Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by G. C. Edmondson

  Next day he went back up to the diggings. No sign of Fred but the celluloid sluice box was still there, every riffle clogged with gold. Close to a hundred ounces, Frank guessed. He cleaned it out and considered dismantling it but there were still a few piles of pay dirt to be washed. Might as well bring his shovel tomorrow.

  Funny thing was, his jaw didn’t ache any more. Swelling was down to where he hardly remembered it. He wondered if he was imagining a little hollow where the swelling had been. Would anybody in town believe him if he told them about Fred?

  Better not say anything. He had more gold than he’d ever need. Valley was quiet again. Soon the creek would clear up and with Fred gone the game would be back.

  Have to sell that gold in danged small lots, or else he’d have so many neighbors there’d be nothin’ left to do but take it all and go try living Outside for a spell.

  He didn’t really want to do that. Neither would Shep. He watched the old dog worrying at a bone and suddenly knew what had happened: all those clean- polished bones when the stranger had finished feeding. “Be goldanged,” he muttered as he ran his hand over a faint fuzzy growth of new beard. “I’ll just bet you that Fred critter went and bit it all clean out!”

  1981

  Written on the Water

  Mr. Edmondson tells us: “The problem with the Byzantine is that nobody is willing to believe the mad-friend stories are true. Literary license requires that they be neatened up a bit, but every story evolved from an incident in our travels. §§§ A younger, unexpurgated Edmondson wrote the first, “The Misfit,” in ’59. The Byzantine had a drinking problem even then. The stories have always tried for a Bach effect: story lines with no apparent connection. The only amusement is seeing if the canon finally goes off. §§§ My mad friend is known to West Coast fans and authors. We spent our lives in unusual occupations, and life has been difficult since the CIA gave a bad name to gun running. But just as we are at our wit’s end in some anus mundi the Byzantine invariably reappears—no older than a quarter century ago—and with just enough consistency to his stories to . . . §§§ Hell, I don’t know. I’ve seen it, but I don’t know if it’s a time machine. I’m operating with an Olduvai Mark II information retrieval system that grows increasingly inaccurate. The data are out of control, and I’m not sure of anything.”

  It was spring; and prudence dictated a change of scene while my friend’s hair, mustache, and some skin grew back. Presumably, this would happen at about the same rate that stability returned to a neighboring country. “I still don’t like it,” he grumbled.

  “You preserve the fine tradition of the Knights Hospitaller and Templar,” I consoled. “To say naught of the Company of Jesus.”

  “Nor let us forget the venerable Order of Assassins,” he growled.

  This nihilism was unlike my mad friend. “Unsound theology,” I murmured.

  Instead of getting a rise I got the glare of a man forced to act against his principles. “If only it made some difference,” he said.

  “What profiteth a man to ask why the helicopter was forty seconds late?”

  My mad friend passed a hand through stubbly hair that was coming out blond again, when a shadow fell on our table. We were making reflexive, armpit-scratching gestures when I recognized him. A pair of wives recognized the small dark man with the brilliant smile before I did. They smiled and returned to their discussion of fake fur and ecological potemkinism.

  “How did you find us?” my friend growled.

  “¿Find you?” The Byzantine was speaking a dialect extant until the conquest of Granada, which meant he was either a Sefarad from some enclave in the dismembered Ottoman Empire or else he truly came from an alternate pan-Christian future erased by his own ineptitude with a time machine. “I did not find you,” he continued. “However, I rejoice to encounter civilized companionship in this benighted backwater.”

  “Civilized?” My mad friend glanced wistfully at my Labatt.

  “So what dost thou here?” he added.

  “Keep asking and he’ll tell you,” I warned. It was too late. The small man with the brilliant smile captured a chair from a vacant table and joined us. A young man in Levis and mackinaw shirt brought glass and bottle. Obviously, the Byzantine was known in these parts.

  “I have been trafficking with an alien intelligence,” he said.

  “Your corpus callosum regenerated and both hemispheres are in touch?” my friend asked.

  The Byzantine was impervious to insult. I was still considering the ramifications of inteligencia ajena, which could range from what Freud used to call an alienist to as far as military intelligence—if one may be permitted a contradiction in terms.

  “The pure.” The Byzantine displayed both palms. Lest one think he referred to intelligence, this is an idiom in which truth is implied. But the Byzantine’s attitude toward la mera verdad had always been subject to procrusteanism.

  “Hadn’t we best shift base a few degrees?” I suggested.

  “But it is spring,” the Byzantine protested. “The worst of the cold is over.”

  “He refers to latitude,” my friend growled. “Now that you’ve blown our cover and, considering that, we’re well above the 49th parallel.”

  “Surely you do not meddle in the affairs of this country!”

  “We never do things like that,” I said. “We’re just avoiding over-zealous admirers.”

  My mad friend looked as if he had a dead fish for a stickpin.

  “No one will bother you here,” the Byzantine reassured. “I’ve been trying to attract attention all winter.”

  My friend and I exchanged alarmed glances. We were rising when the door opened and a Mountie entered. There was a hush in the licensed premises which ended when the Mountie collared a cowering Indian and cuffed him through the double doors out into the mud. “The majesty of the law,” my friend growled. But we were too relieved to be overly perturbed by the underside of northwestern justice.

  “Probablemente, he does not even love Rose Marie,” a wife said.

  “I too have suffered a loss,” the Byzantine said. He poured another drink and continued. “Someone pulled the plug.”

  My mad friend glanced at me. We understood perfectly. “No more time machine?”

  The Byzantine nodded. “Illogical as it may seem for a machine to draw power from an outlet in an alternate future which no longer exists, it is even more illogical for that plug to be pulled.” He sighed. “The paradox is that now when I have a hint that 25th-century New Rome still lives, that very hint has cut off hope of my return to civilization.”

  “Civilization!” my friend gloomed.

  “I still have it,” the Byzantine said.

  “Your time machine?”

  He shook his head. “The camper in which I came last autumn to live by the lake and recharge my spiritual batteries.” He sighed again. “There are nice things can be said for fishing.”

  “By fish?” a wife asked.

  “Thank you, Leigh Hunt,” my mad friend gloomed. “Did you find an alien intelligence at the bottom of the lake?”

  I squinted, trying to reconstruct what seemed to be a missing line in this conversation. From time machines to campers—?

  While I was thinking the Byzantine’s eyes widened and he dropped his glass. “Somebody did listen!” he erupted with sudden hope. “You’ve been sent here to—”

  I shook my head. “Did a hand come out of the water and hand you Excalibur?”

  “I never drive sports cars.” The Byzantine was giving me a puzzled look when the doors burst open again, admitting a chill and a Mountie who stood hands-on-hips and glaring. The licensed premises grew silent while the locals searched their consciences and the Mountie searched the room. He lingered over several wives’ complexions, then saw something in my friend’s blue orb which caused him to look away. After a moment the Mountie took the chill breeze back outdoors along with his six-foot self.

  “A few degrees,” I suggested.

&nbs
p; “Up his lilywhite,” my mad friend grunted. “The worst they can do is deport us.”

  “But to which country?”

  My friend surveyed my glass with increased longing.

  “I had such hopes,” the Byzantine said, and tossed off another drink.

  I was wondering if I could keep my wrists inconspicuous under the table while slashing them when he added, “Do you believe in ghosts?”

  “We’re all spooks,” my friend said heavily.

  “The other kind. Things that gae boomp i’ the nicht.” The Byzantine’s accent was not all that different from broad Scots.

  “Aye,” my mad friend gloomed. “Boomp i’ the nicht.”

  “Helicopters have crashed before,” I said.

  My mad friend sipped coffee.

  “I did not think it was a ghost,” the Byzantine said. “Charming lake. Fish; pines to the shore; no hint of man save the disappearing road and the remains of some forty-year-old cabin fire.”

  “So what else is new?” my friend asked. There being no fire departments in this territory, burned-out cabins were hardly a novelty.

  “I thought to come to terms with living out my allotted span in this timestream,” the Byzantine said. “My dog thought differently.”

  “You left him at the mercy of wolves and porcupines?”

  The small man shook his head. “We were inside; heater lit, and at peace with our Maker. On the roof of the tin yurt fell an occasional pine cone. From the lake came the demented shriek of a lost soul—or a loon. And from around us the calls of owl and wolf. They were friendly sounds.”

  I wondered if the Byzantine had lived in this timestream long enough to remember a steam train whistle on a winter night. “So you heard a ghost,” I said.

  “It was what I did not hear.”

  “Shades of Father Brown!”

  “Chesterton was a better theologian than he was a plotter,” my mad friend snapped. “And my life is replete with plots.”

  Across the table wives wondered if fake fur might not be unsuitable for the bionic woman.

  But the Byzantine was not to be diverted. “My hound and I were inside a metal-bodied camper which would slow the most persistent of bears. Then suddenly my hound was attentive. It was a moment before I realized he was listening to the same thing as I. The loon was mute; wolves ceased howling; even the wind stopped dropping pine cones on the metal roof.” He shuddered. “I had never realized how unnerving silence can be.”

  “Take me where the cement grows,” I murmured.

  The dark man nodded. “I assumed some large animal was passing through. But the silence persisted. My hound was whining, glancing from door to roof vent. I bolted the door. For good measure I cranked the roof vent down tight. And then, not from bravado but the better to see and not be seen, we blew out the lamp and went to bed.”

  “To enjoy the rumsodden sleep of those who tamper with life’s orderly processes.” My friend’s mind was still in another country. I wondered if we were getting old for this work.

  The Byzantine studied him. “You too have suffered a disappointment?”

  My friend gave a limp Nazi salute. “Befehl istBefehl.”

  “Does that mean orders is orders, or render unto Caesar?” My friend did not reply. “Well anyway,” I told the Byzantine, “you didn’t see a ghost.”

  He sipped whiskey and pondered. “We were never taught a belief in ghosts,” he said. “Those come from your Aryan heresy which kept Mohammed from ever becoming Bishop of Medina.” He brushed away a nonexistent fly. “Teutonic mentality slogging through the fog, seeing Nibelungen behind every stump. Now my people who lived under the clear and open eastern sky—”

  “Saw djinns in every bottle and God in the whirlwind,” my friend finished savagely.

  “In your time,” the Byzantine conceded, “where we fell into heresy and out of the mainstream. But I was educated in the physical sciences. I cannot understand my sudden fear.”

  “Possibly you do not see the etymology of Pan and panic,” my friend said.

  “With the lamp out it was impossible to see anything. But suddenly the camper was rocking.” The Byzantine wiped his brow and sipped whiskey. “Given time,” he continued, “I might have concluded it was a moose scratching his back or a grizzly snuffling about. But pitch dark in the midst of the forest with my hound acting strangely . . .”

  “So the spell of Pan descended upon you.” Clearly, my friend was recalling a forty-second crouch waiting for a helicopter.

  The Byzantine shuddered. “My hound was under the blankets with me. Minutes passed before I could remember where I’d left the flashlight. When I finally found the courage to shine it out each window I learned nothing new—only that something out there in the dark was making odd snuffling sounds as it tried each door and window.”

  “Wendigo?”

  “More likely porcupine,” my friend said.

  “It continued for nearly an hour,” the Byzantine said, “and even afterward my hound kept telling me it was close. Yes, I thought of the Wendigo who catches the solitary traveler by the hand. Who has not heard native nonsense about the footprints which become farther and farther apart and finally disappear? But it had not yet snowed; and in my event, the Wendigo is infra dig for serious investigators.

  “Were it to snow in the tropics,” my mad friend said, “a frantic sprint for a line dangled from a moving chopper could produce exactly those footprints.”

  There was a moment of silence while we dwelt on our disparate thoughts.

  “Daylight dispels all ghosts,” the Byzantine finally said. “Except this one. Next morning my hound emerged gingerly. Bearing a cocked shotgun, I followed.”

  “You saw it?” Watching the Byzantine sip whiskey and brush away flies that would not appear for another two months, I doubted if he had seen anything.

  “I saw tracks.”

  “Always wondered what a Wendigo looks like,” my mad friend muttered. “Probable outgrowth of eagle-steals-baby stories. Did he have birdclaw tracks like the kotsnakoo?”

  I studied my friend in some surprise. Having grown up around here I knew that particular demon. But how had my mad friend ever learned of it?

  The Byzantine waggled his forefinger sideways in a Levantine equivalent of head-shaking. “Baba,” he said.

  “Rumcakes?” my friend exploded.

  “Like a snail.”

  My friend shifted mental gears from Russian to Spanish. “You mean slime?”

  “The camper shell was covered. The trail led to the lake.”

  This was too coherent to lump with those invisible flies the Byzantine still brushed away. “There’s something really there?” In my heart I had always known there was. But this was the first time anyone else had ever heard of it.

  The small man was about to answer when the door opened again and once more a hush fell over the suddenly chilled room. The Mountie was striding straight toward our table. “Thought I recognized you,” the tall man said.

  I was fabricating a new cover and my friend was preparing to take action of an extremely prejudicial nature when it dawned on us that the Mountie wasn’t even looking our way. He was talking to the Byzantine in English-accented French, punctuating with both hands.

  I heard something about poix which is pitch or pois which are peas. Seconds later I knew they were talking about poires, which can be either pears or light bulbs. Then they were into poison or poisson and a poissoniere or maybe a poisoneur—which meant somebody was poisoning the fish or else the peas were in the fish kettle—or perhaps they were biting on light bulbs that morning.

  The Byzantine studied the Mountie through eyes that had seen many things, all bad. He was tossing off another shot when the dismounted policeman turned to my mad friend. There was the swift, takes-one-to-know-one appraisal; and then he was speaking French to my mad friend, who seemed less bewildered than I. The only words I caught were écrivain américain from my friend. The Mountie shot me a mental martini of two-t
hirds hate and one-third disgust. A moment later he was gone, letting a final blast of frigid air into the licensed premises.

  “Mexican standoff,” my mad friend said. I glanced at several wives of that persuasion. “He would dearly love to roust the lot of us,” my friend continued, “but is also scared shitless of repercussions.”

  “Tell him,” I suggested, “that if he agrees not to exhume our racial problems I’ll refrain from writing about how the French treat Indians like the Anglos treat the French.”

  “And in Sweden we have the Lapps,” my friend muttered.

  “Don’t know what we are,” a wife was saying.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The Indians,” a wife explained. “They’re friendly. Always try to talk with us in the store or wherever. But they can’t understand Spanish or any of our other languages.”

  “Slime everywhere,” the Byzantine resumed pointedly. “It was midday before I began thinking of Loch Ness and then remembering local accounts of why this region where I camp is no longer populated.”

  “Oh Christ, are we back onto that again?” My friend had problems of his own.

  “A few more degrees and we’re in another country,” I suggested. My mad friend shook his head.

  “I spent the afternoon fishing,” the Byzantine continued. “And my hound spent the afternoon close to me—totally uninterested in rabbits or squirrels. We dined on bass and grayling but in our minds lay the expectation of nightfall.”

  “So why didn’t you move on?” my friend snapped.

  The Byzantine offered a sad smile. “Why don’t you? ¿Machismo? Once a man starts running where does he stop?”

  “Exactly.” My friend was talking to me.

  “Besides,” the Byzantine added, “a civilized man dares not believe in ghosts.”

  “I never knew ectoplasm was slimy,” my mad friend said.

  Certain things began coming together. Had I not been preoccupied the connection would have come sooner. “What’re you doing on the place where I was born?” I demanded. “Is there nothing sacred to your bloody time-tampering?” If the Byzantine was fiddling around my birthplace with a time machine I might abruptly be found never to have existed.