Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  “Even for land that didn’t cost that much in the first place? You could still borrow as high as five an acre against it?”

  “I don’t quite see what you’re driving at, but yes. The railroad has brought civilization to these parts, and civilization is the magic elixir that turns land into money. God’s not going to be making much more land than we got, I figure, so this bank’s willing to take a risk on the best of it.”

  Marlin pulled up a few hundred yards from Kraamer’s house. The front door was slightly ajar and only a thin line of smoke trickled out of the chimney, despite the cold. Marlin got down slowly and dragged his big Army Colt out of its holster.

  He pushed the door open with one foot. The inside of the house was dark and musty and smelled of blood. Kraamer lay in the middle of the floor, flat on his back. His empty eyes stared up at the ceiling. There was a bullethole in his chest.

  Wallace, Marlin thought. Not likely to be anybody else around that cool and that accurate. One shot, right through the center of the heart.

  He put his gun away, turned, and saw the snake. Somebody—no doubt Wallace again—had put a bullet in its head. Half its length still lay in a hole in the wall, but the hole had been dug out and dirt lay all around it. A shovel and an empty metal box, smaller than the diameter of the hole, had been dropped next to the snake.

  Marlin used the shovel to dig a shallow grave in the middle of the floor. The ground outside would be frozen solid for months yet. After a moment’s hesitation he dragged the body of the snake out of the hole and threw it in the ground next to the old man. He piled dirt over both of them and rode back into Lincoln City.

  He sat in the saloon for an hour or so, his greatcoat piled on the chair next to him, blowing into his cupped hands to keep them warm. It was nearly dark when Wallace arrived.

  Wallace stood at the bar and downed a shot of whiskey. Trying to look casual, most of the clientele began to move out into the street. “I’ll buy you a drink before you leave town,” Wallace said to Marlin.

  Marlin stood up and walked over to the bar. They were about ten feet apart. “You’re a little ahead of yourself. I got business to take care of before I go.”

  “What business is that?”

  “Somebody shot an old man to death this afternoon, and stole the deed to his land. I mean to settle accounts.”

  “You’re wrong, mister. That ain’t your business at all.”

  “Old man Kraamer lied to me, and maybe he wasn’t much of a neighbor. But I ate his cooking and slept under his roof, and that counts for something. It’s not to do with money, and it’s not to do with owning anything, so I guess folks around here might not understand it too well.”

  “You’re about to have the opportunity to join the old man,” Wallace said. “And his snake.”

  Marlin ignored him. “What bothers me, really, is that I misjudged Britton. He seemed a decent sort, too decent to hire scum like you.”

  “I fight my own fights,” Wallace said. He seemed genuinely angry. “Britton’s a coward. He never meant anything but talk, just like you. And I’ve had enough. Get out or shoot.”

  It had been leading to this, and Marlin had let it happen. Now he wondered if it had been a mistake. He was old. Still, at the sight of Wallace’s grinning face, he felt the cold fire spread through his body. There was a tiny spasm in the ring finger of his right hand where it rested on the bar. This one last time, he told himself. If I live through this I promise I’ll never tempt fate again.

  Then Wallace reached and so did Marlin. The air of the confined space exploded with the noise of guns and the stink of powder. Marlin was not a one-shot surgeon. He held the Army Colt straight out with both hands and emptied the cylinder.

  When it was over he was alive. He looked down to see if he was all in one piece and saw no blood.

  Wallace was dead.

  People moved back into the bar, circling like vultures over the body. In the darkening street Marlin could see the snow finally coming down. He pushed through the crowd and pulled a sheet of paper out of the dead man’s shirt. He unfolded it, expecting to see the deed to Kraamer’s farm. Instead it was a mortgage note from the bank. The bottom edge was damp with blood. “I’ll be damned,” Marlin said.

  Suddenly Eva Kraamer was standing by Wallace’s body. She put up her hands and screamed. Tears started in her eyes. Then she dropped to her knees and began to go through the dead man’s pockets.

  Marlin pulled her aside by one arm. “Here’s your paper,” he said, holding the mortgage note by one edge. She stared at him for a second or two, her jaw trembling, and then snatched it away.

  “Your daddy got greedy, didn’t he? Thought he could sell Britton land that had been mortgaged, and by the time Britton found out he’d be long gone, packed up in his brand-new steamer trunk and riding the first train out.”

  It was a railroad age, Marlin thought. If you just moved fast enough, you wouldn’t have to answer for anything. Rockefeller and Gould and Vanderbilt were proof of that. They were building a world that had no place for him.

  He shook off the thought and said, “Then Britton got wise. He called Wallace in just to throw a scare into the old man, nothing worse than that. Of course your father didn’t know that, and so he sent for me.

  “Then you got involved. You figured your daddy was about to wind up dead. I don’t think that bothered you too much, only what happens to the money if Wallace kills him? So you had a meeting with Wallace, and by the time it was over, you two had your own deal. Wallace brings the mortgage paper to you instead of Britton, and you cut him in.”

  Eva seemed to get calmer and calmer as Marlin talked. It told him he had the truth of it. “My only question is,” he said, “what were you planning to do with Wallace when you finished with him? You didn’t think your boyfriend Nash could handle him, did you? Or did you think he’d just go away once he’d run all your errands for you?”

  Finally Eva smiled. “Nash is a sweet boy, but he don’t know much about the real world. And neither do you, mister. I might sell my daddy’s share, but not mine. I loved that land. Daddy was about to lose it all. Everything I did was just to keep the land that belonged to me.

  “And I will keep it, too. You can’t prove a thing against me.”

  Marlin realized he still had hold of her arm. He let it go and said, “Land. You people are crazy. You’re all crazy.”

  He stopped at the bar to put on his greatcoat and take one last shot of whiskey. “You moving on?” the bartender asked.

  “That’s right,” Marlin said. “Back to Dodge.”

  The man seemed satisfied. “That’s a long ride,” he said.

  Marlin looked at the body on the floor. “Not as long as some,” he said. He tossed a coin on the bar and walked out into the falling snow.

  Sitcom

  Let me tell you about a TV show. If you’re under thirty-five, it’s probably a major part of your life. If you’re forty-two, like me, it probably doesn’t mean much to you, and you’ll find it hard to understand how a simple situation comedy could destroy my marriage and make me doubt my sanity. And you’d never, ever believe the rest of it: that it got Richard Nixon elected president and killed the sixties.

  It did, though.

  I’m talking about The Harrigan House. You know, the one Time magazine called “America’s favorite TV show.” Only I’d never heard of it until last week.

  My name is Larry Ryan and I’m a freelance magazine writer. My wife—we’re still married, but that’s just a matter of time at this point—is named Linda, and she’s nine years younger than me. At thirty-three, she’s a card-carrying member of the Harrigan Generation.

  She sells hosiery at a boutique operation in Highland Mall, some nights until after ten. It was just last week that she came into my study to give me a peck on the cheek and ask me to tape a show for her. “HarriganMania,” she said. “It’s on ABC at eight.”

  “What mania?”

  “Harrigan. You know, the Har
rigans?” She let out a quick snatch of song. “That’s life at the Harrigan house.”

  “I have no earthly idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I love it. You sound just like the professor. Except it’s ‘I haven’t the foggiest notion.’”

  “What professor?”

  “Professor Harrigan. Why are you being this way?” She wrote “8:00/ABC/2 hrs” across my notes for the stock car racing piece I was writing and walked out.

  I took a lunch break about two o’clock and turned on MTV while I ate. I came in on a Tabitha Soren interview with a blonde teenager named Denise O’Brien. Under her name on the screen was “Janie Harrigan” in quotes.

  “This is too weird,” I said, probably out loud. The occasion was a live stage show, off-Broadway, where a bunch of semi-professional actors like O’Brien recreated Harrigan House episodes line-for-line on a minimal set. Tabitha flagged down a passing boy in his twenties and asked him, “Do you know who this is?” The boy stared for a second and then yelled, “Janie Harrigan!”

  When I went back to work I couldn’t concentrate. I admit I’ve never been a sitcom fan. Maybe they failed to get their hooks into me at an early enough age, since my father never permitted them in the house. He was full of rules like that, as if the fact that he taught at SMU law school gave him some kind of anointed knowledge of right and wrong for him to crack over my little brother Phil and me like a whip.

  Even so, how could I miss something that’s this much a part of the cultural gestalt? I’m in the entertainment business, I do profiles of musicians, actors, athletes. It didn’t make sense.

  It’s hard to sit and stare at a computer screen when your mind is not on your work. I found myself up and searching the house for the TV section. If the show was such a big deal , it had to be in syndication—probably two or three times a day. But I couldn’t find it anywhere in the schedule.

  In my business, if you want answers you pick up the phone. I called Austin Cablevision and got a woman in the PR department.

  “You wouldn’t believe how many calls we get for that show,” she told me. “We had it on up until, I don’t know, a couple of years ago or so. TBS, I think it was. It seems like whoever it was that owned the rights pulled it off the market. I don’t know if it was the studio or what. Maybe they’re gearing up for a videotape release or something.”

  “The shows aren’t on tape?”

  “Never have been. I think the video rental places get as much grief over it as we do. Seems crazy, doesn’t it? A show that popular and it’s just not around anymore?”

  I had to go out that afternoon for the usual post office and Fed Ex drops, so I swung by the Bookstop in Lincoln Village. The woman who asked to help me was about my age, wearing a long dress and glasses.

  It’s one thing to sound like an idiot on the phone, and another to do it in person. I found myself suddenly embarrassed. “Do you, uh, have anything about a TV show called Harrigan’s House?”

  “The Harrigan House? Sure. You can take your pick.”

  She showed me to the section. There was an oversized paperback called HarriganMania, same as the special Linda wanted me to tape, and one called That’s Life at the Harrigan House. Then there was Harrigan House: The Compleat Episode Guide and a smaller, brightly colored one called The Ultimate Harrigan House Trivia Book.

  “Good lord,” I said.

  “I have a confession to make,” the woman said. “Until these books started coming in, a couple of years ago? I’d never heard of the damned show.”

  I looked up at her from where I knelt by the row of books.

  “Maybe,” I said, “we’re too old.”

  The girl who checked me out was in her late teens. “The Harrigans,” she said. “Coo1.”

  The guy at the next register, who was blond and not much older, looked over. “Oh yeah,” he said. He turned HarriganMania over to check out the photos on the back. “Remember this one? The pie fight?”

  “Yeah,” the girl said. “It’s like really sad about the professor, you know?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You know. Dying and all.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah.”

  Instead of working that afternoon I read HarriganMania. It was hard to understand what all the fuss was about—even Tina Storm, the author and self-proclaimed “number one Harrigan fan,” admitted that the show’s premise was “dumb,” the episodes were “banal and formulaic,” and the acting was “wooden at best.” After reading a few of the episode synopses, I had to agree. I found myself skipping on to the next section.

  The bare facts were these: the show premiered on ABC on Friday night, September 27, 1968, at 8:00 pm Eastern. It ran seven seasons, through 1975, 161 half-hour episodes in all. John “Prof” Harrigan was an English teacher at Ivyville College and “Mom” (Joan) was a widowed socialite; Nancy, their unflappable housekeeper, was from “back East” somewhere. The five kids were the show’s gimmick, such as was: Mom and the Prof each had one child from a previous marriage, Jeff and Janie respectively. They’d adopted one child together, Joey, plus taking in Nancy’s daughter Judy to raise with their own.

  The first episode took up shortly after the arrival of the fifth child, who was actually the Prof’s little brother. He had obviously come very late in life to Prof’s parents, since he was only five—younger than any of the other kids—when he arrived at the Harrigan house. The death of his (i.e. the Prof’s) parents, and any possible associated traumas, were never alluded to.

  In fact, the show didn’t just avoid controversy, it completely obliterated it. There were no student protests at Ivyville College, not even in the wake of the Kent and Jackson State shootings of 1970. Adopted brother Joey was pure WASP, not Italian or Jewish, let alone black or Hispanic, let alone Vietnamese. How could he be, since the Vietnam War didn’t seem to exist in the world of the Harrigans?

  The episodes I was able to slog through dealt with such matters as the importance of investing your allowance wisely, and strategies for being popular in school. The professor was a bit pompous, but always full of good, solid common sense at the end. Like when little Jimmy gave the other kids permission to misbehave because he was, after all, their uncle. The Prof straightened everything out at the end when he explained that it was a combination of age, experience, and position that made authority work, and it took all three.

  It was that kind of attitude that doubtless attracted Richard Nixon and prompted him to declare, two weeks before his 1968 presidential victory: “It’s my favorite show. Families like the Harrigans are what makes this country great.” When they asked Hubert Humphrey about the Harrigans, he said, “Who?” At least that was how Tina Storm, who was a decade too young to vote at the time, remembered it. The next week, in mock elections in grade schools and junior highs across the country, Nixon won by a landslide.

  Professor Harrigan reminded me uncomfortably of my own father, who was of course an avid Nixon supporter. He was so convinced of his own infallibility, so rigid, so heroic in his own eyes. The difference was that Prof Harrigan was able to tell his kids that he loved them, and in turn his kids thought he was a hero, too.

  Harrigan catch phrases abounded. Prof’s “I haven’t the foggiest notion,” of course, and his “Do you mind?” every time he found one of Mom’s cats in his favorite armchair. Little Jimmy’s cries of “Say uncle!” Janie’s accidentally overheard remark, “Professor Arrogant you mean!” which was later picked up by the rest of the family—in a good-natured way, of course.

  There weren’t a lot of pictures in HarriganMania. Pub shots of the actresses, none of whom I recognized, and few posed studio stills. There was nothing from the actual episodes because Sheldon Browne, the show’s creator and producer, had supposedly refused permission.

  I had a tingling feeling that meant there was a story lurking somewhere. The feeling turned into certainty when I got to the chapter about The Song.

  It was irresistible, Storm said, like the t
heme from Gilligan’s Island or any of those other viral little tunes that hook into your brain and refuse to let to. In sixty seconds the theme covered the entire hare-brained setup, including the business with Prof’s little brother “who was an uncle and a brother to them all.”

  The theme was performed by the 1910 Fruitgum Company, of “Simon Says” and “1 2 3 Red Light” fame. According to the book, an extended version of the song hit the top ten late in 1968.

  That, I knew, was wrong, and I could prove it.

  I had a lot of music reference books, including Billboard’s Top Ten Charts and Norm N. Nite’s Rock On Volume II. The 1910 Fruitgum Company was listed in both books, but not “Theme From The Harrigan House” or anything remotely like it, not by any artist. Okay, big deal, Storm had been sloppy in her research. Instead of a feeling of superiority, I got a chill.

  That night I watched the HarriganMania special while the VCR taped it. In typical network fashion it was all form and minimal content. Tina Storm was the host, and she spent most of the show interviewing celebrities about their favorite Harrigan House episodes, and what the Harrigans meant to them. “The Harrigan House,” Jay Leno said, “was like an island of calm in troubled times. It was a place you could come to for milk and cookies while the rest of the world was full of riots and Vietnam and girls putting you down.” Shannen Doherty, wearing a “Do You Mind?” T-shirt, said, “Prof Harrigan was the father everybody wants to have. He was just so cool.” Arnold Schwarzenegger said, “The Harrigans were about family values. Why can’t there be shows like that today?”

  There was an overblown emotional farewell to the actor who played Prof, who had died a few months ago in a private plane crash while doing a dinner theater tour. Then more tears were shed over the kid who played Joey Harrigan, who’d died of an OD in 1980. The woman who played Mom was brought onstage for a standing ovation, then hustled off again because she hadn’t aged well and was obviously drunk.