by John Sladek
On a velvet bar in Susie’s vanity kit were pinned Bob’s ΔKE pin, Len’s Young Republican pin, and Jim’s Vietnam button. Her fingers passed over these, nor paused at the Pepsi Come Alive!, the Go Gophers!, or the Win With Dewey buttons, went on to the end of the bar and selected the peace mandala Ron had given her. As she pinned it on, her mother came to the door.
‘That awful creature Ron is here,’ she stage-whispered. ‘Oh, I’m sorry I don’t like him, dear, but he’s so—so shifty. And he always wears old clothes. And now—now he’s even growing a beard ! Ugh !’
Fighting down her own repulsion at the idea, Susie said, ‘But mother, he’s one of the richest boys in the city of Santa Filomena. Surely you want me to have a good future?’
‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’ Madge’s tanned face deepened its seams with worry. ‘I married your father because he had a good future with the insurance company. Now look at me.’
Susie looked at her mother and saw an attractive middle-aged woman right from the pages of Lady Fair, to which Madge subscribed: dark hair, streaked with silver, a slim, girlish figure, and the only clue to her years being the lines in her face. Susie fervently wished that she herself, at thirty-five, would look as good.
Madge went on, ‘I guess I shouldn’t try to tell you how to run your life, after I’ve made such a mess of my own. Every time I think of that bastard—how he’s enjoying himself over there with his harem girls—not even a postcard, in over three months ! Well, I saw the lawyer today, and I’m suing him for a divorce. If he can live it up, so can I ! Sauce for the goose ! While the cat’s away !’
Madge seemed to have been drinking. She lurched to the
mirror and examined her eyes, pulling the loose flesh beneath them this way and that. She scarcely seemed to notice that Susie had drawn on her white felt boots, kissed her goodbye and said, ‘That’s the spirit, Mommy ! Kick him in the—the seater ! ’Bye.’
Near the campus of the University of California, at Santa Filomena, one street featured four well-patronized coffee houses, but none so popular as The Blue Tit. To avoid difficulties with university officials the owner of the coffee house, Kevin Mackintosh, had painted a bluebird on the café’s sign. As on all weekend nights, a crowd had crammed itself into The Blue Tit to listen to folk music and poetry, but tonight, it was a sullen, heavy-spirited crowd. Many of them had arrived, as had Susie and Ron, on motorcycles in the drizzle, and the room was filled with steam and sour smell of wet wool.
On a raised dais at the rear of the narrow room, a poet was reading aloud from a sheet of paper held close to his face. As he turned to catch the light, Susie recognized Kevin Mackintosh.
‘Timepoem number fourteen,’ he read.
‘Johnson in Omaha: loud ticks from the inner clock.
There always has to be a victim
In cool and secret stride
No motives other than patriotism
and pure disgust.
Back to business, without boots.
Look here for an explosive spirit.’
‘Golly !’ Susie exclaimed. ‘Explosives reminds me, I ought to be studying for that Organic Chem test Monday.’
‘Ssh,’ said Ron. ‘There isn’t going to be any day after tomorrow.’
‘I don’t know the Geneva naming system or anything.’
Ron smiled. Kevin Mackintosh looked at her, incredulous. ‘The Geneva naming system is done,’ he said. ‘So is the Geneva convention. So is Geneva.’
‘It’s the end of the world,’ Ron explained.
‘That’s right,’ said someone else. ‘The crack of doom has been sounded.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Susie, smiling a little. ‘I don’t get it.’
‘It’s the end of the whole works, baby,’ Ron said. ‘Like they
tell us on the radio. Didn’t you hear the news?’
‘This is our end-of-the-world party,’ announced Kevin Mackintosh, ‘Bring your own.’
Someone snickered, but the poet was not smiling.
‘Will someone please tell me what this is all about?’ Susie asked. She thought and thought, but was unable to recall just what she had seen on the six o’clock news.
‘That thing in Altoona, Nevada,’ Ron explained, ‘is either a Russian missile, Something Horrible from outer space, or one of our own screaming nightmares. If it is a Russian missile, we retaliate. Then they retaliate. Et cetera, the end.
‘If it is a thing from outer space, why does the government keep it so quiet? Because it is something pretty horrible, like a thing that digested the whole town, or atomic monsters, shooting X-rays all over. Something we can’t stop, that’ll take over.
‘If it is some weapon of our own out of control, what would it be? Some bomb? Not likely, or other countries would be raising hell. More likely a nasty disease—say universal contagious cancer.’
Everyone in the room had grown silent. It was as if they huddled together in the gloom actually waiting for a quick blinding light to illumine and transfigure them for one final instant. The most important actions and words were pointless; the most trivial were full of meaning, elevated almost to sacraments.
Tears came to Susie’s eyes. It all seemed so unfair. She was seventeen years old and still a virgin, and now it was too late. She wanted more than anything to give up pointless, silly virtue now, near the end of All, but it was somehow too small a sacrifice (then, too, there was always the outside chance that the world would not end—and then how in the world would she explain things to Madge?). Susie hated the old End-of-the-world suddenly and furiously. She wanted to just scratch its eyes out !
‘Why—why I think we ought to go out and protest !’ she declared, standing up. The others looked at her, not catching her meaning. ‘They have no right to do this to us ! They have no right to take away the world like this, the selfish pigs !’
There was a sudden high-pitched explosive laugh from one youth. ‘What do you think we ought to do about it?’ he mocked. ‘Write our congressmen?’
‘No,’ she said seriously. ‘But I don’t think we’ll solve anything by just sitting around here moping, for Pete’s sake ! We ought to
go out and—and protest ! We ought to march on this Alt—this wherever it is and tell them what we think of them, in no uncertain terms !’ She stamped her little boot. ‘Or are we going to let them take everything away?’
The room was in an uproar. Some people were egging her on, while others were thinking over her words. Susie’s scorn was magnificent. In vain did someone try to point out that protest against the inevitable is useless.
‘Well of course it’s useless,’ she snapped. ‘I’m not as dumb as all that ! But it certainly isn’t any use just sitting around here just—steaming, is it?’
‘I think she has something,’ said Ron, grinning. ‘Why the hell not go down there and protest? It’s only ten hours’ drive.’
‘Protest what?’ asked Kevin. ‘The end of the world?’
‘Sure, why not?’ Ron said. ‘Like in Attack of the Fungamen, everyone protested the dangerous experiments, right? Like inGoz, they demonstrate against the army’s impotence, remember? And in The Day the Earth Caught Cold—’
‘All right, all right, but what are we protesting?’ Kevin asked. ‘If I may be so stupid.’
‘How about the sealing off of an American city by the CIA, and the violations of freedom of speech involved? Come on, we’ll make some signs, and we’ll get some people who have cars in on this.’
Kevin gave in. ‘We’ll let your girl run the show,’ he suggested. ‘It was her idea. But I never thought I’d spend my last hours making signs.’
‘Or getting arrested,’ Ron added. ‘The friends won’t like this at all.’
‘If I see any fuzz,’ said the poet, ‘I’m going to suddenly have a business deal in Tangier. I’ll only go so far for a joke.’
It may have been a joke to him and to most of those present (behaving in conscious or unconscious parody of old movies
—‘Gee gang,’ someone said, ‘how are we going to raise money for uniforms for the team?’ ‘I have it ! We’ll put on an end of the world !’), but to Susie, it meant becoming for a moment a kind of Joan of Arc. As they left the coffee house, she was at the fore, her white boots lifting high, higher, leading the parade.
Certainly Madge never worried less about the vincibility of her daughter’s innocence than now, having just heard her insist on the word ‘seater’, and seeing her blush as she pronounced it.
How innocent Susie was, and how wise she herself had been at that age.
Madge was now only dimly aware of the dying roar of Ron’s Harley, only vaguely cognizant of her own hand, caressing the buttons on the velvet bar in Susie’s vanity kit. Madge was seeing herself of eighteen years ago, going out to the Webster Beach Club with a handsome young insurance salesman.
How like the youthful Suggs was one of Susie’s friends, Jim Porteus, she thought. Odd that Susie never noticed it in him. He was such a nice boy—so earnest, in his glasses with their customary rims of solemn black, so energetic, so eager to set the world on fire. Madge fingered the yellow pin he’d given Susie: ‘NO RETREAT—BEAT THE VIET CONG.’
Jim was already worth money in his own right, besides being the son of a prominent gynaecologist, and leader of the California chapter of Young Americans to Conserve Free Enterprise.
When he was serious, he was serious indeed. Madge recalled every detail of the first conversation she’d had with him:
‘Are you planning on studying medicine yourself, Mr. Porteus?’
‘No I’m not, Mrs. Suggs.’ He removed the glasses, startling her with the hard planes of his face. ‘No, I’m afraid the medical profession is a dead letter, these days. Despite all our efforts to prevent it, socialized medicine is on the way—and with it, starvation for doctors.
‘No, I’ve been keeping an ear to the ground while I pursue a course of business administration. Market analysis seems very promising—very promising, I can assure you. Qualified analysts are in short supply. It’s an uncrowded field, where an energetic, get-up-early young man can soon make his pile. Or I may opt for corporation law—chiefly protecting infant industries from the predations of the federal eagle—or some related field. I suppose the truth lies somewhere between the two. I may become an humble junior executive, an unknown but vital cog in middle management—a job where the rewards are not mere fiscal aggrandizement, but full commitment to the judicious use of power. I distribute work and rewards—and punishments—to my subordinates, while receiving my own just portion from the higher-ups; a vital link in the Great Chain of Command !’
In many ways, she reflected, thinking back on that conversation, Jim seemed older than her husband.
Madge was shocked to note the time. In the next five minutes
she was a flurry of activity, bathing, perfuming, arranging her hair, and enveloping her body in diaphanous pyjamas of mysterious misty grey barely before the bell rang. She hurriedly pinned on the yellow button and ran to greet Jim.
‘Wow !’ he said. ‘Is it dark in here ! Let’s get a little light on the subject.’
‘Wow !’ he repeated, looking her over in the light. ‘You look great, Madge.’ He took off his Tyrolean hat and kissed her.
As he undressed, neatly and efficiently, Jim talked of the coming elections for student government, in which his Student Ultra Conservatives, newly-formed, hoped to win a few seats.
‘We’re young and dynamic, though inexperienced,’ he said, folding his socks carefully and hanging them over the back of a chair. ‘The older parties will just have to move over and make room for us.’
Madge moved over and made room for him in the bed.
Woody sat in the dispatcher’s office the same night, staring unseeingly at the Lost Property form before him. For hours, he had found himself unable to even begin his strange report—though he saw every detail of it clearly, again and again.
By the time he had brought his little train to a halt that afternoon, the rest of the crew had been on the ground, running for the dispatcher’s office where the beer was kept. The Altoona-Las Vegas run always stopped here at Double Flats for beer, especially on hot days. Officially, of course, they stopped to pick up train orders.
‘Where’s the beer?’ asked Fats, the brakeman cheerily.
‘I ain’t your slavey !’ screamed the dispatcher, who never spoke in any other tone. ‘You know where we keep it ! You guys don’t know what work is. You don’t know how lucky you got it, being out there in the fresh air. I wish I was back on the road, I wish to God I was.’ He spat into a dim, littered corner, where there might have been a spitoon. Woody and the crew opened beer cans and settled in various creaky chairs about the dark brown room. They were not anxious to get back into the desert dust and heat, no matter how lucky they had it.
Railroading was new and wonderful to Woody, though he pretended to hate it as much as everyone else seemed to do. He was already picking up railroad jargon, such as the differences between boxes, gons, reefers and flats, but he had much to learn. One thing which continued to surprise him was that he did not
have to steer the engine. It seemed almost to guide itself, in some way he could hot yet fathom, around even the sharpest curves. The railroad was a wonderful invention, he certainly had to admit.
The Nevada Southern was the only railroad he could find still running steam locomotives. Woody would not run any other kind. He loved the heat, the hiss of steam.
‘That’s right,’ he put into conversation. ‘Anyone is crazy to go railroading.’ The others nodded.
‘I’m gonna get out,’ said Fats. ‘I got a brother in the feed grain business, I’m gonna go in with him. Feed grain, that’s where the real money is.’
‘I laud that,’ said Woody solemnly. ‘The fratricidal bond.’ The beer had cooled him off and made him feel clear-headed. Earlier, in Altoona, he had suffered an hallucination, no doubt from the heat. A classic wish-fulfilment dream, it had been—a woman he had once known, in another state, seemed to board his train at Altoona. He had even waved at the hallucination, but, being only an hallucination, it had not waved back.
He finished his beer, drew on his gauntlets, and strode to the door. And stopped.
Mac, the fireman stood on the platform, utterly dazed. Fats and the conductor were hopping and sprinting across the tracks towards the train.
The train was moving. It was moving and accelerating, with the throttle wide open.
But the throttle could not be wide open. There was no one in the cab to open it. There was no one to fire the boiler. For all practical purposes, the cab was empty.
Roaring and chattering, slipping, the engine, the coal tender and the single passenger car moved out. The hallucinatory woman seemed to be still aboard.
Fats puffed to a halt. The conductor made a try for the tail end of the car, missed, and fell. He rolled clear as the last wheels nipped by.
A mirage? Mass hypnosis?
Woody dipped the steel pen in ink and scratched upon the form.
‘NAME: Elwood Trivian, Ph.D. TITLE: Engineer. ITEM LOST: One train. DESCRIBE THE CIRCUMSTANCES: Apparently the train was stolen, by a—’ he lined out ‘a’ and wrote, ‘by what seemed to be a small, grey tin tackle box.’
CHAPTER IX
COINCIDENCE
‘Men that hazard all
Do it in hope of fair advantages.’
SHAKESPEARE
The young man at the end of the bar was not wearing Western clothes. Had he worn no clothes at all he could not have appeared more conspicuus, at least in The El Cantina Bar in Goodtime, Nevada. The El, as the regulars called it, catered to the brightly-clad guests of three dude ranches. There were the ovoid, unhappy women of the Merry Widow Rancho (awaiting divorces); the unhappy, ovoid men of the Triple-Tumblebug Ranch (awaiting divorces); and the querulous, dozing old people, of no particular sex, from the Golden Sunset Retirement Ranch (awaiting death). Amid their orchids, turquoises and claret
s, all the hues of a painted sunset, Cal’s rumpled grey suit and dirty-white lab coat stood out like a bird-dropping.
Hitchhiking towards California, he had made it this far before sun, sand, wind, shimmering pavement and truck smoke had driven him indoors.
‘Another one?’ asked the bartender, poising his bottle. His name, stitched in violet letters over the pocket of his carnelian shirt, was Slim. His unlabelled customer nodded solemnly.
‘I will have another. And pour yourself another, too, Slim.’
‘Why, thank you, Carl. Your health.’
‘It’s Cal. Say, Slim, tell me, who are all those people along the wall?’
Slim explained about ‘retirement ranches’. ‘They come in now and then for a little fun, with their attendants.’ He indicated a group of bored-looking young men and women at the middle of the bar, all wearing black ten-gallon hats and shirts of ochre silk. On the back of each shirt was embroidered a setting sun, or rising sun, emitting heavy black rays. The attendants’ names were stitched in black over their hearts.
‘Another thing. How come everything here seems to be made of wagon wheels and barrels? Tables and chandeliers and … Where do all the wagon wheels come from?’
Slim moved down the bar, smiling, to wait upon two middle-
aged women.
‘Oh Slim, you beast !’ shrilled the thin woman in a black-and-lavender-shirt. ‘We’ve been waiting for hours !’
Her friend, a dumpling in oriflamme orange, called Slim a bad boy, and told him she didn’t know whether she wanted a frozen Daquiri or not, from such a bad boy. Wasn’t he a bad boy, though? she asked her companion.
On the colour television a parade in Texas appeared: whole troops of cowgirls in sky blue, their white boots moving like pistons in synchronous high-kicking steps. The men from the Triple-Tumblebug wet their lips and began to chuckle.
Cal had another drink. Two swarthy strangers came in. The smaller was Cal’s height, the larger was a giant. They wore Palm Beach suits with wide shoulders and trim straw hats with narrow brims. Nevertheless, their eyes seemed to be in shadow. Cal would have taken them to be policemen, but they were drinking, and top-shelf whiskey, too. There was something familiar about the larger man. …
