The Very Best of Barry N Malzberg Page 10

  “Make you see clear.”

  Stein pressed in his pocket and squeezed. “We are clear,” he said, “that’s our job. Now, You’ve got a father, right?”

  “Most people do, but not like this one.”

  Hand in pocket, Stein continued. “The point is, the man is your father; he’s over seventy. And now he’s applying for Government compensation because, he’s broke.”

  “Ain’t broke,” the woman said stubbornly. “Got it socked away, he does.”

  “Not to our knowledge. Now, as his only daughter and making a good salary — ”

  “I’m a maid, Mister.”

  “Whatever you are, you declared five thousand dollars last year.” Stein allowed his hand to drift, completely enclose his object; it huddled inside like a sparrow. “Now, you’re in a position to help him; under the law you’ve got to help him, don’t you, Mrs. Silver?” Ah, thought Stein. The spike on the heel of the boot of the rider. “You talk easy, Mister. I got things to say, too.”

  Rubbing, Stein said, “We don’t want to make anything difficult, Mrs. Silver. We just want to make our role clear in such a circumstance.” Good Lord, he thought.

  “I want to talk now.”

  “Go ahead,” said Stein, stroking furiously, hoping that the woman could not see what he was doing. But he knew that his action was of no concern to her at the moment, and perhaps this was the real, the true, the concealed trouble after all.

  “Trouble with you people from the Government is that you come in to talk. Sometimes, you got to listen.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I’m an orphan. Let me tell you about my father. Let me just tell you about that man. My father left me and my mother when I was two years old. I’m lucky I didn’t have to go to no orphanage because my mother, she killed herself to keep a home going. I knew you was coming up here to ask me questions! My mother died when I was in high school.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Stein said. He hunched lower against the cushion on which he was sitting and half-turned his right side into the wall, slipping his hand all the way down into his pocket. The woman did not notice. “Still, a lot of people have unfortunate childhoods. It’s nothing new.”

  “Now, when my mother died it was just like this: I just come home from school one day and she was stiff on the floor with her bag in her hand. She was trying to go out to work, but a stroke hit her. My aunt and I had to make all the arrangements and we sent a telegram to my father’s brother because we knew he knew where my father was and after fifteen years, we wanted that man to see what he had done.”

  “Now you have to understand, Mrs. Silver, that a lot of things we do really aren’t our fault. Because your father was the kind of man he was, what happened had to happen.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the woman said. “You ain’t even listening to my words. Now, the next day, my aunt and I went down to the parlor to see her laid out, and you know what the man at the door told us? He said my father had come in and had come right out again; he got sick, he told the people there he was her husband and he couldn’t take it! Couldn’t take it!” the woman· shrieked, “for fifteen years he couldn’t take nothing, not even himself, and then he couldn’t even see her dead! Well, that was the end of him.”

  “But that just shows you’re stronger than your father,” Stein said. “Maybe that’s why he’s in his present situation — because he isn’t very strong at all. The strong have to take care of the others.” He turned to the woman, facing her. “Some of us are weak.”

  “That was the end of him,” the woman said. “I ain’t seen him and I don’t want to hear nothing of his troubles and they’ll lay me out, too, before I’ll give him a cent. Now, that’s my piece, you understand? Do you?”

  My God, Stein thought, leaning back again into the cushions, removing his sopping hand from his pocket, patting the pages of his notebook. She lives on the fourth floor of a stinking tenement with perhaps three thousand (a good number) dollars in the bank and a few more here and there, in front of a print of a dying horse with an old television set and five or six pieces of furniture and no history at all. None whatever. You have no history. Mrs. Silver, he considered saying, and perhaps her eyes would opaque: don’t need none of that. There’s no point in any of this, he thought, beginning to crouch his legs to leave. There is no inducement, no lie, no fiction, no myth or religion in the universe that can compel me to stay longer and hear an (orphaned) woman sack her past. This is something we cannot do! Stein thought absently, looking through the window at the roof of another tenement on which he saw children playing amidst the blank surfaces, heard their cries. Further down the street, he knew with fragments of his gathered sense that there were a thousand sweating, beaten men and women sitting on porches drinking, plotting murder, vanishing after some moments to perform mechanical coupling; waiting, all of them, for the clean, the pure fire that would, by common destruction of all of the cubicles of the city, liberate them from their unique disaster. It was only morning and they were coming out to the stoops; later there would be more and more, and by the time the sun had come down there would be an attentive army sweltering against backdrop, waiting to move and yet unable to march because of their lack of a single vision — there were no barriers that they could not wreck if only they truly wanted. He got up smelling that flame, thinking furiously: three times seven are twenty-one; fourtimes six are twentyfour; fivetimesfivearetwentyfive. As we increase, we also reduce.

  “All right,” he said, “you’ve told me the situation and I’ve listened, but the position of ‘the Agency in this regard is clear.”

  The woman rocked back in her chair. “I knew you weren’t listening.”

  “I was so listening. The position of the Agency, however, is established by law and we’ll communicate with you by mail indicating exactly what the fixed amount of your contribution will be.”

  “Contribution!” .

  “I think I’m just upsetting us,” Stein said quickly. “There’s no point in my staying, is there? I just hope you understand my situation as well as you understand yours,” he added meaninglessly and closed his notebook carefully, looking at the door.

  The woman got up with a scream and poised herself against him, her eyes thin and lined with rage. Like the Sergeant.

  “I ain’t got no one,” she said, “and I don’t want no one! That’s the way it is; I’ve accepted things!

  They’re going to knock this building down and make me move and I’ll accept that! Now, why don’t you and your goddamned city leave me alone and accept things, too? Why don’t you leave us alone, me and my father! He made out! Why don’t you leave him alone?” She began to sob and wandered away from him, standing finally in front of the window where the glare made her features invisible, an impenetrable mask. “There isn’t no right to interfere.”

  Stein stood alone in the center of the room, matching her breathing gasp for gasp, and reached again in his pocket. He took out his grenade and showed it to the woman. “You see that?” he said.

  “See what?”

  “This thing.”

  “It looks like a chunk of rock.”

  “It’s a grenade,” Stein said, waving it. “It’s a real grenade! I could blow everything up, you know that? You want me to?”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “I could blow everything to pieces,” Stein said wildly, “is that what you want me to do? 1 can’t just listen to this, forever.” .

  “You work for the Government!”

  “I’ll blow the Government up, too!” “You’re crazy. What kind of people they sending up to this place?”

  “Do you want me to blow it up?”

  The woman moved away from the window, edging along the wall, past the print to the door, her tongue flailing. “Stop it!” she said. “Stop it!”

  With a shudder, Stein put his grenade away. “You don’t want me to do it,” he said. “You want to live. You don’t really mind it at all
.”

  “Get out of here!”

  “No,” Stein said, straightening his pocket. “You didn’t mean a thing you said. I was just testing it. It’s not real.”

  The woman flung open the door. “Get out!” she screamed, ‘’I’ll get the police!”

  “I knew it; I knew it,” Stein said. He leaped toward the door, his arms flailing at the woman. “You really didn’t want it at all.” He fled into the hallway’s night like an assassin, feeling his grenade. “You have to be honest,” he said, turning to the woman.

  The door cracked shut, leaving Stein in darkness. The bulb had been extinguished, and for a long time he only stood there, breathing heavily, feeling the power against his hip. Conditions surely were becoming clear; the testing was to begin. After a while, he went to the door of the old man and, pressing his right side into the soft plaster, he knocked.

  He knocked and knocked.

  He knocked three times.

  Anderson

  HE is elected President of the United States by an overwhelming margin. A mandate. Fifty-eight percent of the popular vote, five hundred and twelve votes in the Electoral College. Inexplicably, his opponent wins Nebraska. On the day after the election, Bitters whooping in the huge suite says that the first action of the administration will be to settle with those hayseeds. Anderson looks at him quizzically. “I don’t want to punish anyone.”

  “What the hell,” Bitters says, “don’t you have any sense of humor?”

  “I have a gloomy premonition that we will soon look back on this troubled moment as a golden time of freedom and license to act and speculate. One feels the steely sinews of the tiger, an ascetic ‘moral’ and authoritarian reign of piety and iron.”

  —Robert Lowell, 1967

  Winding down. Everyone knows that it is on the line now; this is the time when men and boys get separated. It is a time for greatness. Fourth and one on the ten-yard line, thirty-six seconds left on the stadium clock, no time-outs, game hanging in the balance. Anderson perches over the center, his eyes filled with alertness, his chest heaving with the excitement of it all, the lacerating cold turning warm inside, each exhalation truly a burst of fire. He has never felt so alive as at this moment when truly he is dead, the ball coming into his hand, he scurries and sees the middle linebacker shooting through unblocked, coming upon him, eyes huge. Anderson gives an eh! of woe and cocks the ball for a desperation pass, try and get it into the end zone anyway but his foot slips and even before the linebacker hits him he feels himself falling to the hard Astroturf and then the man is upon him, grunting.

  Even as the horn sounds, Anderson hears not only the game but all circumstance spilling from him. He knew that it was going to be very difficult but could not surmise that it was going to be like this. Not quite. Sounds are all around him as he spirals out. Down and out. Game to go on the two.

  In coma, he hears the sound of engines.

  Anderson, awakening from an unrecollected dream of loss, plots his moves, considers his fortune, then opens his eyes to look at the lustrous plaster of the bedroom as his wife tumbles all over him. This is not characteristic of Sylvia.

  Petulant, demanding, she seizes him. Wearily, he commits himself. Foreign policy, ceremonial pens, the medal of freedom, state banquets, it is just another of the obligations of office.

  Sylvia is inflamed by the idea of touching a President: she has never shown so much interest in the act as in this last year. Anderson does as he can, serves as he will, utters oaths of office, does as he must, holds to the center. He is a moderate. Sylvia capsizes upon him mumbling. Anderson charts his own release, thinking of ICBMs as convulsively, absently, he climaxes.

  Anderson lights a cigarette calmly and blows out the match, tosses it, inhales, then in a single graceful motion pushes in the swinging doors of the Circle Bar and walks through. In the poisoned darkness the two Lump brothers stand glaring at him, hands on their holsters. Half-consumed whiskey bottles stand behind them over the deserted bar. The bartender has dived for cover, the customers, no fools they, have filched out a side door. “All right,” Anderson says, “this is it. One at a time or both of you, I don’t care.”

  “Taste lead,” Tom, the older one, says. His gun is in his hand and poised to fire when Anderson shoots him in the wrist. Tom Lump shrieks and falls. His point thirty-eight clatters to the crude surface of the bar.

  “Next,” Anderson says, the gun cocked, drawing down on Charles. The tall Lump stares at him; his eyes shift, his expression weakens. Slowly he raises his hands.

  “I’ll take you on with fists,” Anderson offers, “right outside.

  Let’s go.”

  On the floor Tom whimpers. “Listen,” Charles says carefully, “we don’t want any trouble here. You got us wrong.”

  “Not wrong, just drawn down,” Anderson says. He holsters his gun. “Okay,” he says. “Any arguments?”

  Charles Lump says, “I got nothing to do with this. Tom brought me along for the ride, I ain’t got nothing against this town and I’m the first to say so. Anything this town wants to do is okay with me, so there.”

  “Oh shut up,” Tom says weakly, “you’re in this with me up to the hilt. I’m going to bleed to death here you don’t stop talking and get me a doctor.”

  “You can get to a doctor out of town,” Anderson says. He throws down his cigarette, carefully stomps it out with a circular motion. No fires when the marshal is around. “Get up.”

  Charles turns, shrugs elaborately. On the floor Tom begins to dry heave, then vomits brightly. “Pack him over a horse and get him out,” Anderson says, “there’s a doctor over in Bluff City twenty miles west, you ought to be able to get him there before he passes out if you get going now.”

  There is no spirit left in either of the Lumps. Charles nods, bends, yanks Tom to his feet and lurches him past Anderson, out the swinging doors. Anderson watches them carefully, joins them then as they saddle up their horses, Tom clumsily in an attitude of prayer. Charles unhitches.

  “There will be another time, Anderson,” Tom says weakly.

  “This isn’t the way it ends.”

  “Shut up,” Charles says, helping him mount with a push.

  “Just get those reins and let’s get outta here.”

  “I had hoped for more from you than that,” Anderson says carefully. “Maybe a little more fight next time, eh?”

  “Maybe,” Tom says. “Nothing ever ends. It replicates. It goes on and on.”

  “For Christ’s sake shut up,” Charles says. “Let’s just get the hell going.”

  “Got nowhere to go,” Tom says. He seems to be edging into delirium. “Anywhere we go, got to come back and face it.

  Unless we die out of it, Charlie. I think maybe I’ll do that.”

  “Ain’t so easy,” Charles says. He glares at Anderson. “Ain’t going to be so easy for you either; this is a tough country.”

  Anderson stares back flatly, showing the outlaw his inner strength and Charles Lump drops his eyes, coughs, shakes his head, mounts his horse and taking the tether of the other, moves slowly away. He does not look back.

  Hands on hips, gun dangling from his index finger, Anderson watches them all the way out of Tombstone. Their figures and the horses diminish to small, concentrated blobs of darkness that blend at last with the landscape to leave him there eternally and as always, alone. Soon enough it will be time to turn and face the silent crowd who have massed behind him; he knows to pay them homage but for the moment Anderson does not need them, needs none of this at all, needs only the proud and terrible isolation which has been imposed on him in the role which he so humbly but gracefully has assumed:

  The Avenger’s front man.

  Some years ago Anderson had begun to feel it all slip away, not only his career which had been slowly drained from him for many years but his very sense of self. All of his life, through the great times and the years of sorrow, he had been sustained as had most of those he knew by the belief that destiny was be
nign, that life was a sentence with a structure and that nothing so terrible could happen that would not yield salvation in the nick of time.

  But the decade shook that faith. It shook faith but good, shock, implosion, the feeling of circumstance turning upon itself and there had been a period, it must have gone on for years, when Anderson had found himself questioning the sense of it all, when paralysis had settled like a cloak upon him; for a long time he had been unable to perform all but the simplest actions. Sex, sleep, panels, conventions. Never an introspective man—but not nearly as stupid as a lot of them took him to be; that was his secret and his strength—he had found it hard to handle, like an undiagnosed, dreadful virus hanging on at the lip of reason.