But I needn’t have worried about them, for when we got out to the road they were waiting for us, breathing kind of hard and considerably scratched up. The way they’d gone through that brush and all those blackberry patches must have been a caution.
“I am glad to see,” said Butch’s Pa, “that you got back safely.”
“Don’t mention it,” Pa told him coldly, and went on down the road, hanging tight onto my hand so that I had to trot along.
We got back home and went into the kitchen to get a drink of water.
Pa said to me, “Steve, have you got those glasses?”
I dug them out of my pocket and handed them to him. He put them on the shelf above the washstand.
“Leave them there,” he said. “Don’t touch them again—not ever. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir,” I replied.
To tell the truth, I would have liked it better if he’d gone ranting up and down. I was afraid that what had happened out there in the woods had made him decide to go to one of the Homestead Planets. I told myself he maybe already had made up his mind and didn’t need to rant.
But he never said a word about the fight with Andy nor about the Homestead Planets and he wasn’t sore at me. He kept on being quiet and I knew that he still was mad clean through and I figured that he was mostly sore at Butch and Butch’s Pa for their having made a complete fool of him.
I did a lot of wondering about what I’d seen down there in Andy’s hayfield. And the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that I had grasped the secret of how the halflings operated.
For I must have been seeing in two different times when I’d been looking at the ladder. I must have looked into the future and seen the ladder slip. Except it never slipped, for the halflings, seeing that it would slip, had made one leg of it settle in the ground. And then, with the ladder sitting solid, it never slipped, of course. The halflings had done no more than look ahead a bit and then righted something that was about to happen before it had a chance to happen.
And that, I told myself, was the basis of good luck and bad. The halflings could spot disaster coming and try to head it off. Except they couldn’t always make it. They had tried to protect Andy when Pa took a lick at him and they had failed. So I figured that they weren’t infallible and that made me feel some better.
For if they could make good luck for Andy, it stood to reason they could make bad luck for the rest of us. All they had to do, if they had a mind to, was to see good luck heading for us and change it into bad.
It might even be possible, I told myself, that the halflings lived ahead of us, by a few seconds or so, and that the only thing which separated us from them was this matter of a different time.
But there was something else that troubled me a lot. Why had I been able to see two different times? It was clear to me that Butch and his people couldn’t, for if they could, they’d have more answers to the halfling situation. They’d been studying it for years, and so far as I could figure, they didn’t know for certain about this two-time business.
It seemed to me, when I thought about it, that Butch’s Pa might have ground better than he knew when he made my glasses. He might have put in something or taken out something or done something he didn’t know about at all.
Or it might be that the human race had a different kind of vision, or maybe just a little different, and when you added the correction for Butch’s kind of vision to our kind of vision, you brought out a thing you couldn’t even guess at.
I tried and tried to get it clear within my mind, but I couldn’t do it. I just went around in circles.
I stayed close to home for several days because I had a feeling that I should be ignoring Butch to uphold the family honor and that is how I missed the big hassle between Fancy Pants and Nature Boy.
It seems that Nature Boy got sick and tired of how Fancy Pants was mistreating that poor, bedraggled cat. So he took one member of the skunk family that had fallen in love with him and he clipped and dyed that skunk to look exactly like the cat. And one day he sneaked over to Fancy Pants’ place and switched the skunk for the cat without anyone seeing him.
The skunk didn’t want to be Fancy Pants’ skunk; he belonged to Nature Boy. So he started beating it back home as fast as he could go, which wasn’t very fast.
Just then Fancy Pants floated out of the door and he saw the skunk going through the gate. He thought the cat was trying to sneak away from him, so he reached out and grabbed it up and rolled it into a ball and tossed it pretty high into the air, sort of careless like, to teach that cat a lesson.
It went up in the air and came down smack-dab on top of Fancy Pants, who was floating out there in the yard a few feet off the ground.
The skunk was scared witless. As soon as it got its claws fastened into Fancy Pants and had some leverage, it retaliated with enthusiasm. And for the first time in his life, Fancy Pants thumped down to the ground and, among other things, he got his clothes as dirty as any other kid.
I would give a zillion dollars to have seen it.
For a while, they figured that they might have to take Fancy Pants out somewhere and bury him for a week or two to make him presentable again. But they finally got him to a point where one could come near him.
Fancy Pants’ Pa went storming down to talk with Nature Boy’s Pa and the two of them put on a ruckus that had the neighborhood chuckling for a week.
And now I was really strapped for playmates. I was still cold-shouldering Butch and I knew better than to take up again with either Nature Boy or Fancy Pants. They both were mean cusses when they set their mind to it. I was sure we hadn’t heard the last of this feud of theirs and I didn’t want to get tangled up in it by being friends with either one of them.
It was plenty tough, let me tell you. Here I was with vacation almost ended and no one to pal around with and my live-it gone. I watched the days slip past and regretted every minute of it.
Then one day the sheriff drove up to the house.
Pa and I were out in the barnyard trying to tinker up a corn binder that was all tied together with haywire and other makeshift odds and ends. Pa had been threatening to buy one for a long time now, but with all the tough luck we’d been having, there wasn’t any money.
“Good morning, Henry,” the sheriff said to Pa.
Pa said good morning back.
“I hear you been having a little trouble with your neighbors,” said the sheriff.
“Not what you would call real trouble,” Pa told him. “I busted one in the snoot the other day is all.”
“Right on his own farm, too.”
Pa quit working on the binder and squatted back on his heels to look up at the sheriff. “Andy been around complaining?”
“He was in the other day. Said you had swallowed some fool story that this new alien family started. About some sort of bad-luck critters he’d been harboring on his farm.”
“And you talked him out of it?”
“Well, now,” said the sheriff, “I am a peaceable man and I hate to see two neighbors fighting. Andy wanted to put you under peace bond, but I said I’d come over and have a talk with you.”
“All right,” invited Pa. “Go ahead and talk.”
“Now look here, Henry. You know the story about them hard-luck critters is so much poppycock. I’m surprised you took any stock in it.”
Pa got up slowly. He had a hard look on his face and I thought for a minute he was about to bust the sheriff. I was scared, I tell you, for that is something no one should ever do—up and bust a sheriff.
I don’t know what he might have done or what he might have said, for at that moment Nature Boy’s Pa came tearing down the road in his old jalopy and pulled in behind the sheriff’s car, intending to park there. But he miscalculated some and he smacked into the sheriff’s car hard enough to skid it ahead six feet or so with the brakes all set.
The sheriff broke into a run. “By God!” he said. “It isn’t even safe to drive out into this corner of the county!”
The two of us ran along behind him. I was running just because there was some excitement, but I figure maybe Pa was running so he could help Nature Boy’s Pa if the sheriff should take it into his head to get feisty with him.
And the funny thing about it was that Nature Boy’s Pa, instead of sitting there and waiting for the sheriff, had jumped out of his car and was running up the slope to meet us.
“They told me I’d find you here,” he panted to the sheriff.
“You found me, all right,” said the sheriff, practically breathing fire. “Now I’m going to—”
“My boy is gone!” yelled Nature Boy’s Pa. “He wasn’t home last night …”
The sheriff grabbed him and said to him: “Now let’s take this easy. Tell me exactly what happened.”
“He went off yesterday, early in the morning, and he didn’t show up for meals, but we didn’t think too much of it—he often goes off for an entire day. He has a lot of friends out there in the woods.”
“And he didn’t come home last night?”
Nature Boy’s Pa shook his head. “Along about dusk, we got worried. I went out and hunted for him and I didn’t find him. I hunted all night long, but there wasn’t any sign of him. I thought maybe he’d just holed up for the night with one of his friends in the woods. I thought maybe he’d show up when it got light, but he never did.”
“Well, all right,” said the sheriff, “you leave it to me. We’ll rouse out all the neighbors and organize a hunt. We’ll find him.” He said to me: “You know the lad? You did some playing with him?”
“All the time,” I answered.
“Lead us to all the places where you played. We’ll look there first.”
Pa said: “I’ll start phoning the neighbors. I’ll get them here right away.”
He ran up the hill toward the house.
In an hour or less, there were a hundred people gathered and the sheriff took them all in hand. He divided them into posses and appointed captains for each posse and told them where to hunt.
It was the most excitement we’ve ever had in the neighborhood.
The sheriff took me with the posse he headed up and we went down Dark Hollow. I took them to the place where we were digging out the lizard and the place where we had started to dig ourselves a cave and the hole in the creek where Nature Boy had made friends with some whopping trout, and some other places, too. We found some old tracks of Nature Boy’s, but there was no fresh sign, although we hunted up and down the hollow clear to where it flowed into the river, and we trailed back come night, and I was tuckered out.
And a little scared as well.
For an awful suspicion had come to me.
And no matter how hard I tried to keep from thinking of it, I couldn’t help myself, for all the time I was trying to remember if the hopper in that time machine had been big enough to take a kid the size of Nature Boy.
Ma fed me and sent me up to bed and later she came up and tucked me in and kissed me. She hadn’t done that in years. She knew I was too big to be tucked in and kissed, but she did it anyhow.
And then she went downstairs and I lay there listening to some men who still were out there in the yard, talking among themselves. Some of the others still were hunting and I knew that I should be out there hunting with them, but I knew Ma wouldn’t let me go and I was glad of it. For I was tired all through and the woods at night can be a scary place.
I should by rights have gone straight to sleep. Any other night I would have. But I lay there thinking about that hopper in the time machine and I wondered how long it would take before someone told the sheriff about the ruckus between Fancy Pants and Nature Boy, and I thought perhaps they already had. And if so, the sheriff probably was looking into it right now, for the sheriff was nobody’s fool.
I wondered if I should tell him myself if no one else had. But that was one fight I didn’t have any hankering to get tangled up in.
Finally I went to sleep and it seemed to me I hadn’t been asleep any time at all when something woke me up. It still was dark, but there was a red glow shining through the window. I sat up quick, with my hair standing half on end.
I thought at first it might be our barn or the machine shed, but then I saw it wasn’t that close. I skinned out of bed and over to the window. That fire was a big one and it wasn’t too far up the road.
It looked as if it was on the Carter place, but I knew that must be wrong, for if bad luck like that struck anyone, it wouldn’t be Andy Carter. Unless, of course, he was loaded with insurance.
I went downstairs in my bare feet and Ma was standing at the door, looking up the road toward the blaze.
“What is it, Ma?” I asked.
“It’s the barn on the Carter place,” she said. “They phoned the neighborhood for help, but all the men are out hunting Nature Boy.”
We stood there, Ma and me, and watched until the blaze almost died out, and then Ma hiked me off to bed.
I crawled underneath the covers, weak with this new excitement. I wondered why we should tag along for months with nothing happening, and then all at once have it busting out all over.
I lay there and thought about Andy Carter’s barn and there was something wrong about it. Andy had been the luckiest man in seven counties and now, without any warning, he was having bad luck just like the rest of us.
I wondered if the halflings might have gone off and left him, and if that was the case, I wondered why they had. Maybe, I told myself, they had gotten plain disgusted with Andy’s meanness.
It was broad daylight when I woke again and I jumped straight out of bed and climbed into my clothes. I rushed downstairs to see if there was any word of Nature Boy.
Ma said there wasn’t, that the men were still out hunting. She had breakfast ready for me and insisted I eat it and warned me about wandering off or trying to join one of the searching parties. She said it wasn’t safe for me to be out in the woods with so many bears about. And that was funny, for she had never worried about the bears before.
But she made me promise I wouldn’t.
As soon as I got out, I zipped down the road as fast as I could go. I had to see the place where the Carter barn had burned down and I just had to talk with someone. And Butch was the only one left that I could talk to.
There wasn’t much to see at the Carter place, just burned and blackened timbers that still were smoking some. I stood out in the road a while and then I saw Andy come out of the house and he stood there for a minute looking straight at me. So I got out of there.
I went past Fancy Pants’ place real fast, hoping I wouldn’t see him. At the moment, I didn’t want a thing to do with Fancy Pants.
When I got to Butch’s place, his Ma told me he was sick in bed. She didn’t think it was catching, she said, so I went up to see him.
Butch sure looked terrible lying there—more like a runty hoot owl than he ever had before—but he was glad to see me. I asked him how he was and he said he felt better. He made me promise I wouldn’t tell his Ma, then told me that he’d got sick from eating some green apples he’d pinched off the Carter orchard.
He’d heard about Nature Boy and I told him in a whisper the suspicions I had.
He lay there looking at me solemnly and finally he said to me: “Steve, I should have told you this before. That is no time machine.”
“No time machine? How do you know?”
“Because I saw the stuff that Fancy Pants’ Pa put through it. It didn’t go anywhere. It still is lying there.”
“You saw …” And then I had it. “You mean it went to where the halflings are?”
“That’s what I mean,” said Butch.
Sitting there on edge of the bed, I tried to think it through
, but there were so many questions bubbling up in me that I couldn’t do it.
“Butch,” I asked, “where is this place that the halflings are?”
“I don’t know,” said Butch. “It’s close to us, almost in the world, but not really.”
And I remembered something Pa had said several weeks before. “You mean it’s like a place behind a plate-glass window that’s between our world and theirs?”
“Something like that.”
“And if Nature Boy is there, what would happen to him?”
Butch shuddered. “I don’t know.”
“Would he be all right? Could he breathe in there?”
“I suppose he could,” said Butch. “I think the halflings do.”
I got up from the bed and started for the door. Then I turned back again.
“Butch, what are the halflings doing? What are they hanging around for?”
“No one’s sure,” said Butch. “There are a lot of ideas about what they are after. One is that they have to be near something that is living before they can live themselves. They can’t live a life themselves; they’ve got to have a life to—well, like imitate, only that’s not the word.”
“They need a pattern,” I said, remembering what Butch’s Pa had said that day, before Pa choked him off with his own rambling about what the halflings might be after.
“I guess you could call it that,” said Butch.
And I stood there thinking what a lousy life the halflings must have led, using Andy Carter as their pattern.
But that wasn’t so, for the halflings, that time I had seen them, had sure-God been happy. They’d been running around up there on the roof and keeping themselves busy and enjoying themselves.
And they had, every one of them, looked like Andy Carter. And of course they would, with Andy as their pattern.
Thinking about it, I could see how someone like Andy, with his kind of disposition, might enjoy being mean as dirt and ornery with his neighbors. He’d have a sense of independence and the feel of every hand being raised against him and him standing there like a mighty warrior, defying all of them. And from that he’d get a sense of strength and domination. All in all, I supposed, Andy, for a man like him, might be living a pretty darned satisfactory life.
No Life of Their Own: And Other Stories Page 4