Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by G. C. Edmondson

  “What of the UFO?” I asked a plump young man who pushed a three-wheeled-bicycle load of ice cream.

  “Gone,” he said in English. “They’ve even blotted out the tracks where it landed.”

  “Something really came down?” my mad friend asked.

  “About midnight, with a scream like a communist lawyer.”

  A small girl with a large copper coin approached, so we left.

  A toolshed stood in the center of the graveyard. In its doorway sat a thin, pockmarked man in pith helmet, leather puttees, and guaraches. “¿One may perhaps seek information?” I asked.

  “¿How not?”

  I handed him the crumpled letter.

  “Epifania López, widow of Fuentes,” he mused, and riffled through a ledger. “She’ll be leaving tomorrow.”

  “This whole affair has taken on an aspect of unreality,” my mad friend said in English.

  The pockmarked man gave him an apologetic smile. “No spik.”

  “We were under the impression that the lady was dead,” my friend added.

  “She is.” He glanced again at the ledger and memorized a number. Two of our wives got out of the car as we trailed him up the rocky slope. “Two-forty-two,” he mumbled, consulting a small numbered stake. We walked down one row and backtracked another before he stopped. The mound was nearly hidden between a marble atrocity and a granite phallic symbol. Scrabbling through the weeds, the caretaker found a stake with faded typewriting under celluloid.

  “Here’s your aunt,” I called to the wives who were catching up.

  “And the lady is to be evicted?” my mad friend asked.

  “Five years have elapsed and the plot has not been paid for.”

  ‘Where does she go from here?” I asked.

  The caretaker mumbled vaguely and I deemed it best not to pursue the subject.

  “¿How much are the fees?” my wife asked.

  “Two hundred pesos.”

  Which, at 12 ½ to a dollar works out to, uh—

  “Well, let’s see,” my friend said, “A peso’s worth eight cents. Times two hundred—”

  ‘Where’s your slide rule?” a wife asked.

  “Sixteen dollars,” the caretaker said.

  Both wives were looking at me.

  “I could eat the blastoderm out of a nematode,” my mad friend said.

  Resignedly, I reached for my wallet.

  “I am not permitted to accept money.”

  My mad friend slapped a hand to his forehead.

  “One must go to Recaudación, taking the name, date, and plot number.” He scribbled necessary data on the back of the crumpled letter. “It would be well to hurry,” he added. “The graveyard locks itself at seventeen hours.”

  Walking at the maximum permitted men with wives, we returned to my friend’s auto and bounced our way back. “The average snake,” my friend continued, “has little intelligence. For reasons having nothing to do with theology, he’s in an evolutionary blind alley and will never be smarter than a moderately precocious rutabaga.”

  “I knew you were a theologian but when did you become a herpetologist?”

  “Satan’s evil knowledge can often be turned against him.”

  There are times when I believe my mad friend could have jansenized St. Ignatius Loyola. We arrived again at Recaudación. There were now twelve girls in the office, filing nails, applying lipstick, knitting, reading the lonely hearts ads in Confidencias. One was typing an answer. The sole secretario finally deigned to notice us.

  “We would like to pay the necessary fees for the tomb of Sra.—” I consulted the letter again.

  “¿Another five years or in perpetuity?”

  “That depends on how much it costs,” I hedged.

  “It’s costing me malnutrition,” my mad friend mumbled.

  “One hundred and fifty pesos for five years. Two hundred a la perpetuidad.”

  “I wouldn’t go through this again for four dollars.”

  He X-ed a square in a form and copied the name and plot number from the crumpled letter. He took my name, address, age, marital status, place of birth, nationality, native tongue, and occupation.

  “What about political affiliation?” my mad friend asked.

  “As a government employee I naturally belong to the Revolutionary Institutions Party,” the secretario said loftily.

  My friend sighed.

  “And now the receipt, if you please.”

  “¿What receipt?”

  The secretario controlled himself. “For the two hundred pesos,” he said raggedly, “Didn’t you stop at the cashier’s office first?”

  My friend and I looked at each other. “I’m dying,” he moaned.

  “And I’m dieting.”

  “Over there,” the secretario said tiredly. “And you’d better hurry.”

  We sprinted up an iron, fire-escape-like stairway to the Palacios 2nd story. “Recaudación sends us for a receipt for two hundred pesos,” I panted.

  Counting audibly, a middle aged lady finished knitting a row then began a receipt in triplicate. I reached for my wallet and extracted two $10 bills.

  “National currency,” the lady said firmly.

  “Quick!” my mad friend yelled. We dashed downstairs, across the patio looking for a place to buy some funny money. The casa de cambio across the street was closed. The next money changer was four blocks away . . .

  “I’m too exhausted to be hungry,” my friend wheezed as we sprinted back with a fistful of tattered, inflation colored paper.

  A small eternity later we were again rattling toward Panteon Number Two. The crowd had thinned by this time and I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t as yet called Shapiro. “Funny how these stories grow,” I said, remembering the ice cream vendor, “As if a weather balloon could make a noise coming down!”

  “In nordic countries the saucer is invariably noiseless,” my friend explained, “but Latins cannot tolerate the existence of silence. Nor, apparently, can my stomach.”

  Several wives descended from the car and followed us. We stood around the mound, each thinking his own thoughts. By now Aunt Epifania was definitely part of the family.

  “A small marble stone would look nice,” a wife said.

  My fingers closed convulsively over my billfold. “Hasn’t Aunt Fannie any issue of her own?”

  “How much would a headstone cost?”

  “A chemise and two pairs of alligator pumps with matching handbags ought to handle the down payment.”

  There was no answer.

  “Verily, life is for the living,” my mad friend muttered.

  “I wonder where that caretaker is.”

  I was still wondering when an elderly lady attracted our attention by descending the graveyard’s upper reaches with a recklessness hardly proper for her years and widow’s weeds. Hopping from mound to mound, She skittered downhill knocking wreathes and headboards askew. “¡Ay Dios, señor!” she babbled, clutching at my lapels and snagging a stray wisp of beard. “There is fresh digging and a hand extends itself from the ground, making perfectly the sign of the cross!”

  “Oi Gewalt!” my mad friend moaned. “A skeleton I’ll be yet.”

  Sure enough, the plot adjoining the agitated widow’s husband’s had a hand sticking out. My friend and I viewed it circumspectly, avoiding each other’s eyes from fear that suppressed smiles might erupt into something uncontrollable. Several wives were having a similar difficulty.

  “Truly, senora, the hand makes the sign of the cross,” my mad friend began. “But—” Abruptly, he buried his face in his handkerchief and coughed.

  “What my friend wishes to say,” I explained, “is that each country has its own language of gestures. Note, señora, that, though thumb and forefinger make the sign of the cross, little and ring fingers are also clenched.”

  My friend recovered from his coughing fit. “In our land, senora, the clenched fist with middle finger extended is a gesture without religious significance. It
does, of course, have a secular meaning.”

  By this time the caretaker had appeared. “God forbid!” he wailed. “The notifications to proper authorities, the paper work—” He clutched his head in bony hands and the pith helmet rolled several meters downhill.

  “Calma,” I said. “Some saucer gawker has a perverted sense of humor.” I shook the gravel out of the latex-glove hand, rolled it, and stuffed it in my pocket.

  We were nearly back to the car when he caught up with us. “I thank you,” he said. “You cannot imagine the hours of bureaucrat anguish you have saved me.”

  “Like hell I can’t!” my friend said grimly. “My royalties for an overripe mango.”

  “I shall remove the weeds from your great aunt’s grave. I shall plant jacintos and claveles and water them daily.”

  “We shall be eternally grateful,” I said, rushing through the ronde of Latin leavetaking. We made our escape.

  After Suppe and Kartoffel Salat we settled down to a leisurely gorge of Bavarian potroast which, due to our lateness, was the only thing not crossed off the menu. Only a purist could have distinguished it from Sauerbraten. Halfway through my second hard roll I remembered. “Oh gad!”

  A waiter appeared. “Yah?”

  Not knowing whether this was German for “what do you want?” or Spanish for “are you already finished?” I asked for a telephone in English. “Got to call Shapiro,” I explained.

  When I returned my mad friend was arguing with his favorite wife about whether Spanish with a German or German with a Spanish accent sounds worse. A busboy removed some of our litter. A baldheaded Bavarian unveiled a trayful of assorted Schmaltzen-macherei and a bowl of whipped cream.

  “Now where were we?” my mad friend asked. He sipped coffee with a longing look at my glass of Rhenish rotgut.

  “The serpent,” I reminded him. “Where does dogma assure us that reptiles cannot develop intelligence? If our fishy ancestors could, why not a snake?”

  “I’ve often suspected piscine ancestry on your side,” a wife interjected, “But I disclaim it for my own.”

  “Oho!” my mad friend laughed, “The grunnion bit, Mr. Bones.”

  Wives looked at us expectantly.

  “Stripping the story and ourselves to bare essentials, we’ve all hand-caught them during the monthly high tides. As veterans of these fullmooned beach bacchanalia, we can swear before any and all tourists that the little fish is neither mysterious nor mythical.”

  “All right,” a wife said tiredly, “so we’ve all come home in the wee small hours with a case of sniffles and a bucket of grunnion. So what?”

  “Mme. Grunnion’s marvelous little instinct makes her lay eggs high enough on the beach so they won’t get wet before hatching time twenty-eight days later. Can you, Gods finest creature, with all your Vapours and Lunar Humours, disclaim a kinship with this tiny tidebound female?”

  All wives became thoughtfully silent.

  “And thou, mad friend of Celtic breed?”

  “I grow less sorry by the minute for having taken the pledge. Returning to your argument, I see no point in dragging theology into a simple affair of two chambered hearts versus the four chambered pump of a viviparous species. Small things like these distinguish us from the fish and warm the connubial bed. By the way, what’d Shapiro have to say?”

  “Oh, there’s a mixup somewhere. The telemetering gear started working again and they’ve zeroed in on it somewhere in New Mexico.”

  My mad friend thoughtfully slopped another dollop of whipped cream into his coffee. “Then what do you suppose the local saucer gawkers were looking at?”

  I pulled the obscenely gesturing glove from my pocket and unrolled it. “Odd,” I said. “See the holes where the fingernails ought to be? More like a claw than a human hand. That new grave must have been directly below where the whatever-it-was landed.”

  “I suppose so,” my friend mumbled.

  “Say, feel of this.”

  My mad friend ran his fingers over the rough surfaced glove with its faint hint of scaliness. “Strange,” he said. “Doesn’t feel exactly like latex. More like a sloughed lizard skin.”

  “I suppose a skin-shedding would require more squiriming space than could be found in the average flying saucer,” I said, “but why was he digging around that new grave?”

  “Please,” a wife said, “not while I’m eating.”

  My mad friend frowned. “If it’s true I’ll sue Him for breach of Covenant,” he said distinctly.

  And suddenly nobody was eating.

  1961

  The Country Boy

  A new adventure of a time-traveling friend we have met before. There are special reasons, as you will see, to hope that this will not be the last time we meet him . . .

  SIT IN A SIDEWALK CAFÉ LONG enough and the whole world will walk by. Hah I A half hour had passed without one familiar face. I was glowering into a French beer, gaining a new insight into the Gallic preference for wine when someone sat uninvited at my table. “Feelthy peectures?” he asked.

  It was my mad friend. I stared incredulously, then laughed. “You first,” he said.

  I shrugged. “A-world power pays me not to talk.” Not that there was any real secret. Millions knew IT was going to start a few days after the inauguration. This time America had selected the original Aw-shucks kid. His supporters gleefully described him as the ugliest president since Lincoln. They hinted he was more everything than the Emancipator. So far he was only uglier.

  The other side of the world gave him ten days to snafu. Then they’d deliver the Ultimatum and he was going to muff it. I knew it; my mad friend knew it; so did everybody else. But, business as usual, so here I was for this crummy geophysical fizzle where I’d probably get mine an hour before the optimists who’d voted for the wonder boy.

  My mad friend read my mind. “He can’t be real,” he groused. “So he was a doctor at 19. So he wiped out disease and lengthened the lifespan 20 years. But why, in his B 5-year-old decreptitude does he have to take up politics? I say it’s all done with mirrors.”

  “We’ll know in three weeks,” I gloomed. The waiter hovered.

  “Café,” my mad friend said. He glanced distastefully at my bock. “Remove this urine and bring my friend a bottle of Münchener Lowenbrau.”

  “Sí, señor,” the waiter answered.

  “No wonder that troglodyte couldn’t understand French!”

  “Refugee,” my mad friend clarified. “It never occurred to you to try Spanish?”

  “Never,” I admitted. “But why do you endanger your sinuses in this rainwashed realm of international iniquity?”

  “An extradition.”

  “A what?” The last I knew he’d been playing Great White Father to the autochthonous population of an Arizona town which only the threat of legal reprisals keeps me from naming. I could not imagine a Yaqui Indian in Paris. Much less could I imagine one being wanted bad enough to send my mad friend here.

  The waiter returned with coffee for my friend and a potable, non-local beer for me. “¿Los señores desean algo más?” he asked.

  “I desire to know why you didn’t speak Spanish in the first place.”

  The waiter shrugged apologetically. “You look like a goddam.” My mad friend laughed. “Where did you ever get those tweeds?” he wondered.

  But I was not going to be led down the garden path. “You mentioned an extradition—”

  He saw what I was driving at. “I don’t work there any more.”

  “What! Those ungrateful wretches turned you out as soon as you’d ticketed enough tourists to build a new jail and squad room?”

  “Not exactly,” he explained.

  “I went into business for myself.”

  I have heard of private investigators but never of a private traffic cop. “Did you buy up a stretch of highway or do you have the toll concession on Brooklyn Bridge?”

  “Bring any women?” my friend asked with his usual mercurial change of subjec
t.

  I nodded. “I don’t imagine anyone would foot the bill for your harem as long as it’s an extradition matter.”

  “You’re so right,” my mad friend agreed.

  Two furtive men in shabby overcoats sat down at the next table. Without asking, the waiter brought a half bottle of Valdepenas to one and something which looked like cider to the other. They began a political discussion in Catalán.

  “This seems to be a Spanish Republican hangout,” I said nervously.

  “It is,” my mad friend admitted.

  “Shades of McCarthy!” I exclaimed, “I’ll be investigated!”

  “Relax,” my friend said. “Have another beer.”

  “You know they’re harmless and I know it but do the hatchet men?”

  “What hatchet men?”

  “That scientific congress. I’m supposed to know Secrets.”

  “Do you?” my mad friend asked.

  ‘That’s beside the point. Hired assassins have their job and they’re singularly unimaginative about doing it.”

  “If I’m not mistaken,” my mad friend said, “here comes one now.”

  “How would you know?”

  “He flashed his tin in the consulate when I was there yesterday.”

  The man who approached our table was definitely not the FBI type. He was of medium height, with a nondescript, faintly Byzantine look, and splendid teeth which his dark skin made even whiter. He wore a trench coat and boina, which is cut so like a beret that only a Spaniard recognizes the difference. Accompanying him was a rather attractive Mexican girl, wearing what I guessed was the new botch look. The mere thought of its cost made me acutely unhappy.

  “Look who I’ve found!” she said, then did a double take as she recognized my mad friend.

  “How many wives did you bring?” my mad friend asked.

  “Just this one.” We made room at the table and the waiter reappeared.

  “Avez-vous une Coca-Cola? the girl asked.

  “He speaks Spanish,” I said.

  “You want I should ask for Tequila already?”

  My mad friend sighed and inspected the man in trench coat and boina. The Byzantine stared back. Without looking, he took a glass of cognac from the waiters hand and tossed it off. “I know you,” he said.