loser’s derringer misfired; another was taken by an opportune epileptic seizure. A third cowboy’s gun went off in its holster, and a fourth was himself shot by an old debtor at the moment he drew on Howe. Finally, one of Howe’s potential murderers was distracted by the fire that burnt half of Chicago.
Jenny seldom gambled, though on a dare she once parlayed a dollar across seven horse races to something over four hundred thousand (and this was her dowry when she married Fulton Hines). But grandmother Jenny was lucky chiefly in fashion. She had a habit of buying old dresses, altering them to suit herself, and openly disregarding the prevailing fads. Inevitably what she wore became the avant-garde fashion a year or two later; Paris designers finally discovered her and paid her handsomely to let them sketch her old rags.
Archy and Bernoullia had twin sons, Morse and Whitney. Morse went into a monastery; I have only one story about him. He was excessively zealous, at least according to the abbot’s way of thinking, and that good man asked him to ease up on the fasting, vigils and self-immolation. One day the abbot rebuked him rather sternly for it. At once a heavy statue, which had been solidly anchored to a stone foundation for centuries, toppled, and the abbot was killed by the Good Shepherd’s crook. This story may be apocryphal. By the way, I hear steps are being taken in Rome for my great-uncle’s beatification.
Whitney Mutt was wounded in the Spanish-American War and shipped home. The following day everyone in his platoon came down with malaria; all eventually died. Whitney married one of the pretty Peqeq twins, Merrimac, by whom he already had a nine-year-old daughter, my mother, Bell.