Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by G. C. Edmondson

  “We’ve been reconsidering,” Pendergast said in round, foundation-shaped tones. “I’nr afraid we are going to have to call the project off.”

  Before I could remind him that we had a contract he continued, “We’ll pay you, of course. And you might want to keep your troupe together. Perhaps in a month or so, once the dust has settled we can get together and dream up some other kind of public service program.”

  I mumbled something and got off the line.

  IT JUST didn’t make sense. Sure, I’ve been shafted before. But not this way. It was as if the Conscience Fund Foundation really did have a conscience. Somebody felt guilty and somebody was buying me. What for?

  Now that my immediate financial worries were over I had another problem. You’re only as good as your last and my last hadn’t happened—though I had sixteen cases of exposed film sitting in my apartment, next to my television set. I had to get something going soon or I’d end up in some goddam wax museum. Besides, it bent me out of shape. The first time in my life I ever tried to produce a really good program and here I was, shafted up to the sweetbreads.

  I decided to do something wild, crazy, extravagant. With my own money I hired an investigator. Not a hundred-dollar-a-day divorce expert. Not a Watergate Wonder-Boy. The guy I hired called himself an advocate. I called him a lobbyist.

  There’s nothing deader on this whole festering planet than a dead TV deal.

  But I wanted to know why. Personally, I tended toward the deep dark plot theory, but then I’m paranoid. Besides, now that it had been killed somebody should have been gloating, and making sure I found out why.

  While my high-voltage gumshoe was padding down the corridors of power I considered the possibilities. There were plenty of ordinary commonplace ones but they would all have gossiped back to me by now. Suddenly another one hit me. That whole goddam series of anthropological do-it-yourself—it had been a survival course!

  Somebody knew something. I started watching Walter Cronkite. Same old crap. The Cambodians had finally gotten it through their little heads that if Glorious Leader didn’t get those MIA’s back soon the silent majority probably wouldn’t say a word after the Bomb was dropped, except maybe to suggest the second one land on Sweden. But Kissingkraut must have convinced Moscow and Peking too. Things hadn’t looked better for a generation. The Arabs were even hinting that some of their best friends . . .

  Scratch one theory.

  At home Glorious Leader was screwing the poor, welshing on every campaign promise and giving it all to the little men in black pyjamas who had suddenly become our allies, essential to our best interests in . . . It was business as usual.

  The dollar was dropping, Europe was screaming, and it wasn’t really all that bad now that young Europeans were buying Mustangs instead of Black Forest Brand X.

  The Russians were going for color TV in a big way. Every country had its own color network now. China had agreed not to jam the satellite relays. It looked like we were going to be just one big happy family, even if Old Glorious had reversed himself again and cut off the programs that might have kept that family down to manageable size. So why was somebody stopping me from producing a decent TV program?

  It had to be a conspiracy. I’d tried too hard, run into too many stone walls. Two weeks and nobody had snickered or gloated. Somewhere in a back room evil men in hoods sat around a table and . . .

  My gumshoe rang me. “You’re not alone,” he said. “Bill Buckley’s been canceled.”

  “So what else is new?”

  “Doesn’t it strike you odd that in spite of all the government’s feuding with the media, just about everything right-of-center is getting canceled?”

  “Of course it’s odd. Now tell me why it’s odd.” For this I’m paying a gumshoe real devalued American dollars?

  “I’m working on that,” he said and hung up.

  Meanwhile, not only was I watching Walter Cronkite; I was starting to read the papers. I even read the classifieds.

  It was no use. No cryptic ‘personals’. No little men in hole-in-the-wall stores to lead me into extradimensional adventures. Even the ‘object, carnal knowledge’ ads were unimaginative.

  One of the more image-minded corporations was getting hit with another anti-trust suit in return for its latest public-service program educating the citizenry in the outs of government. A communications conglomerate was being warned about a radiation hazard in their new line of color TV’s but since a jap set selling at half the price and emitting twice the radiation was outselling them that was the least of their worries. Somebody was promising gasoline rationing this summer and no fuel oil this winter. America’s birthrate was at its lowest since World War II. Somebody in Africa was starving, having managed to outbreed Borlaug’s Miracle Mealie-mealies. And my gumshoe was still running up a bill. I decided to call him off and fold up the company while I still had a dime left for my old age.

  MY AGENT called. “Everything is supercolossal again!”

  “We’re going to do the series?”

  “No, that one’s dead and gone.”

  “So what is it this time?”

  “Situation comedy—This POW comes home after nine years. He’s never seen a mini, doesn’t even know brassieres will burn.”

  “Where’s the comedy?”

  “Each episode his wife comes on with something new. First off, she’s living with three other guys. Next one, we put his daughter in a commune.”

  “This is comedy?”

  “It all depends on the treatment.”

  “You don’t want me; you need Evelyn Waugh.”

  “Don’t you want to do the show?”

  “I didn’t say that,” I sighed. “It just takes a little getting used to.”

  “So it’s on?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t sound very happy about it.”

  “I’m delighted.” I hung up and poured myself a drink. Here was my chance for another Emmy. Ought to top Archie Bunker any day. I hadn’t disbanded my company yet. Better Call Honig and get him to working up a shooting schedule. Shlock Rides Again! You could bet your life nobody was going to shoot this one down. An administration that favored the crap that was going out in prime time now would stand for anything—except intelligence or good taste.

  Suddenly a great light burst. I wondered if this was what the mystics meant when they maundered on about Illumination. To me it. was more like an old fashioned cartoon. I could almost see the light bulb encased in a little balloon floating over my head. The trouble was, I had a production company. Now who the hell knew anything about the technical side of the business?

  I found the man I wanted.-Not in a TV repair shop where you might expect.

  “Ruined,” the X-ray technician said. “I don’t know where you’ve been storing it but this film’s picked up enotigh radiation to sterilize twenty generations of fruit flies and half the population of Biafra.”

  Knowing that I’d been expecting that answer did nothing to stop the sinking feeling in my stomach. At last I knew why. Now my only problem was ethical. Knowing why didn’t tell me what to do about it.

  People were made to be managed. I’d been producing shlock all my life, reminding myself each time I went to the bank that Mencken was right: No man ever went broke under estimating the American taste. So I’d done one decent thing in my life—tried to produce a good TV program. And what had it gotten me?

  I’ll do the POW comedy. Why not? Somebody else would anyway, But I really wonder. I wonder if, twenty years from now when the Selecting is all done, somebody might not discover that his kids watch shlock too? Somebody watches those cruddy shows. And since when can even a Right Wing mother convince her precious genetic heir not to glue his nose to that X-ray emitter? But you don’t catch me watching that gonad-shriveling shlock. From now on I’m not even watching Cronkite!

  1980

  All that Glitters

  Getting on. Frank wasn’t sure how old he was because he didn’t ha
ve a calendar. Spring. But was it March or May? In his private chronology it was shootin’-star month. And if the danged snow ever cleared out he was going to have to get to town and see about his teeth which were aching like eternal damnation.

  He brought his rifle to his shoulder and tried to draw a bead on the lightning-struck bull pine across the meadow. After a moment he sighed and lowered the gun. It was a 50-70 Springfield Government Breech Loader and had been new about the same time Frank was.

  Shep studied him worriedly. He remembered when the dog would have pranced rings around him. Now their tracks were side by side in the mushy snow. There were fresh droppings near the bull pine. Frank squinted and couldn’t tell if they were deer or elk. He studied droppings and tracks, trying to decide how many hours old. Shep sniffled and lost interest.

  But these were the only tracks this morning Frank belched sourdough and began following the trail as Shep paced soberly beside him, glancing up from time to time.

  Frank was still straight and his hair only beginning to gray. He walked with the careful economy of motion that goes with age, carrying the breech loader at port arms. They followed tracks toward the place up the hillside where game trails crossed, their traffic thickened by the block of salt he had packed in twelve years ago to permeate the soft rock face of the lick. Only very gradually did Frank sense something was wrong.

  It was too quiet even for this barren land. Not a single chicken, which is what people up here call the ptarmigan. Nor were there any of the sparrowlike snow birds whose names he had never bothered to learn. By now he surely should have heard the raucous squawk of some ruffnecked scavenging crow.

  It was natural for Frank and Shep to walk in their little circle of silence as all the woods creatures acknowledged their passage, but this time the silence was all-pervading. That could only mean some other large animal was loose in the woods.

  No moose or elk would provoke this universal watchfulness. And even if it weren’t still early for them to be out Frank knew a grizzly wasn’t all that terrifying to his neighbors. He glanced down at Shep and realized how old his dog was getting. If Shep sensed anything different, he wasn’t saying. Then abruptly the dog’s hackles rose and he gave a deep, almost subsonic hint of a growl.

  Frank squinted toward where Shep was pointing, and up on the hillside near the lick he saw it. It was impossible to believe his eyes so Frank didn’t. Instead, he squinted and tried to look slightly to one side until the formless quivery mass wavered and finally congealed into two separate entities, one vertical and the other not. “Be danged if I don’t get me some glasses,” Frank muttered.

  Shep was still edgy but stuck close to Frank as they walked toward the vertical and horizontal blurs. Another hundred yards and Frank realized he had come upon the one thing he had never expected to find out here. The man wore a ragged mackinaw rather like his own. His dog must be getting on in years too, considering his lack of curiosity.

  Man and dog stood silent waiting for Frank to finish climbing the hill. As he approached closer, Frank’s eyes cleared momentarily and he saw the stranger had a rifle too. Shep’s subsonic warning became more insistent. “Now don’t you go startin’ no fights with peaceable strangers,” Frank growled back. He nodded at the stranger. “Howdy,” he said, working the word carefully past his aching jaw.

  The stranger raised his right hand high and for an instant Frank thought he was an Indian. Then as they came closer he could see grizzling hair and weathered skin much like his own. The two were about the same height, and the stranger seemed just as at home up here as Frank. Shep and the stranger’s dog surveyed each other warily.

  “Seen any game?” Frank asked. There were other questions he would rather ask—like “What the hell you doin’ in my backyard?” But in the days when Frank’s character had still been setting you just didn’t say things like that to strangers.

  The other man’s voice was odd. Once when he had not had a dog to talk to Frank’s voice had gotten that way from long disuse. Give him time, he told himself. His voice’ll come back to him. There was an instant of awkward silence and then finally the stranger croaked, “Howdy.”

  At precisely the same moment they shushed their bristling dogs. Frank decided the stranger had been out here quite a while from the woodsy way he was acting. Funny they had never cut each other’s sign before. An unwelcome suspicion was building in Frank’s mind. He was getting on. Eyes going. Maybe the stranger had been here quite a spell and Frank, getting so careless, had walked right over all the signs. “Nice country,” he hinted.

  If the stranger knew what Frank was asking he gave no sign. But he didn’t have the confused, hostile air that often came from too many months of solitude. Instead he seemed neutral—waiting. After a slightly- too-long interval he finally said, “Yes.”

  Frank could see him clearly now. There was something vaguely familiar about the stranger. It took a moment before he knew what it was. The stranger looked a little like the older brother he had not seen for thirty years. Not the way Leonard had looked, but the way he might look if he were still alive. “Thought I saw elk sign this morning,” Frank said. He was babbling, but the stranger had been out here too long. Somebody had to help him back to civilization. “Name’s Frank,” he offered.

  Another long silence and then a barely perceptible croak. Frank thought the stranger was repeating his name and then he understood. The stranger’s name was Fred.

  “It’ll come back,” Frank said. “First year up here I danged near forgot how to talk too.” He still wasn’t talking too well with that aching jaw but that was nobody else’s business.

  “Elk,” the stranger said. “Saw one.” He pointed.

  Frank nodded. “C’mon, Shep,” he said. Hackles still up, Shep followed him off in the direction the stranger had pointed. No use rushing things, Frank guessed. Give the stranger time to get used to the idea of other humans. Must be as much of a strain for him as it was for Frank to discover that neither of them was alone since the Indians had started to die off. “You come on around some day soon now and we’ll have us a feed,” he called back.

  Another slightly-too-long interval, and then the stranger croaked. “Tomorrow.”

  A quarter mile ahead Frank saw more fresh droppings and knew the stranger had steered him right. He glanced back and saw the man and dog still standing there by the lick, apparently they hadn’t moved since first he had seen them. But by then Frank’s eyes had once more melded them into the same amorphous lump. Shep growled, then sniffed at the fresh droppings and showed an interest he had not evinced back down in the meadow. Frank checked the load in his breech loader and began following the tracks where the elk had pawed through the mushy snow for grass and moss.

  Shep’s ears lay back and he went into a point. Frank squinted. There was the elk. The bull had not seen them. He was in range. Frank shouldered the rifle and squinted. This time his eyes were clear. He whistled, and the bull elk obligingly raised its head. Frank fired and the animal disappeared behind billows of black powder smoke. For an instant it felt as if the side of his face was coming off. Then his jaw subsided back to its regular ache. The smoke cleared and he saw he had made a clean kill.

  Shep lapped blood and made the most of a kidney while Frank dressed out the elk and spent the greater part of the day cutting it into manageable pieces which he hung from branches out of reach of all the forest creatures who liked fresh meat as much as he did. Finally he packed liver and tongue and some of the other more perishable parts into his rubberlined meat sack and started hoofing it back to the cabin.

  Suddenly he remembered the stranger. If he was still at the lick Frank reckoned he’d tell him where the kill was hung, invite him to take a piece. But when he and Shep arrived at the lick the stranger was gone. Not a stranger, he reminded himself. Man’s name was Fred.

  That night Frank and Shep shared a skilletful of sliced liver salted, floured and peppered. He wished for onions but the dried onions were finished along with ju
st about everything else. He wondered how Fred was fixed. Once he had had time to get over his woodsiness maybe they could trade a few odds and ends to make life easier until the snow was gone.

  And tomorrow he would have to start slicing all that meat thin; get it at least part dry in the month that was left before fly time. But that could wait till tomorrow. Tonight, full of fresh meat for the first time in over a month and with his jaw aching a little less than usual, Frank suddenly became aware of how his whiskers were itching. He began stropping his cutthroat razor while another kettle of snow warmed on the sheetiron stove.

  He tried to shave around the angry red lump on his jaw and then, halfway through shaving, stopped to squint into the cracked mirror. Suddenly he knew why the stranger had seemed so familiar. Should have guessed it when he saw how much like Shep the stranger’s dog had been. Now he knew where he had seen Fred’s face before. He was shaving it. Even to the same reddish lump on the right side of his jaw. “And I thought he was woodsy,” Frank said. Shep looked up at him and wagged his tail.

  Man can’t get to Frank’s age without thinking once in a while about the inevitable. But now that he was faced with new evidence of how quickly everything was closing in on him Frank’s first and most painful thought was for a dog grown too old to forage for himself. I’ll have to kill Shep first. He was tempted to do it right now without any more hesitation or thinking it over. Then he decided he might as well wait a while. Maybe he would get better before the elk was all gone. So instead, he banked the fire and went to bed.

  Sleep did not come as easily as it had when a body was new and everything happened for the first time. There had been a girl once. After fifty years he was hard put to remember what she looked like. She had been young, had loved to go to bam dances. He had been young too. In those days he had known with a young man’s certainty that all problems could be solved with gold—if he could just find some.

  “You don’t think about anybody but yourself,” Effie had said.