Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by G. C. Edmondson

  The Byzantine bullied them into seats at the next table. After a wistful glance at the wives, they reverted to some plosive gabble where each sentence sounded like an ultimatum. The Byzantine wiped his face with a scented handkerchief before muscling a chair into our table. “Some wild cattle,” he said, using the latin term for streetwalkers, “Will drift in and keep them happy.”

  The turtle butcher deposited a half empty bottle. Over poorly drawn terriers was printed GENUINE SCOCH WISKY. The Byzantine gulped a gleason-sized belt. His eyes widened like a freshly alimonied Californian’s, then he smiled again. “Poor children,” he sighed, “They get restless in this climate.”

  “Why bring them to this third rate Fort Zindemeuf?”

  Given half a chance, the Byzantine would never stop. “What,” my friend hastily asked; “Will you accomplish with this Mohole?”

  “Search me. My job is just keeping the radar going so we can center over the hole.” I sipped beer and tried to answer his question. “We ought to break through any day. Maybe it’ll tell us how the earth was created.”

  “It’s all in Genesis,” my mad friend said, and made a ritual gesture of exorcism.

  Wives snatched bags from the table. Staring, the Byzantine overfilled his glass and was still pouring booze over the table. It wasn’t like him to get potted this early in the story. “Is your liver giving out?” I asked.

  There was a deafening silence at the next table. Bulletheads stared at the doorway where the late sun silhouetted an anatomical ensemble.

  ‘Tiger, tiger burning bright,” my mad friend muttered.

  “Rascuachitlan has joined the 20th Century,” I decided.

  “How?” a wife inquired.

  “Wild cattle who must face the magistrate without consul or counsel actually dare appear without skirts.”

  The silhouette was joined by two thicker ones. As they fumbled their sunblinded way across the floor I realized it was the palomino. The turtle butcher sidetracked his tray and rushed to escort them. Some instinct told me that the tight trousered palomino was communicating.

  Bulletheads returned resignedly to their drinking, save one who gazed regretfully at what might have been. Even iron curtain countries issue dresses for female tourists. I wondered if this one had lost her luggage.

  “Break through what?” my mad friend asked. I wrenched myself back to the Mohole.

  “The mantle; Earth’s outer covering.”

  “What do you expect to find?”

  “No two geologists agree.”

  The Byzantine glared morosely into his glass. “Is not good scotch,” he growled.

  “Could you do an article on it for the new magazine?” my friend asked.

  The Byzantine brightened. “I have a story,” he said.

  “We don’t plan to run fiction.”

  “At least we won’t call it that.”

  “But this is true.”

  My mad friend said something in Arabic. The sound alone could have provoked another crusade.

  “It starts with an astronaut just beginning turnover to go into orbit,” the Byzantine persisted.

  “At least it isn’t sf,” a wife said.

  “Then just at the moment of substitution—”

  “The moment of what?”

  “When the Great Ones pull him through the inspection hole and start the whirligig so radar will think he’s orbiting.”

  My friend flagged frantically and the turtle butcher came to our table. Not, I noted, without a swift glance at the palomino. “This sheep dip,” my friend said, “Is doing permanent damage to the small gentleman’s cerebrum. Kindly bring something less noxious.” He slopped the Byzantine’s glass on the floor and tossed a match. There was a sputtering whoosh. “Won’t even burn with a blue flame,” my friend grunted.

  The Byzantine screwed his boina down on his head. “The Great Ones,” he said, “Are not too different. They’re just waiting for us to catch up.”

  “I demand immediate integration,” my mad friend murmured.

  “Where do these Great Ones come from?” a wife asked.

  The turtle butcher deposited a bottle. My mad friend studied the seal and label. He passed it to me, looking exactly as someone might who had not had a drink since a soul shattering episode in Nord Afrique. I poured a short snort. “Legitimo; the leprechauns washed their feet in this poteen.”

  The Byzantine poured another gleason-sized belt.

  “Primoroso!” he exclaimed, “But why tastes Irish so different from scotch?”

  While my mad friend explained how smoke is flued under the Irish floor and boils up through the rye in Scotland I studied the menu. It consisted of turtle.

  “Hungry?” I asked. My friend nodded.

  “Cahuamar a wife exclaimed, “It makes years that I do not taste.”

  “Is it fit for human consumption?” my friend asked.

  “It has six flavors,” the wife continued, “Part tastes like beef, some like veal, some like pork, some like chicken. Once during difficult times we made chorizo,”

  The palomino progenitor leaned toward me and in English said, “I know cahuama is turtle but could you tell me about it?” He shrugged apologetically and continued in California Spanish, “First time I’ve ever been here.”

  “This wife,” I cautioned, “Grew up in an isolated fishing village. If you’ve been eating naught but fish it’s possible that hawkbill sea turtle will taste like beef, lamb, chicken, or consumi madrileno. If you’ve eaten these regularly, I’m afraid its going to taste fishy. As for the chorizo, I prefer my sausage of dog or iguana.”

  The palomino was turning green.

  “I still want some,” a wife insisted.

  “And you shall have some,” my friend said, “But let’s cut out where the rest of us can have something approved by Good Housekeeping and Leviticus.”

  “Dees gawhamma,” a bullethead asked in what was probably English, “Ees tortull?”

  I nodded.

  They turned on the Byzantine with angry expostulations. My friend flagged the assistant bartender, pressed a wadded bill in his hand, and said, “We wish to eat elsewhere.”

  “I don’t know my way,” the palomino progenitor said, “Do you mind if we go along?”

  “Why not?”

  As long as the bulletheads and the Byzantine had attached themselves . . .

  “In ten minutes,” the turtle butcher said, “I finish.”

  We finished our drinks and, after endless waits before die door marked DAMAS, exited. Under bug-haloed streetlights waited three calandrias, the open carriages which handled most of the local transportation problem.

  “Courage,” I consoled, “The horses look tired.”

  The turtle butcher had shed his apron and combed his hair. He maneuvered the old folks into a calandria and crowded next to the palomino. My mad friend and I made room for the Byzantine. “After the astronaut has been pulled through the hole,” he said, “We flashback and explain about the Great Ones.”

  “Vamonoooooooos!” the turtle butcher shouted in imitation of a train conductor. Drivers flicked whips and whistled between their teeth. We passed to an older part of town. Open air restaurants sweltered astraddle the cobbled street’s central gutter. “La zona our hackman said.

  “Did he say Zona?” a wife asked.

  “Zona de Tolerancia,” the turtle butcher explained.

  My friend and I looked at each other in growing consternation. “Wrong appetite,” my friend muttered.

  “What’s wrong?” the palomino progenitor twittered.

  “We are enfiladed by whorehouses,” I grunted.

  “No importa,” the turtle butcher said, “Excellent restaurants. Families come.”

  The palomino abruptly stooped. “Eight to five,” my mad friend murmured. She straightened again and though strained, the capris had not burst. From the gutter she held a small neatly wrapped package.

  A policeman strolled down the street, gravely acknowledging greetin
gs from the open doorways. “Everything managed with decorum,” my friend said. “T’was indeed a sad day when the Parlor House disappeared from the Land of the Free and the Home of the Women’s Club.

  “So.” He turned to the turtle butcher. “Which eating establishment gives you a kickback or just happens to belong to your uncle?”

  The young man led us through a heavy door into the patio of a large building with heavy windowless walls to shut out the noisome stinks of the Great World. Its two stories gave onto a cool central patio where an ancient woman fussed over washtub sized copper cauldrons. A small grizzled man in loose white trousers and guayabera was digging. His spade liberated a jet of steam. My friend absently hummed a snatch of Te Deum.

  ‘The young man deserves his commission,” I said.

  “And a lifetime indulgence,” my mad friend added.

  We were served, one recalcitrant wife with cahuama, the rest of us with beef just emerging from its banana leaf shroud after forty-eight hours underground.

  “Real barbacoa,” my friend exulted.

  I wrapped beef in a hot tortilla, pausing only to slosh it with red-green sauce made of tiny magma-flavored chiles serranos macerated with onion, jitomate, oregano, and fresh coriander leaves.

  “True barbacoa,” I agreed, “Not that fraudulent pap from the backyard brazier which ulcerates our vincible homeland.”

  The bulletheads performed heroic sleight of mouth. The ubiquitous small boys trotted beer and iced glasses of instant insanity from across the street. “After the Great Ones pull the astronaut through the hole,” the Byzantine continued, “They indoctrinate him into the nature of the universe.”

  A wife stared morosely at turtle stew. “This tastes like fish,” she complained. While my mad friend and I laughed a boy removed her plate and brought barbacoa.

  “You will like this story,” the Byzantine told us.

  “Like a strawberry pizza,” I said, but he was continuing.

  “In this story we prove that space travel is impossible. After all, space is solid!”

  My mad friend grinned. “Now I know why the Index bans Galileo.”

  “But what, then, is Earth?”

  “A bubble in the gently flowing solid of space.”

  “And the Great Ones?” I asked, “Where do they live?”

  “On other spheres.”

  “Don’t you mean in?”

  “On,” he insisted, “Earth is a sphere inside a sphere. We live on outer surface of inner sphere. How else could we see stars?”

  “How indeed?” my mad friend wondered.

  The mortal gorge was ending. The old woman brought a fleeting memory of Act I, Scene 1, MacBeth as she ladled up coffee and the inevitable final course of beans from her cauldrons.

  The palomino rummaged in her purse and discovered the green wrapped package. Que sera? she wondered.

  It looked like sheets of unseparated banknotes. Then I realized they were lottery tickets, perforated to tear each into its hundred separately saleable cachos.

  “What date?” I asked. She handed me a sheet. “Last week. Winners ought to be posted by now.”

  The progenitor was recalling stories of 8 million peso winners. “How do you cash them?” he sputtered. “Help me and you’ll get a split. Everybody gets a split!” Across the patio the ancient man and woman regarded us.

  The palomino progenitor made a magnificent gesture and said “This is on me.” He handed the old woman a note whose denomination precluded any hope of change and grandiloquently told her to keep it. I wondered how much would revert to the turtle butcher.

  That young man reappeared with more calandrias. It was ten PM. Offices and stores had just closed and the local people were hurrying home to supper. I wondered how much of a dent we had made in what the inhabitants of this pension were going to get.

  Momma sat beside the palomino. Her husband shouted back to us regarding the division of spoils. “Why not wait and see if the tickets won?” my mad friend shouted back.

  “If space is solid why don’t we fall up?” I asked.

  The Byzantine leaned forward with sudden intensity and I saw he was not as drunk as I’d thought. “A planet is a one way screen. Gravity is the relentless seep of space pushing in.”

  The calandria lurched over a missing cobble. My friend cast a jaundiced eye at the moon’s direction and said, “We progress from Penn Station to the Battery via Brooklyn.”

  “Oh, give the poor boy a chance,” a wife said.

  In the lead carriage the turtle butcher s dyspeptic grimaces were soulful.

  “If gravity seeps in,” I said, “The bubble will get full.”

  “It’s been happening since the Ur-bubble burst to create an expanding universe. Have you noted the circular bubble sign in primitive religions, erroneously called the sun disc?”

  “A yam like that would sure as Kennedy put me on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. What times your boat leaving?” my friend asked with his usual mercurial change of subject.

  “8 AM.”

  He glanced at his watch. “How much farther to that miserable hotel?”

  The turtle butchers soulful looks made me wonder if he was passing a stone. “We expect to hit the Discontinuity any minute,” I said. “Maybe I can get away from this Turkish bath soon.” I slashed at the gnats which descended each time we passed a street light.

  “Mira alli!” a wife exclaimed. Walls were draped with numbers printed on muslin. “Alto!” I yelled. We scrambled into the lottery office. The Byzantine made explosive noises and his bulletheads stood quiet. “How long are you stuck with them?” I asked.

  “Thirteen more days but our plans may change. Would you care to join the tour?”

  “Afraid not. I’ve got work to do.”

  “Where’re you going?” my friend asked.

  The Byzantine got that glassy look again and I suddenly noticed a hearing aid. He had once told me he expected to die at 40. He must be around 42 now. His eyes focussed and he put his hand on my arm. “En serio, I have a fondness for you. I will happily bear the expense for you and wives.”

  Bulletheads crowded around, arguing like poorly carburated Vespas. “Right proud t’have y all come along,” said one. The one a wife had insisted was female edged closer. “Danger if you not,” she added. “We needing badly women.”

  My mad friend had been watching the gambling crazed palominos. “Those tickets are complete?” he asked, “Nothing torn off?” They nodded. “If the stubs weren’t handed in for the drawing your discarded, unsold tickets are about as valuable as a Nixon button,” my friend said.

  Seeing his bubble burst, the progenitor tried to laugh but looked more as if his ulcer had just gone septic. He was remembering his ‘this is all on me.’ As horses clopped toward our hotel even the turtle butcher sensed that the evening’s magic had departed.

  “These Great Ones,” I asked, “Why such a hurry to pull the astronaut through the hole? Do they have to close it quick to keep from leaking gravity?”

  The Byzantine had lost interest in his own story. “How do they get from one planet to another if it can’t be done with spaceships?” I insisted. He came to with a jerk and I wondered if he were drunk or tired. “Time machine,” he said, “That’s how I met the Great Ones.”

  Back in first person, I noted. “In an expanding universe,” the little man continued, “The only way to travel is to go back to that instant when the Ur-bubble has just burst and step to one’s chosen destination. It’s easy to move forward again in time.”

  “A good idea for a story,” my mad friend said thoughtfully. “Too bad I can’t use it.”

  “Too late,” the Byzantine said, and went to sleep. Moments later we arrived and as the turtle butcher watched his palomino depart I knew somebody else’s bubble had burst. The floor was crowded now and an orchestra industriously ground out a mambo while the locals, a tourist or two, and the wild cattle twisted. As we crossed the floor someone released a mass of balloons. Dancing turne
d to bedlam as hairpins and cigarettes popped them. The Byzantine caught my arm. “You will come?” he pleaded.

  “Sorry.” I felt sudden shame when the little man I had always regarded as a figure of fun shook my hand and spun so abruptly that I could see tears fly. A balloon rocketed across the floor and slapped me wetly in the face.

  The wives had put up their hair and gone to bed. I sat on the balcony watching the moon sink into the sea just about where Blaspheme II was tethered to its column of drill steel. My mad friend silently passed a rosary through his fingers. “Too bad about the lottery tickets,” he finally said.

  “Did you notice how the Byzantine lost interest right in the middle of his story?”

  My friend nodded. “Wasn’t drinking much either. I wonder if he’s on the needle. Notice that glassy stare and the way he was Hearing Voices?”

  “Be funny if that hearing aid was a radio. I wonder what instructions the Great Ones would give him.”

  Beneath our balcony the bulletheads erupted with packed bags. They trotted toward the ocean for a farewell swim. “Two out of three will step on stingrays,” my mad friend guaranteed. But there was only laughter as they splashed into the quietly lapping ocean.

  I had a sudden thought. “Could we find that paper that was on the table this afternoon?” My friend made an interrogatory grunt. “The pictures,” I said, “They look like that mixed bag of astronauts.”

  My mad friend snorted and began thumbing his rosary.

  “This’d sure be the place to hole up if somebody wanted to pretend he was in orbit.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” my friend snapped, “Give up sf for a while. Try knitting, or smoking pot. Besides, the Great Ones pull them up through the hole.”

  “Right,” I grunted.

  “I’m bushed,” my mad friend said. “In case you sail before I get up, I’ll be here another week. Think you’ll break through by then?”

  “Could be,” I said.

  “Well, good night. Don’t forget the article.” He disappeared and I sat watching the bulletheads come out of the sea. Still in bathing gear, they set off with their bags. Why had that female thought it dangerous if we didn’t go?

  And why didn’t the Byzantine want to peddle his crazy theory any more? The palomino progenitor had lost something he never really had. So had the turtle butcher. But what bubble had burst for the Byzantine? I yawned and gazed at the gibbous moon through half closed eyes. What were they celebrating downstairs popping all those balloons?