Puttering About in a Small Land

by Philip K. Dick

  “Don’t you go too far with me,” he said.

  Having lit a cigarette she resumed. But now she had gone back to her dry, controlled manner; she had calmed down and become more business-like. “While I’m staying out here,” she said, “I want to do something for Virginia to help her along the lines she wishes. I think she’s got her mind set on fixing it up so you can have your fixit shop, and if that’s what she wants I’ll naturally do everything in my power to bring it about. I always intended to do the best I could by her. It has nothing to do with you; its between me and my daughter, Virginia.”

  Then he saw the drift of it. He saw her getting ready to talk about giving them money for opening the store. Up to that moment the idea had never occurred to him; he was taken completely by surprise. A wave of excitement flashed into his bones, his hands and feet; he began to dance up and down behind the wheel of the car, trying not to let go of it, trying to see the cars and street ahead, the signals and pedestrians and signs. Then he began to yell at Mrs. Watson, “I don’t want your fucking money, you hear? I wouldn’t touch any of your fucking money!” He yelled at the top of his lungs. “You keep your trashy hands off of my store, you hear? I don’t want nothing to do with you, I want you to go back home to your place and live there and have nothing to do with us. You hear me? You understand? If you keep coming around I’m going to do something to you. I mean that, Mrs. Watson. I don’t care who you are or how much you’ve got; I mean what I say. You keep your fucking money. I mean that too. I don’t want it. I mean to open my store and I don’t want no help from you.”

  Her face wavered and faded, as lifeless as rock.

  “Get out of my car!” he yelled, driving steadily along the street. “Open that door and get out, you hear? Or I’m maybe going to do something to you right now; maybe I’m not going to wait any longer.” Stepping down on the gas pedal he speeded up the car; he shot forward, around a corner and along a side street. Faster and faster the car flew; he paid no attention to speed. “You take all your stuff and get out! I’m telling you what you better do. Get that trash out of the back of my car; I don’t want all that trash cluttering up my car. I need my car. When you get out, take it with you.”

  The house in which her room was located appeared ahead of them, to the right, among other buildings. Driving along the curb he brought the car to a bucking stop; Mrs. Watson, bouncing up, raised her arms to protect herself, twisting her body as she fell forward against the dashboard and door. He yanked on the brake, leaped out of the car and ran to open the door on her side. With both hands he dug out the suitcase, and then from the back the boxes and bedding and wastebasket, throwing them onto the sidewalk. Mrs. Watson remained in the front seat, following his actions wide-eyed, motionless.

  “Get out of my car,” he said.

  She gazed at him, utterly disconcerted.

  “Get out.” He stood yelling at her, not touching her. “Go on, get out of my car.”

  Sliding her legs, she stepped shakily to the pavement, holding onto her purse, sunglasses, and cigarettes.

  “Now when you come back tomorrow,” he said, “you talk to me with respect. You hear? You understand what I’m telling you?”

  Without waiting for her answer he ran back around the car and leaped in. Slamming the door he drove off in low gear, not shifting, pushing the gas pedal flat. He did not look back.

  He thought of himself, years ago, a child in school, in the second grade. Nobody paid any attention to him; nobody listened to him or cared what he had to say. Sitting at their desks they were served at lunch time a meal of bread sandwiches, tomato soup, and milk. He took the crusts of his sandwich and stuck them on top of his head. It was the funniest thing that had ever been seen, and all the children laughed. The next day at lunch time he did it again, and again they all laughed. Every day for a month he stuck bread crusts on his head, and everybody looked at him and applauded; he got to his feet and jumped up and down and waggled his arms and made faces, and they all laughed and laughed. It was the happiest moment of his life.

  Now, as he drove, he thought to himself that he was finally going to have his store. He began to cry great tears of humiliation that dripped down his face and splashed onto his shirt and arms. The wetness slithered among the hairs of his wrists and stained his trousers. At a red light he got out his handkerchief and wiped his cheeks and neck. Hating himself and his wife and Mrs. Watson and the Negro who had hit him and the dentist who had charged him sixty dollars and the salesman who had sold him the car which he had no use for and John Beth who had not let him open the repair department at Beth Appliance Center, he continued crying and wiping his face as he drove back to his wife and the wartime housing unit in which he lived.

  11

  On Saturday morning, after Roger had gone to work, Virginia got a telephone call from Liz Bonner about their shopping date. She drove over to the Bonner house and parked.

  “Hi,” Liz said, opening the front door and letting her in. “I’m giving the dog a bath. Come on inside; I’m almost finished.” She looked quite plump and fetching and brown-eyed in her cotton shirt and cord pants; her feet were bare, and her sleeves were rolled up past her elbows, and splotches of foam and water clung to her. She had tied her hair back with a ribbon. Under her shirt her breasts bounced as she ran ahead of Virginia, through the house. “You want a cookie? I baked them last night, but they taste like soap. Anyhow, that’s what the paper boy said when I gave him one. It’s supposed to be coconut.”

  The glass dish of cookies was in the center of the dining room table, a platter of white squares like small red bricks.

  “When did you want to leave?” Virginia said. They had talked about going down into Pasadena before noon.

  “Anytime,” Liz said. “Excuse me.” She hurried off somewhere, and Virginia heard the sloshing of water and Liz’s voice addressing the dog. She heard, too, the noise of a lawnmower. Beyond the dining room window a red-faced man wearing a blazing sport shirt passed with the lawnmower. His big furry arms attracted her attention. The man, to her, looked like a gym instructor or a scout leader. He had that sober, responsible, out-of-door manner. It did not seem to her that he was especially bald. In the morning sunlight his face shone and perspired, and he stopped to wipe his forehead with his arm. Then he plowed on. He did not appear to mind the task.

  Following the sloshing noises, she came upon Liz kneeling in the garage by a tin tub in which a collie dog stood dripping water. “That’s Chic,” Virginia said, “isn’t it? Out in the yard mowing the lawn.”

  “Yes,” Liz said. “Oh, you didn’t meet him.” She scrambled up. “I’m sorry; I forgot. Do you want to meet him now? Come on,” she said, snapping her fingers at the dog. “You’re finished with your bath.” The dog hopped from the tub and shook himself; water flew, and Virginia retreated. Liz picked up a towel from the doorknob and began to rub the dog dry. “Go outside in the sun,” she ordered the dog. “Go on out. Go on.” The dog started toward the door of the garage. “Go sit out on the front sidewalk,” Liz said. “Keep out of the shade so you don’t catch cold.”

  The dog obeyed more or less. He left the garage, and she and Liz watched him stop to shake himself once again. Then he set off along the sidewalk.

  “You’re all dressed up,” Liz said. “I better go change. I didn’t know what you were going to wear so I waited. That’s a nice suit. Don’t you think people back East dress better than they do out here? Do you know—” She started from the garage up the steps that led to the kitchen. “I wear these pants six days a week; I wear them to the store and around the house, and nobody cares. I guess part of it’s the weather; it’s so mild out here.” At the bedroom door she stopped, turned, and said, “Where’s Gregg today? Can’t he come? The boys are coming.”

  “He’s with his grandmother,” Virginia said.

  “Bring her along, too.” Within the dark bedroom—the shades were down—she began to throw off her clothes. “Chic’s coming. He thought maybe he could g
et a look at Roger’s store. It’s along the way, isn’t it?”

  More confusion, Virginia thought. Kids and dogs, a flock of them trailing along into the crowded downtown department stores. “I’ll go out in the yard,” she said. She had not seen it, yet, and she was curious. “While you’re dressing.” Without waiting for an answer she left the house, opening the back door of the garage to find herself suddenly in sunlight.

  His lawnmower halted. “Hello,” Chic Bonner said. “Are you Mrs. Lindahl?”

  “Don’t stop working,” she said. “You look like you’re having fun.”

  Chic said, “It’s a chance to get outdoors. I’m cooped up in the office five days a week. The only chance I have to get out is on Saturday and Sunday, unless I take some time off.”

  By the side of the house, beds of flowers grew; she turned her attention to them. The beds were well-kept, weedless. The blooms on the flowers—she did not recognize them—were immense. The entire yard had a professional tone, as if a Japanese gardener had been let loose. But, she thought, he probably does it himself. How tan he is. She pictured him with sacks of fertilizer and heavy spray-tanks and imported English pruning shears. A proper schedule of plant-care. And the interior of the house…so messy. The contrast: order, here. Chaos within. The two domains.

  “How nice it is out here,” she said.

  He accepted her compliment. “Are you a gardener?” he asked. “By that I mean, do you get the itch once in a while?”

  “I’m not,” she said. “My mother’s more the gardener in our family. She kept a wonderful garden back in Maryland. Out here she hasn’t done much. She’s not used to the dryness.”

  “You have to water,” Chic said. He started up his lawnmower again; it was manual, not gas-operated, but it had fat balloon tires. The paint on it was shiny, new. To Virginia it had the aura of the garden-supply shop window; she imagined a price tag dangling from it, a wheelbarrow display directly beside it.

  “I never had much luck with flowers,” Virginia said. “I planted a few glads, but neighborhood kids knocked them down.”

  “I see,” Chic said, mowing.

  “That’s something that really offends me. I had tulips along the front path, but the kids in the block picked them as fast as they bloomed.”

  “Tulips are limited to one bloom per plant a year,” Chic said. “From a gardeners standpoint they’re more trouble than they’re worth. You have to really love them to make it worth it.”

  One bloom, she thought, or a hundred; it didn’t matter since the kids were going to steal them anyhow. The kids had even uprooted the plants in their eagerness to snatch the blossoms. She had come outdoors in the morning and found the hairy white bulbs littering the walk.

  Don’t they run through your garden? she thought. Apparently not. You have it all like a model, a world. And if I could get the darn things to come up in the first place I was never able to protect them. After the kids had yanked up the tulips (what did they do with them? Sell them? Give them to their mothers? Teachers?) I stood at the window, ready to deal out justice, but I never caught them; they didn’t come back, at least not that week. And I couldn’t stand there forever, just for a few flower bulbs.

  I admire you, she thought. I admire anybody who can keep a garden operating with kids around.

  The two Bonner boys shoved open the side gate and came toward her and Chic, carrying armloads of comic books. “When are we going downtown?” Jerry asked. “Hello, Mrs. Lindahl,” he said to her.

  “May I see those?” Chic said, resting the handle of the lawnmower against his stomach and reaching out his hand toward the comic books.

  The two boys held the comic books so that he could go through them, one by one, examining the covers. He withdrew several. The boys accepted his judgement as a natural event; neither of them protested.

  “Does your boy ever get his hands on these things?” Chic said to Virginia. He held up one of the bad comic books; it had a banner reading Tales of the Crypt and the picture was of a young girls head being baked, on the end of a rod, by a loathsome fiend. “It makes you wonder sometimes.” Rolling up the bad comic books he stuck them into his back pocket and resumed his lawnmowing. “I think if that was the only way I could figure out to make a living, I’d forget it,” he said.

  The two boys departed with their comic books.

  “Better get into the car,” Chic said. “You can read in there.”

  “Okay, Dad,” Walter said, at the gate. The two boys disappeared past the side of the house.

  “Who do you suppose puts out those things?” Chic said to Virginia.

  “Somebody in New York,” Virginia said.

  “A lot of that stuff is printed here in L.A.,” Chic said. “There’s a regular industry here. What they have on TV is bad enough. I don’t remember that there used to be horror comic books. When I was a boy there weren’t any kind of comic books, and we didn’t miss them. What do you suppose it’ll be like when they get to be our age?” He squatted on the lawn and began cleaning the blades of the mower. “They pick it up outside the home. There’s nothing you can do.”

  “Even up at the school?” she said, thinking of Gregg.

  “This stuff—” He tapped the bad comic books in his back pocket. “They go everywhere. All over the world. It’s a big business, like oil or shoes.”

  The back door of the house banged open and Liz appeared, all powdered and perfumed, with her hair in soft ringlets, wearing an orchid-colored dirndl and a puff-sleeved blouse. “Ready to go?” she said to Virginia. “Chic, you better go change; shouldn’t you change? You can’t go downtown on Saturday like that. Go in and put on a suit.” She smiled at Virginia.

  “Wait until I put the lawnmower away,” Chic said, spinning the blades with his thumb. Bits of wet grass fluttered.

  “What do you have in your pocket?” Liz bent down and caught hold of the rolled-up comic books. Flattening them, she studied the first cover. “What’s all this?” She seemed unable to imagine where the comic books could have come from; carrying them over to the back step she seated herself, spread them out on her lap, and began to read them. “This is awful,” she said, in a bewildered voice. She did not seem offended, only confused.

  Chic winked at Virginia as he straightened up.

  While he wheeled the lawnmower to the garage, Liz remained seated on the back step, poring over the comic books. The wind blew her hair and ruffled her skirt; she reflexively smoothed her skirt. In the sunlight she looked flushed, charming; the color of her clothes stood out, and Virginia could not help admiring her hair and the smoothness of her skin. And there you sit, Virginia thought. Struggling with a comic book, holding it with both hands, frowning and moving your lips.

  Glancing up, Liz said, “Where’d he get these?”

  “From the boys,” Virginia said.

  “Did you look at them?”

  “No,” she said.

  Liz said, “Is it true that a corpse can come back to life and point out its murderer? That’s what it shows here. That’s absurd.” Leaning on her elbow, Liz drew up her legs, crossed them, and resumed her reading of the comic books. Then she closed the comic book and tossed the stack indoors, behind her, into the house; her legs stretched out to balance her and Virginia saw that she had on high heels but no stockings. I have not seen that since the War, Virginia thought. Liz patted her waist, tucked her blouse into her belt, brushed her hair back from her eyes. Sprawled on the step, she said, “I guess we better go. It’s almost ten.” With reluctance, she got to her feet.

  Appearing from the garage, Chic stepped by his wife and gave her a spank. “Let’s go,” he said.

  “How do I look?” Liz asked Virginia. “Okay?”

  “Fine,” Virginia said. But the comic books, she thought. Then she felt guilt. I am mean, she said to herself. Mean and unfair. But, she thought, with delight, wait until I tell Roger. I wish I had a snapshot of her sitting there. It would be something to keep.

  In the back se
at of the station wagon the two boys read their comic books with great seriousness, uninterested in the drive.

  “Don’t read in the car, boys,” Chic instructed them. “Its bad for your eyes.” At his voice, the collie started up. “Come on now, boys.”

  Gradually they ceased to read. They put away the comic books. How obedient, Virginia thought. They had the same gravity that their father had, his making something important out of every act. She herself felt lazy and lulled, as she always did on Saturday; the idea of shopping carried with it the atmosphere of prosperity, as if money was left over, beyond the demand of necessities. She could go as slowly as she wanted, pick over the skirts and dresses, try on what she wished; she did not have to buy or not buy, and if the girls behind the counters did not approve, then it was too bad; she did not need their approval. She could leave. She was mobile; she could go somewhere else or even back home. And she liked the buzz and pressure of the crowd, the hectic pushing and shoving of the downtown shops on Saturday. The air of drama…the gathering of many.

  While she meditated about that, she became aware that Chic and Liz had begun to argue in low, snappish voices.

  “No stockings,” Chic was saying, seated so that he faced his wife, his back to Virginia, “and what do you have on under that blouse? Nothing at all, do you?”

  “I have a slip on,” Liz said, driving with her eyes on the traffic.

  “You don’t even have a slip on.”

  “I do. Look.” Letting go of the steering wheel with her left hand, she showed him the strap of her slip.