Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by G. C. Edmondson

  “Murphy was lacerating his duodenum up in California,” my mad friend prompted.

  “Ah yes. My city slicker spent a great deal of time showing him die ropes. About the time the slicker was ready to get his money back, presto!”

  My mad friend sighed.

  “At first my shill thought he’d been lured away by some other razor merchant. But after several months he received a letter—”

  My mad friend began dictating: “ ‘I take the liberty of enclosing a MS which you may find marketable. Should you decide to handle me, I must stipulate that my whereabouts remain secret.

  “ ‘Should any unusual conjecture cross your mind, please be assured I have excellent reason for conducting my affairs in this fashion. Sincerely, Joe Blow.’ ”

  “You got it all right but the name,” I conceded. “He signed himself S. Murphy.”

  The mailman coughed and blew a fine spray of tizwín in the general direction of the dancers. “Something wrong?” I asked. He shook his head and continued gasping. My mad friend thumped him on the back and after a couple of agonized wheezes the mailman was himself again. “You are writers!” he said.

  “I demand trial by jury,” my mad friend hastened.

  “Whatever gave you that idea?” I wondered.

  “You spoke of S. Murphy. I have read his works.”

  “Has he been translated?”

  “I read him in English,” the mail carrier said.

  I raised my eyebrows but did not manage to cover my bald spot. “Obviously,” my friend said, “You are a man of parts.”

  The cantoras had by now escorted Virgin and Child to the Mother cross next to the whipping post. After some complicated footwork and flag waving by the village’s little girls, they returned the images to the church.

  “This Murphy,” my mad friend prompted.

  I managed another sip of tizwín. “You’re the crime crusher. You put the clues together. He pulled the plug on his instalments and in-laws and disappeared in a transparent but satisfactory manner since the joy and fruits of his gonads didn’t bother or think to trace him through his agent.

  “When he incarnated as Murphy, his kookie gingerbread style was unchanged, the subject matter still autobiographical. Previous stories had dealt with an Outsider type trying rather desperately to establish some contact with his family. The new run was beachcomber-remittance man genre—about the lonely stranger who nobly bears his white man’s burden through some dark and secret corner of existence.”

  “My old sabre wounds are throbbing,” my mad friend grunted.

  The mail carrier took a deep breath. “I would write,” he said, “If only I could find more time.”

  My friend flinched from the look in my eye.

  “I have many ideas,” the little man continued.

  My mad friend glanced upward at the ramada which shaded us, reminding me that as guests we were duty-bound to hear out the club bore. “You didn’t know S. Murphy?” I asked.

  The mailman was swallowing tizwín, throwing his head back chicken fashion. He waggled a finger in the Latin negative.

  “And you obviously know everyone in this district,” my mad friend added.

  The mail carrier nodded and spat the taste of tizwín toward the plaza where men danced in eternal penance for having slept when the Romans came to arrest their Saviour.

  “Your agent’s never met Murphy?” my friend asked.

  I shook my head. “In this racket those who know your most intimate secrets are people you’ve never seen outside of an envelope.”

  “Why the sudden interest in looking him up?”

  I fanned myself and wished either the weather or the tizwín were cooler. “Our errant scribe underwent some sort of metamorphosis once he escaped the strictures of Organizationville. Maybe it was a spiritual rebirth; maybe his typewriter got gummy. (He began hitting the keys a lot harder.) But he started leaving out all those adjectives. Suddenly, he had one of those simple, effective styles which makes Genesis read rather like a comic book. Of course, he loused it up by going off on some sort of phonetic spelling kick but writers never can spell anyway.”

  The low slanting sun was beginning to reach us beneath the ramada whose shade was now transposed to the plaza where chapayecas in needlenosed demon masks waved wooden swords in mute menace at children who made faces at them.

  “What kind of stories do you write?” the little brown mail carrier asked.

  “Mostly, I write the kind everybody was buying last year.”

  “Principalmente,” my mad friend contributed, “He writes accounts of the fantasy scientific.”

  “—so, about this time, S. Murphy—”

  The mailman had taken the bit in his teeth. Though the Spanish language was no more native to him than to me, he had a certain way with words. “It was on the island,” he began, “Which lies in the sea two days N from the river mouth. There had been a burning. The people accused him of being ñagual. The Mexicans got wind of it and I was taken along to interpret when they arrested the headman.”

  “¿Nagual?” my mad friend asked, “You believe that?”

  “Certainly not,” the mail carrier said. “A man is a man and a bear is a bear. They do not trade shapes. But these island people—”

  “But there are no bears on this island,” I protested, “How could the belief have drifted over there?”

  The mail carrier shrugged. “No one ever got to the bottom of it. I could not understand their language so finally the Mexicans shot the headman and we left.

  “On the way back, after the Mexicans had gone their way and I mine I decided to pass the night at—”

  He whisked through the double voweled stutterings which mean Jackrabbit Drinking Place Where the American Killed Many Mexicans Before They Cut Off His Head. “You have been there?”

  We nodded.

  “I watered my horse and hobbled him, a large alazán which I had acquired from a Mexican who no longer needed him.”

  No longer needed was a euphemism which I understood. “But you were working for the Mexicans,” I protested.

  “For their money,” the mail carrier corrected. “This was some years ago, before they learned to respect us.

  “It was early spring and there were still a few green weeds inside the hacienda’s house garden. I led my sorrel in and was getting ready to boil coffee when a light came on inside the ruined building. It startled me,” the little man continued, “For I had not seen many electric lights. Since then I have been in large cities and seen the colored lights which twist into letters but I have never seen light like this. It came from everywhere, like sunlight through fog. Though there was enough to sight a rifle, it cast no shadow.”

  A chapayeca came to the ramada and gestured with his wooden sword. While men were bringing out the drum I studied his needlenosed mask of fresh deer-hide. Around the neck, his rosary strung up and was hidden under the demon face. I glanced at my mad friend.

  “Vow of silence,” he explained. “They keep the crucifix in their mouth for the entire week.”

  The mail carrier sensed that we were not particularly interested and began speeding up his story. “He was very white. His face had the pale, corpse color—like the part of a white man which is always covered by trousers. It was hard to know where clothing ended and skin began. He had no pockets. Carried a bag like this, only smaller.” The mailman smiled momentarily. “His trousers were tight but showed no bulge at the seat of courage. His hair was like dried corn silk and bristled a half centimeter over face and head. His eyes were pink, like those of a horse I stole once. He carried no rifle. I was certain he was not Mexican so even though he was alone, I did not kill him.

  “I accepted his invitation. His food came in square pieces like that tasteless bread you Americans eat. I did not care for it but since I had only a handful of piñole and three more days to ride . . . His beer was cold. Have you ever seen a small box from which one takes soft bottles and bites off the end?”

&nbs
p; “No, but I’ve seen this story.”

  “About once a month for the first twenty years after Stanley G. Weinbaum’s floruit,” my mad friend suggested.

  “You speak of stories,” the mailman protested. “This really happened.”

  All the more reason for its suppression, I thought, but the little man was off again. “That night he took a small thing from his knapsack. It made a noise like beans when they are first dumped into a hot skillet, then a voice in some language I didn’t know and he answered questions.”

  “How big was this radio?” I asked.

  “It was like the cigarette pack radios the turistas carry now.”

  “And this really happened?” my mad friend asked, “In what year?”

  The Indian thought a moment. “1926,” he said.

  “I know the Indian has a flexible concept of time,” my friend said, “But this is carrying things too far.”

  “Later that night I woke and rolled a cigarette. It was that time of year when Woman Who Plants Squash is high in the sky. While I watched, the tip of her digging stick flared for just an instant, then suddenly the star was much tinier.”

  “Were any novas recorded in 1926?”

  “Search me,” my friend said, “I thought they lasted for days or months.”

  “I had seen falling stars,” the mail carrier continued, “But this was the first time I had seen a fixed star change. I turned to see the all-white man also sitting on his blanket. “Two minutes early,” he grunted.

  The sun had finally set and it was becoming endurable beneath the ramada. In ten minutes it would be dark and we had not yet decided where to spread our sleeping bags. The dancers and officials of the various societies had been on their feet and fasting since dawn. Soon they would eat and those whose vow of silence relaxed at sundown would be enjoying themselves before the tiny fires which rimmed the boundaries of sacred ground.

  “I dislike to freeload on people who can ill afford it,” my friend said, “But we’ll create a bad impression if we uncork K rations in front of them.”

  “You will be welcome at my house,” the mailman said.

  “We couldn’t impose on you like that.” Mentally, I was calculating how many times this offer must be refused to strike a balance between politeness and necessity. The mailman was the only one in this village who had regarded us with other than a faintly hostile curiosity. “You must dine and pass the night with me,” he repeated.

  A boy brought tizwín. My long empty stomach regarded it somewhat coldly. I wondered if its taste had something to do with the village custom of constant and indiscriminate expectoration.

  “So what’s with S. Murphy?” my mad friend inquired.

  “Ah yes, the errant scribe. Well, along with that stark and simple style he suddenly developed a plot sense. I read the first few chapters of his magnum opus as it came in. They were (and I say it with a wrenching in the cardiac region) far superior to anything I’ll ever do.”

  “So what’s the difficulty?”

  “They were good enough,” I continued, “To get the grand-daddy of all contracts. The prepublication campaign on this one will make the Peyton Place business sound like the hard sell on some starving poet’s slim volume.”

  My mad friend was still mystified.

  “The time is overripe,” I said. “If I can’t find this guy and talk him into completing those last three chapters within 60 days my shill may be forced to subsist exclusively on Brand X.”

  “Zo vot’s in it for you?”

  “If the wheels fall off his pushcart my apples also scatter.” By now I had fallen into the habit of automatically spitting after each sip of tizwín. The postman, apparently unused to stronger waters, had lost his Indian gravity and would soon by all portents approach orbital velocity.

  “S. Murphy,” he slurred, “A wonderful writer.”

  Somewhere across the plaza a harp tinkled and falsetto voices raised in plaint to the Great Mother. “I have read his books,” the mailman continued in a voice from which tizwín had dissolved all roughness. “Have you read one—I remember not the title under which it publishes.” He began sketching in plot and characters, using that verbal shorthand one writer employs with another. I decided he must know Murphy quite well to have picked it up. “Could you take me to see him?” I asked.

  The mailman shook his head. “Impossible. Much distance.”

  My mad friend listened boredly. The plot dealt with a bumbling Ugly American type who settled in a village remarkably like this one—a man whose roots became large and clumsy feet when he attempted to plant them. My mad friend became more apathetic as he listened to garbled authorese. “What happened to the all-white man who was using pocket radios and predicting stellar catastrophes in 1926?” he asked.

  Without hesitation the mailman shifted stories in mid-sentence. “It frightened me that this man with the pink eyes could know a star was going to die. I had always thought only Our Lord or Earth Mother could do these things. I thought of killing him but if he were what I thought, my bullets were of the wrong metal. For a moment I wondered if he might be the same one the island people burned.

  “The all-white man sensed my inquietude. ‘Everywhere it is the same,’ he said. ‘Most people are good. They hire someone to protect them from the bad and the foolish.’ ”

  “Always around when you don’t need one,” I grunted.

  My mad friend whistled from Gilbert and Sullivan to the effect that a policeman’s lot was not a happy one. While the postman had droned on with this utterly predictable bit of sf I had been thinking deep thoughts about the Murphy plot he’d been detailing.

  “¿y Murphy?” I asked.

  Murphy’s style seemed to have rubbed off on the mail carrier though, of course, all Spanish in literal translation has that florid, bigger-than-life quality.

  “There was a man in the village who could read,” the Indian continued, “So he received a salary from the Mexicans, ostensibly as mail carrier, though really they thought they were hiring a Judas. Since no one else could read, his job was a sinecure. To make ends meet on his microscopic salary he also kept store, burro-training back those bits of civilization—cartridges, matches, coffee—which cannot be grown in fields.

  “The postman and the stranger became friends. Both were initiates into the sacred mysteries of Alphabet. Both knew tales of the great world below. And there was the postman’s daughter, in imminent danger of becoming an old maid. She sat in inconspicuous comers while the white man told stories of a world which mountain-bred beauty would never see.

  “Murphy’s eyes seared the brown body which bulged beneath an all-concealing dress. The postman was optimistic. But . . .

  “Perhaps she reminded the white man too much of his own daughters who by now must have been considerably older. He made no overture. Meanwhile, young men of the village stayed away, knowing they could not compete with this blond Othello who held a maid enthralled with tales of distant lands.” The mailman spat again.

  It was totally dark now with that velvety blackness of the tropics, unrelieved at this altitude by any flicker of love-frenzied fireflies. From the tiny fires that ringed Sacred Ground came appetizing smells of coffee and broiling meat. “I don’t know about you,” I said to my friend, “But I could eat the gastric contents of a ñagual.”

  “There will be food at my house,” the mailman said.

  I slung saddle bags of emergency rations over one shoulder and loaded down the other with the gadget bags and cameras which I had learned earlier would be reduced to powder if I so much as popped a flashbulb toward Sacred Ground. My mad friend shouldered the sleeping bags and we trudged behind the mailman, across the plaza, up the widest of the streets which wriggled octopuslike away from it.

  A couple of hundred meters uphill we entered a larger than usual compound, fenced with the usual jumble of cactus and yitahaya stalks. With no great surprise, I recognized the store in Murphy’s novel. We passed through it into the patio between th
e Mother Cross and a drying rack for chiles, into a low, rambling structure whose wattle and daub walls were high enough for privacy, but lacked a full meter of reaching the oval shaped palm thatch which shaded the house, stored maize out of the hogs’ reach, and sustained its own ecological cycle from cockroach to scorpion via mouse to snake. We suffered a visitaton of mosquitoes.

  “Burn a candle for whoever invented atabrine,” I muttered.

  My mad friend nodded and crossed himself.

  The postman’s wife was a tall, mahogany colored woman who wore abundant hair in a molote like Mrs. Katzenjammer. She greeted her minuscule husband with a respectful affection which explained the equanamity with which he faced a large and confusing world. She extracted a palm leaf from beneath the baby in her rebozo and knelt to revive the fire in the patio. A stairstep set of daughters joined her and the eldest began slapping tortillas while others brought out the best dishes.

  Soon my mad friend and I faced steaming bowls of the stewed squash blossoms which are one reason why I return regularly to this desolate land. We were poured countless cups of the asphaltum-like coffee which, after one disremembers American brews stands on its own peculiar virtue. There was chicken stewed in mole, a dark brown sauce made of 21 different chiles, peanut flour, ground chocolatl, and Ometecuhtl knows what else. When tamales de dulce appeared, made of fresh roasting ears macerated with stick cinnamon and loaf sugar, I began to suspect some runner had forewarned the household of our impending visit. The tizwín began to rest more comfortably.

  After a terminal plate of beans with tortillas of the local, paper thin and yard wide variety, we stretched legs and tilted vertical backed rawhide bottomed chairs to a comfortable angle. I glanced at my mad friend who was more cognizant of local custom than I. He nodded so I extracted some emergency ration.

  A daughter brought glasses.

  The mailman regarded the label on my rations with respect and said something which astounded us: “I’ll bring some ice.”

  The wife had long since retired to her own part of the immense rambling structure. We were alone in the patio, save for the 15 year old daughter who bulged in all the proper places and was learning how to pose and project her protuberances. I wondered if this were instinct or sophistication. It occurred to me that this might be the same young lady who in her quiet way was giving Murphy the business.