Riders of the Purple Wage

by Philip José Farmer

Rip Van Winkle

  Washington Irving did not know it. Rip did not dare tell it.

  Rip hadn’t been asleep every day of those twenty years. At least, he didn’t think he had. Sometimes he wondered if the reality had just been pleasant, indeed, ecstatic, dreams mixed with nightmares.

  In A.D. 1772, Rip was thirty-five when he passed out from the booze snitched from the strange little men playing ninepins. When he awoke on the Kaatskill meadow, his whiskers were no longer than if a night had passed. The bowlers and his dog Wolf were gone. Wincing at every step because of his hangover, he reluctantly trudged over the hills, his hunting musket on his shoulder, headed for the Hudson river and home. And the hell his wife would give him.

  Suddenly, he reeled, and he cried out. The world had become all flux and also fogged with a very pale purple haze which did not obscure other colors. The leaves of the trees changed from green to many colors. Autumn fell like a dead bird and then snow dived after it. He was up to his waist in it, but he couldn’t feel it. The snow melted. And snow fell again and again. The rains came; the land greened. The sun, the moon, and the stars raced across the sky.

  Once a falling tree hurtled through him. Then it decayed and was gone while he yelled with terror and for mercy. He’d been bewitched by the little bowlers and justly so. He should’ve stayed home, repaired the fences and house, tilled and planted instead of lazing around, hunting, and thinking of forbidden cunt.

  Suddenly, the purple haze was gone. The moon slowed and soon resumed its normal pace. All was stable again. The hot summer night was noisy with insects and a great humming from the east. Trembling, he resumed his trip home. Presently, he stopped on a hill which looked down on the river, sparkling in the full moon. The narrow dirt road along the Hudson was now a broad highway of some kind of stone. It was brightly illuminated by lights at the tops of poles along it and by lamps in the fronts of…horseless carriages? The humming was the sound they made when heard from a distance, and they were going, incredibly fast.

  To his right, on top of an empty hill he’d passed yesterday, was a big house with many lights and people on the front porch and a very strange music emanating from it.

  Rip went down the hill slowly and quietly. He was determined to get, somehow, through all these frightening witcheries to his village, where the holy presence of the church building would make them all disappear. But he stopped at the foot of the hill. Parked in a grove of trees was one of those scary vehicles, a topless one. Its lights were out. He crept forward until he saw by the moon that a woman was sitting in the back seat. She was smoking tobacco in a little white tube. He could hear an unfamiliar but stirring music, then someone shouting, “Hiyo, Silver! Away!”

  Closer, he found that the sounds came from a box in the front part of the carriage.

  He looked down past the woman’s right shoulder. Her skirt was up over her waist, and her hand was working up and down slowly inside some very thin lacy garments covering her loins. Her thighs gleamed whitely between the tops of her stockings—silk!—and the lacy garment. Her head was thrown back, the glowing tube sticking straight up, and she was moaning.

  Rip was very embarrassed, but his tallywhacker was rising. Dame van Winkle had cut him off after the birth of their eighth; it’d been a long time since he’d gone to bed with her. Or anyone.

  Rip turned to retreat, and his musket stock banged against the metal door. The woman screamed. He started to run away, but his ankle turned, and he fell flat on his face. The next he knew, something cold and hard was pressed against his neck. He looked up at the woman. She was very pretty, big-busted, and enticing in that short shameless tight dress. The huge strange-looking pistol she held was not so alluring.

  She spat out invective with a vigor matched only by Mrs. van Winkle, who, however, would never have used such dirty words or blasphemous oaths. Then she let him get to his feet.

  Eyes wide, she said, “What kind of crazy outfit is that? Are you a butler from that house?” Then, seeing the musket, she cried, “What in hell is that?”

  He tried to explain. When she’d heard him out, she said. “Your name is Rip van Winkle? Now I know you’re a refugee from the funny farm.”

  “There’s no farmer around here by that name,” he said, “unless you mean Klaus van Fannij.”

  She looked at the tiny watch on her wrist. “Shit! Isn’t he ever coming back? I get so goddam fed up waiting around for him while he’s sneaking around spying on those big-shot crooks!”

  She backed up to the car, reached behind to the rear seat, and brought up a silver flask. She unscrewed the cap of the flask with a thumb, and, still pointing the enormous weapon at him, drank deeply. He smelled gin.

  “Here. Have a snort.”

  He took it gratefully. It was gin but terrible stuff. Still, it helped get rid of the shakes, and it warmed the cockles of his heart, not to mention those of his tallywhacker. She saw the expanding bulge; the barrel of her gun dropped as his barrel ascended.

  She took the flask back, drained it, then looked at her timepiece again. “Well, why not? It’ll serve him right,” she said, her words slightly blurred. “Okay. Kneebritches. Off with them.”

  “My God!” she said as they climbed into the back seat. “It must be at least fourteen inches long!”

  “Why, that’s only normal,” he said. “You should see Brom Dutcher’s!”

  She laughed and said. “Did you fall asleep and wake up in the twentieth century, Rip?”

  He didn’t know what she was talking about and didn’t much care. After the second time, she offered him a tube which she called a Lucky Strike. He smoked it, but the paper came off on his lip and the tobacco tasted vile.

  “I suppose,” she said, “you think I’m promiscuous. You know, fucking a complete stranger.”

  He blushed. Such language from a woman!

  “That looney son of a bitch runs around at night in his black hat and cloak, cackling, sneaking around, just itching to blast crooks with his two big .45 automatics. He’s knocked off a lot of them, you know.” (Rip didn’t know.) “I suppose he does much good, socially speaking. But he sure doesn’t do me any good. Won’t give me a tumble though I practically rub his nose in it. He’s not a fairy, so I figure he’s either asexual or he thinks his profession, rubbing out gangsters, is holy, just like a priest’s, and he’s vowed to chastity, too.

  “Cranston uses me to spy for him, but he won’t let me go with him when he expects some real action. He says it’s not women’s work, the asshole!”

  “Don’t he know you’re doing this behind his back?” Rip said as he started plugging again.

  “He should. He claims to be the only one in the world who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men. And of women, too. Oh, wow! Oh, God! Pour it in, Kneebritches!”

  Maniacal laughter, shuddery and sinister, burst from the shadows. Rip sprang up, dived over the door, jetting, landed on the ground, got up, and began to pull his britches on. The woman, muttering curses, sat up and smoothed her skirt down. A tall man, lean, hawk-faced, with a huge curving nose and wild burning eyes, appeared out of the darkness. He was dressed in strange clothes and carried a bundle under one arm. Rip supposed that was the hat and cloak the woman had mentioned.

  “Margo, what do we have here?” the man said. Suddenly, a gun like the woman’s was in his long pale hand.

  “Some nut who claims to be Rip van Winkle, Lamont.”

  “I’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest back there. They’ll be on our necks in a minute. Let’s go!”

  Rip said, “Could you drop me off at my village? It’s just down the road a mile or so.”

  The man waved the gun. “Get in the car. You’re going to the city with us. I think you’re a part of the plot, though I’ll admit I don’t exactly know how you fit in.”

  “Oh, Lamont!” the woman said. “Don’t be so fucking paranoid! He’s been to a masquerade party or he escaped from the puzzle factory or he is a time traveler!”

  “You’ve b
een reading too much of that trashy science fiction. No. He’s going with us. I’m getting to the bottom of this if it kills him.”

  Rip prayed as he held on to the side of the door and Margo’s thigh. He was traveling at a speed the philosophers had said no human being could endure. The air rushing over the glass shield in front of him smote him. The lights of the oncoming traffic were blinding.

  The nightmare voyage got worse every second. Then they were crossing a gigantic steel bridge over the Hudson. Manhattan was before him, but the island, which had been nothing but woods here, was packed with incredibly high buildings and more people in a mile’s stretch than he’d seen in all his life before.

  And then the purple flickering started again, the sun, moon, stars whirling, snowfall followed by rain by hot sunlight, flicker, flicker, flicker. When it stopped, he was sitting on the same street in bright day, his ass hurting where he’d fallen through the car, metal squealing, horns blasting, cursings, and the front of a car just touching his back. He had a vague impression he’d been there for a long time while countless hordes of cars had passed through his body. But these were solid, and if he didn’t get to the sidewalk fast, he was going to be run over or badly beaten by the red-faced driver waving a fist at him.

  When he got to the walk, he looked around. Some of the buildings he’d seen from the crazy man’s car were gone, replaced by others even taller. At that moment a car pulled up to the curb near him. It was rusty and dirty with PEACE and LOVE in big letters painted on it. What Margo had called a “radio” during the mad journey to the city was blasting out some wild barbaric rhythms.

  A young woman with a mass of frizzy yellow hair stuck her head out of its window. “Hey, man! Far out!”

  The driver was a long-haired, bushy-bearded youth wearing fringed buckskin clothes and a leather headband. He looked like a frontiersman, an Indian fighter. The female and male in the back seat wore some kind of robes with many bright symbols woven on them. One wore on the chest a round metal object sporting the slogan: McGovern in ’72. The slogan on the chest ornament of the other was: MAKE LOVE NOT WAR.

  The driver said, “Hey, man, I dig those crazy threads. You going to the demonstration?”

  Rip thought he might as well say he was. He needed some friendly people to guide him in his stay in this age. Oh, Lord, propelled two hundred years into the future without a return ticket!

  Rip got into the front beside the girl, who introduced herself as Judy Gardenier. She asked him if he was going as the “Spirit of 1776.” He said he didn’t know what she was talking about. As the car headed east on a street that hadn’t existed in his time, the three passed a burning tube around. It wasn’t white like Margo’s Lucky Strike but brown. Its smoke had a heavy acrid odor. Judy asked him if he’d like to try the joint, and he said, “Why not?” Watching him, she said, “Man, you from the sticks? You gotta draw it way down into your lungs and hold it as long as you can.”

  He did so, and after a few times he began to relax. Things didn’t seem so bad now.

  “You got any bread?” Judy said.

  “Not a bite,” Rip said, and the others howled with laughter. When he found out what she meant, he produced from his pocket his worldly wealth, two copper halfpence coins. Judy looked at the King George III heads and the dates, and said, “Wow, collector’s items!”

  Rip let Judy keep the coins. What the hell.

  The trip toward the “pad” in “Hell’s Kitchen” was fascinating if sometimes shocking and always confusing. He was startled when he saw the first black and white couple walking along, the man feeling up the woman’s ass. The attitude toward slaves certainly had changed. Or did the colonists now have white slaves, too? Whatever the situation was, the color barrier was down.

  Women’s skirts were, however, up, way up. After he got over his first shock at seeing so much leg, he reveled in it. Nobody else seemed to think such exposure was sinful, so why should he?

  The “pad” was in a basement occupied by ten or twelve youths of two or three sexes. A very short stout man with a long red beard, Yosemite Sam, seemed to be the leader.

  A girl whose thin blouse obviously had nothing under it, said, “You gotta be putting me on! Rip van Winkle!”

  “It’s a fake name, of course,” Judy said. “Rip, if you’re on the run from the pigs, you’re safe here. Unless there’s a raid.”

  The four-room apartment was in bad shape, paint peeling, plaster falling, holes in the ceilings, and the furniture looked as if it had been second-hand before Noah’s flood.

  Everybody seemed to be having a good time, though there were some fierce cries about giving it to the fascist motherfuckers. He puffed a joint being passed around, and then an emaciated girl with huge glazed eyes asked him if he wanted some coke to snort. He said, “Yes,” but when she gave him a slip of paper containing some white stuff, he sneezed, and the powder blew all over the girl. She yelled, “That’ll be twenty dollars, Sneezy! The only thing I give away is my ass!”

  Judy called the girl a freaking ripoff, and the next he knew Judy had thrown her out bodily. While this was going on, Rip told Yosemite Sam that he had to make water. Sam sent him to the place of convenience. But in which bowl was he supposed to urinate? The one on the floor was leaking from the base and had a big turd floating on it. Maybe it was reserved for crap only.

  He retraced his steps to Sam and got him aside.

  “You mean where you come from you don’t have indoor plumbing? I’ll bet you don’t even have television!”

  Rip confessed he’d never heard of either.

  Mr. Sam bellowed, “Hey, everybody! Here’s a dude so underprivileged you won’t believe it! Gather around, folks, and hear him tell it like it is!”

  Rip was very embarrassed. Besides, his bladder was hurting. “I’ll be back,” he muttered, and he tore loose from Sam’s grip and pushed his way through to the bathroom. Still lacking instructions, he used the bowl with the pipes, one marked H, the other C. When he turned the handles, both gave cold water.

  On the way back to the front room, he came to a stack of wooden crates holding books. Most had paper covers, something unfamiliar to him. The titles were strange: The Story of O, Red Power, The World of Drugs, I Was A Black Panther for the FBI, The Mother Earth Catalog, The Annotated Fart, Lord of the Rings, Zen Archery, Love and Orgasm.

  A couple near him was arguing about UFOs, and he left the bookcase to get near enough to hear them clearly. But Judy Gardenier pulled him back to the cases, removed a volume, and showed it to him. The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, by Washington Irving. She opened it to a story titled—amazing—“Rip Van Winkle.”

  “Here. Read about your namesake.”

  He sat down, his back against the wall, and he slowly lip-read through the tale.

  When he was done, he gazed at the wall. He couldn’t believe it, but it had to be true. Irving hadn’t said anything about his time-traveling. Apparently, he knew nothing about it. Irving said that he’d slept for twenty years and woke up as an old long-bearded man.

  Something that especially disturbed him was that his daughter Judith had married a man named Gardenier.

  Judy staggered down the hall and sat down by him.

  “Kinda makes you freak out, don’t it?”

  “You mean that you might be my I-don’t-know-how-many-times-great-granddaughter?”

  “You really like to put a person on, don’t you? Nah. I mean the coincidence, the names. Me Judy Gardenier and you Rip van Winkle. He was a fictional character, wasn’t he? Even if he was real, you couldn’t be him. Could you?”

  “Just now I don’t know who I am.”

  “That’s right. Be cool, baby. The fuzz really after you? No matter, never mind, as Mary Baker Eddy said. Meanwhile, we’re all looking for an identity.”

  She wanted to take him back to the front room where he could tell how he’d been disadvantaged, downtrodden, oppressed, and persecuted. Rip agreed that he’d been all that. But he didn’t te
ll her that it wasn’t the capitalist-pig class that’d been doing it to him. It was his wife. And he really couldn’t blame her for hen-pecking him. He had been a lazy shiftless good-for-nothing who only wanted to hunt and to lounge around in front of van Vedder’s tavern.

  He said, “Judy, I have to ease myself again. This beer…what’s in it?… I used to be able to drink a gallon before I had to go behind a tree.”

  He went into the bathroom and pissed in the bowl with the two pipes, idly observing that four more turds had been added to the leaking bowl. He was wondering when the honey-dipper men would come to carry the crap away when the door opened and a woman came in.

  He started to protest. She screamed and ran out of the room. A minute later, two men burst in as if they expected to find a wild Indian there. They looked at Rip and started laughing. Before he could make himself decent, they seized him and carried him down the hall to the front room.

  “Hey, everybody, look at this!” one of the men shouted. “This is the club Annie thought he was going to hit her with!”

  The two let Rip down, and he stuffed his pisseroo into his britches and buttoned his fly. He was both embarrassed and flattered by the raucous remarks of the crowd.

  The party went on and on, far past midnight. Rip wasn’t used to staying awake much after dusk, but excitement kept him going. Finally, after almost everybody else had left the pad or passed out, Rip found a place behind a sofa and hurtled into sleep.

  Since he was as drunk as Davy’s sow, his cock should have been snakeshit-limp. He awoke, however, with his maiden’s delight as hard as a tax-collector’s heart, rising heavenward like the Tower of Babel, expanding like the British Empire. In the dim light he saw Judy, naked, crouching by him, his whacker in her hand. She certainly wasn’t bobbing for apples.

  Rip had always thought that this sinful act would disgust him, but it didn’t. Far from it.

  Judy stopped it, looked at the pulsing monolith in her hand, shrieked, and then crawled on top of him. His bumper slid into her greasy cunny as easily as a money-bag into a politician’s pocket. She clamped her bunny muscle around his flailer, and they were off on the roller coaster, boxing the long compass, Eve riding Adam’s tail. They came together, yelling as if the room was on fire.