The Zebra Derby

by Max Shulman

  “How’s this?” inquired La Hernia, taking a stance.

  “Well, your honor,” Swannekamp answered, “it could be better if you put your left leg over there.”

  Mayor La Hernia was standing at the point where the spur line to the Whistlestop Wagon Tongue and Trailing Antenna Corporation branched off from the main line. He put his foot where Swannekamp had indicated—in the switch between the main track and the spur.

  “Here?” asked La Hernia.

  The Cannonball was a hundred yards away.

  “Yes,” cried Swannekamp wildly, and threw the switch, trapping La Hernia’s foot between the rails.

  “Murderer!” screamed La Hernia. “Help! Help!”

  The Cannonball was fifty yards away, and Swannekamp fled into the woods. The crowd stood petrified.

  And inside the locomotive of the Cannonball, as though there were not enough drama on the tracks, another struggle of elemental passion was being enacted. It seems that the fireman and the engineer had long been good friends. They were wont to go about together drinking and carousing during their off-duty hours. On the night before the Cannonball’s maiden voyage they had been at a Minneapolis night club called The Sty. Here they had met a beauteous orthopedic nurse named Hygiene Bandaid. Both had been smitten with her. At first they engaged in a friendly rivalry for her favors. As is so often the case, the rivalry soon changed from friendly to serious. The next morning, when they took the Cannonball out of Minneapolis, they were scarcely speaking to each other. On the way to Whistlestop a trivial occurrence sparked their enmity into full flame. The fireman picked up a lump of coal and hurled it at the engineer. The engineer, neglecting his open throttle, turned and threw a lump of coal at the fireman. The fireman threw another at the engineer. The engineer threw another at the fireman. For thirty miles before Whistlestop they stood and threw coal at one another.

  And now, as hapless Mayor La Hernia screamed imprisoned on the tracks, inside the locomotive the engineer and fireman pelted each other with bituminous, and the Cannonball, untended, roared full speed ahead.…

  chapter five

  But this was no time to be woolgathering about the past. The future was before me, and the conductor of the Cannonball was calling, “All aboard!” I boarded the train and chugged away to Minneapolis and the future.

  chapter six

  In its day the Cannonball was the fastest train in Minnesota, but time and wear had left their marks. Now it took the Cannonball eleven hours to travel the 178 miles between Minneapolis and Whistlestop. Now the Cannonball was probably the only train in the United States that had mice.

  To pass the long hours of the journey I played a favorite game of mine. I studied my fellow passengers, trying to divine from their appearances what kind of people they were. (In Minnesota this is a very popular pastime, and one often finds whole trainloads of people just sitting and staring at each other.)

  First I examined a portly, clean-shaven, conservatively dressed gentleman in the seat across from mine. Everything about him bespoke wealth, culture, breeding. Obviously he was a man of high estate—a banker, an executive of a corporation, perhaps a lecturer. Yes, I decided, a lecturer.

  Next I turned to a woman sitting behind me. I got up on my knees and peered at her over the back of my seat. She looked about thirty—large-boned, bespectacled, and stringy. A bandanna handkerchief covered most of her coarse blond hair. She was wearing blue denim slacks and blouse. Her sleeves were rolled up, displaying rippling biceps, one of them tattooed with an anchor. She was chewing tobacco.

  “I’ll bet you’re a stevedore,” I said.

  “Guess again, dearie,” she grinned. “I’m a sand hog. I had a job in the sewers up in Duluth after the war ended and they closed the Acme Aircraft plant. But I quit. I’m going home to Minneapolis now. Why don’t you come sit by me? I won’t hurt you.”

  “A pleasure, madam,” I said, and joined her.

  “Cut plug?” she offered.

  “No, thanks. How about having one of my cigarettes?”

  “No, thanks. Got out of the habit, during the war. I had to. There wasn’t a cigarette to be found in all Duluth. Did you have trouble getting cigarettes during the war?”

  “No,” I said, “there were plenty of cigarettes out there in the Pacific where I was. But there were plenty of other things that we didn’t have. Why, weeks would go by when we didn’t see a—”

  “Don’t try to talk about it, Mac,” she interrupted. “I understand.” She took my hand. “You’re home now, safe among your own people.”

  I tightened my grasp on hers. “Miss,” I said, “I know I speak for every veteran when I say thanks to you on the Home Front. Thanks to you who forged the tools of victory and kept the home fires burning. Thanks for the better world we came home to.”

  “My name is Nebbice,” she said. “Nebbice Upcharles.”

  “Asa Hearthrug,” I answered. “I haven’t had time to have cards printed yet.”

  We laughed at my little mot.

  “Well, Asa, we did our bit. As for me, though I am a mere woman, a little frilly thing, when the call went out for workers at Acme Aircraft, I responded.”

  “Good girl,” said I, stroking her muzzle.

  “I don’t complain, you understand, but it was far from easy working at Acme. I was busy every minute honing gaskets, shearing sprockets, grinding grommets, turning sumps, brazing couplings, coupling brazes, boring bearings, beveling bushings, reaming elbows, buffing shims, tamping ducts, threading cams, sanding scuppers, grit-blasting nipples, Babbitting shackles, and occasionally extricating a midget who had been riveted into a wing section.

  “And the only rest we had from this routine was once a week when the man would come and give us the Army-Navy ‘E’ and we would go outside and sing the ‘Acme Aircraft Rouser’:

  “Acme! Acme!

  Back me! Back me!

  I’ll always do my work

  And never, never shirk.

  If I become a jerk,

  Sack me,

  Acme,”

  sang Nebbice in a well-tempered baritone.

  I brushed aside a tear.

  “Not to brag,” said Nebbice, “but I wrote that song myself. The company gave me a Stillson wrench with a handle of lapis lazuli.”

  “You deserved a wrench for that one,” I said feelingly.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” replied modest Nebbice. “Poetry just comes easy to some people, I guess. Even as a child—although that wasn’t so long ago,” she put in, giggling, “I could write poems. In grade school, for instance, I wrote the graduation class poem for commencement exercises:

  “How do I feel on Commencement Day?

  Query this question and I will say,

  Nothing on earth doth me dismay.

  “Is not high school with terror fraught?

  Inquire this interrogation for aught.

  I’m armed with the things that I’ve been taught.

  “Aren’t you afraid to go out in the world?

  Ask this scrutiny. My flag’s unfurled.

  The rod’s been spared, but the child’s not sperled.”

  “Tell me something about yourself,” I said. “It is easy to see that you weren’t brought up to be a sand hog.”

  “No,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I was a schoolteacher once. But it’s such a long story. Are you sure you want to hear it?”

  “More than anything in the world,” I answered.

  “Sweet,” she said, giving my hand a little squeeze that caused my knuckles to jump one on top of the other. And as the Cannonball chugged through Blue Earth, Big Arm, Bivalve, Cheesequake, Calcium, Decorum, Deaf Smith, Embarrass, Electric Mills, Federal, Hardware, Looking Glass, Meat Camp, Plum, Quick, Reform, Sleepy Eye, Truce, What Cheer, and Zigzag (in Minnesota cities are arranged alphabetically) she told me the story of her life.

  Nebbice was a victim of environment. Though her soul was free and her spirit as a bird’s, she was forced by her petit-bourgeois
family into a pattern of painful normalcy. Her parents were classically middle class—they lived in a six-room house in which five separate eras of furnishing vied for prevalence; had an iron deer on the lawn; slept in pajama tops only or bottoms only or sometimes both; did not undress in the same room, the husband going into the bathroom but leaving the door a few inches ajar and the medicine-chest mirror angled toward the opening; owned a two-door Chevrolet sedan with seat covers on the seat covers; had a highboy radio that got two stations, one clear, one faint, on every space-band; carried low-premium insurance policies on which the fine print, if they had read it, specified that no benefits could be collected unless the insured were killed in Outer Mongolia while riding in a rickshaw drawn by a coolie suffering from enuresis on even-numbered days of the month; read one book a month chosen for them by four strangers, and never took the jacket off the book.

  From babyhood Nebbice’s life conformed to the norm. Her mother was much influenced by the then popular book on child care, The Wee Folk, by the noted lady pediatrician, Dr. Ova Barren. “Routine,” wrote Dr. Barren, “often so odious to we grownups, is the very key to the happiness of infants. The infant must have a prescribed time to eat, to sleep, to play, to evacuate. You must never, never, never change the schedule of these activities. If, for instance, the infant wants to sleep and you force him to eat, if he wants to play and you force him to evacuate, it will only cause confusion in his little mind, confusion that leads to terror and eventual mental breakdown, and just as sure as you are sitting there, he will end up a public charge, begging alms in the courthouse square.”

  Saved from mendicancy in front of the courthouse, Nebbice passed a stolid childhood and studied with minor distinction at Webster Grade School, where she delivered the previously noted poem at graduation. In high school she made creditable grades, played the second lead in The Rivals, was appointed a monitor in the lunchroom, and would have been elected treasurer of the senior class had not the girl running against her captured the male vote by blossoming noticeably into puberty on the day before election. (Nebbice’s own puberty occurred suddenly a few months later at a school police picnic.)

  When Nebbice was graduated from high school her parents sent her to a teachers’ college in St. Cloud for two years, after which she secured a teaching position at a rural school in northern Minnesota. She taught for a year and then said the hell with it, sixty-five dollars a month wasn’t enough for fending off pimple-faced louts all week long and then submitting to a pelvic examination by the school board physician on Saturday.

  She went home to Minneapolis and after a search found a job as a file clerk. Here, too, she was unhappy, mainly because of a maxim-minded office manager who hung placards all over the office proclaiming: THE GIRL WORTH WHILE IS THE GIRL WHO CAN FILE and EARLY TO BED AND EARLY TO RISE OR YOU’LL GET REPORTED BY COMPANY SPIES. When war came and the Acme Aircraft plant in Duluth called for workers, Nebbice accepted readily.

  Working in Duluth, away from the inhibiting influences of her family, freed of the restrictions of teaching, liberated from the etiquette of offices, long-dormant forces in Nebbice exploded. She became a hellion. The night didn’t pass when Nebbice wasn’t out roaring with some of her fun-loving cronies. Sometimes the girls would go to a bowling alley, bowl a few lines and slop up some beer, and then go down the street kicking over hydrants. Other times they would go to a night club and dance with each other until four in the morning and then go out and steal milk bottles. Sometimes they went to a movie and poured popcorn over the balcony.

  “But,” said Nebbice, “it began to pall. Fun’s fun, but there are other things in life.”

  “Indeed there are,” I agreed.

  “Men,” said Nebbice, and seized my arm in a wristlock. “Mac, do you know what it is to spend three years praying, hoping, panting, pining, aching for a man?”

  “No,” I said truthfully.

  “Thinking of men. Dreaming of men. Men, men, men. And not a man to be had. Not even a nut Hershey. In three years, Mac, I had one date, and that was with a maniac named Kilmer Boles. We spent the whole night in hollow oak trees—each in a separate oak, yet.

  “I finally decided that when the war was over I was going to get myself the first man I ran across I don’t care what it is,” she cried, bounding into my lap.

  “Well, you’ve certainly had an interesting life,” I said. “Are you the only child in your family?”

  “No, I’ve got a brother named Alaric. As a matter of fact, I’m going to live with him when I get to Minneapolis. He’s a rebel too. He had more sense than I did; he ran away from home when he was ten. He’s been all over the country, done millions of things. Alaric’s always had big plans. He’s got a head on him, that boy. He’ll be a rich man someday. You’ll like Alaric.”

  “I’m sure of it,” I said. “Planners are what made America what it is today. How fundamentally American it is to plan! Even in the midst of the late horrible struggle there were those at home who calmly, quietly, planned the future—the future that is now the present. And I am on my way to Minneapolis to realize my share of the bright, new present.”

  “Go no further, Mac,” she said. “Alaric will take good care of you. Your search is ended. Destiny brought you to Alaric—and me.”

  We were pulling into Minneapolis.

  Nebbice gathered up her luggage and mine, put it under one arm, and took my hand. “Come,” she said, “dear veteran.”

  As we walked hand in hand down the aisle, I brushed against the portly, well-shaven, conservatively dressed gentleman (the lecturer).

  “Excuse me, sir,” I said.

  “That’s all right, Mac,” he answered. “Say, could youse use some neckties? Brilliantine? Razor blades? Dr. Dehorn’s Elixir for Men Past Twenty?”

  chapter seven

  “It’s not much, but it’s home,” said Nebbice as we entered her apartment above Peetwig Brothers’ Hardware Store, the World’s Largest Seller of Ax Handles on One Floor. She dropped our suitcases and turned on the light bulb that hung on a cord from the ceiling. “Alaric picked these things up at an unclaimed freight auction,” she said, pointing out a wicker love seat, two chromium-and-leather bar stools, a baize-covered baccarat table, a Regulator wall clock with a long brass pendulum, a knee-high china shepherdess, and a gross of harmonicas.

  “Don’t fret,” I said. “You’ll soon have postwar furniture.”

  “I could be happy with any kind of furniture,” said Nebbice, “and a man.”

  She drew me down to the love seat and climbed into my lap.

  “You know,” I said, “I haven’t been to Minneapolis since I was at the University of Minnesota before the war.”

  “I suppose,” she said, “that I could have had a man during the war if I had wanted to throw myself at somebody. But I got pride.”

  “We certainly have a fine university in this state,” I said. “Why, did you know that some of the greatest work on butterfat enzymes was done right here at our university?”

  “I believe that a man thinks more of a woman who is demure, retiring, circumspect—in short, feminine.”

  “Yes sir. There was a stirring account of it in the Spring 1940 issue of the Curd and Butterfat Quarterly under the title ‘Aye, Tear Her Tattered Enzymes Down.’”

  “And you see,” Nebbice said, “I was right. I waited. I suffered. I followed my conscience. And today I have a man.”

  She slipped off her spectacles and held my face immobile between her hands. Her lips descended on mine, clung, pressed. I felt the wicker behind my head give and then splinter. (That’s the way it is with wicker. It’s O.K. for ordinary use, but give it a little rough treatment and it’ll go bad on you every time.)

  The door opened and a man walked in. “Nobody can play fast and loose with my sister without he marries her,” he said, pointing a finger smudged with pool-hall chalk.

  “Nix, Alaric,” said Nebbice, releasing me. “It’s not necessary. I got this one.”

 
“Yeah? You thought you had that divinity student back in 1938 too.”

  “Was it my fault?” she protested. “I took him to the beach for the first time and he ran off with a girl he said he saw walking on water. I tried my best to explain, but the damn fool couldn’t get it through his head about surfboards.”

  “Well, I think you ought to let me handle this one. Somehow they all get away on you.”

  “Quit worrying, Alaric. I tell you this one is in the bag. He’s got a head like a potato.”

  She turned to me. “Dear, I’d like you to meet my brother Alaric. Alaric, this is Asa Hearthrug.”

  “Charmed,” I said simply.

  “Nebbice,” said Alaric, “let me handle it.”

  “Now, don’t worry, Alaric. The romance end is all sewed up. But there’ll be plenty for you too. Asa is interested in a postwar opportunity.”

  “Indeed I am,” I said. “I have come to Minneapolis to fill my niche in the new civilization.”

  “Let us sit down,” said Alaric. He hoisted up his black pinstriped trousers neatly and climbed up on a bar stool. He loosened the collar of his black shirt and pulled down his yellow necktie. “Now then,” he said. “The gentleman has some money to invest?”

  “Well, not exactly,” I replied. “I have come to Minneapolis to claim my position in the postwar world. I have come to choose what was made ready for me by those who stayed at home and planned and builded.”

  “And you have no money?” said Alaric.

  “Well, some,” I admitted. “My mustering-out pay, a couple of thousand I saved during the war, some bonds.”

  “Well, then,” said Alaric briskly, “let’s get down to cases. What type business were you planning to invest in?”

  “Invest? To tell the truth,” I said, “I wasn’t thinking of investing in anything. I was thinking more of a job.”

  “Do you mean,” asked Alaric, aghast, “that you went through the mud and hell of the war and then you intend to come back home and work for somebody, to let somebody boss you around?”