Strange Trades

by Paul Di Filippo

  On the lofty platform, Honeyman boosted himself astride her. The horse never balked. She seemed to sense Honeyman’s devotion and admiration. She waited till he was settled. Then she took off.

  Honeyman contributed nothing. He was just along for the ride.

  And what a hell of a ride it was. Honeyman had no sensation of falling. Instead, he felt he was going up, up, up, straight to the empyrean. In a splash and geyser, it was too soon over.

  Honeyman was addicted. Lispenard was convinced. The deal was struck.

  The next seven years were an uncomplicated, almost bucolic period for Honeyman. He slept late each day, rising for a communal lunch with the other performers. He groomed the Baroness, perhaps went to explore whatever town they were playing, ate a light supper. All day long the excitement would be building quietly but steadily inside him, until it reached its pitch just prior to the dive. Then he would feel drained, almost post-orgasmic, and the whole cycle would start again.

  One day in November 1976, the trailer carrying the Baroness to winter pasture was broadsided on the highway by a truck. Honeyman was vomiting by the shoulder of the road when he heard the shot from the policeman’s revolver.

  Lispenard, genuinely sympathetic, kept Honeyman on for another year, as part of the tightrope act. Honeyman had picked up the skill in his spare time, accustomed to heights as he was and gifted with an infallible inner balance.

  But Honeyman’s heart wasn’t in it. His life seemed empty without the nightly flight. Sometimes he swore he still felt the warm barrel shape of the horse’s body between his legs.

  When Jimmy Carter announced amnesty for draft dodgers in 1977, Honeyman claimed his savings from Lispenard’s squat old safe—more than once Honeyman had thought how that depository resembled its owner—and returned to the land of his birth. After an uncomfortable reunion with his parents, he headed east, ending up somehow in Hoboken, owner of an eponymous sandwich shop.

  His life for the next decade was basically eventless. A smattering of love affairs, most recently with Netsuke, the demands of a small business, the pleasure of the spectator at sporting events. Nothing loomed large in his life; his psychic landscape was flat; his horizons untroubled by mirages, destinations real or unreal.

  Until, that is, he invented spondulix.

  3.

  Higher Economics

  Nerfball’s fingers moved like a maestro’s. Fluid, knowing, commanding, they flew through their arcane rituals. Cutting, slicing, chopping, dicing. Layering and spreading, halving and wrapping…

  Filling drink orders, taking money and making change, Honeyman watched in admiration. Nerfball, his lank, longish, greasy hair whipping about, was a one-man sandwich factory. No, it was more like performance art. Sometimes, in fact, the crowd at the counter actually broke out in applause.

  The inside of Honeyman’s Heroes was clean but not neat. Mounted on the exposed brick of the walls were numerous caricatures of various local characters, in the inimitable Netsuke style. She had also done the illustrated menu that listed the various sandwiches by name: the Shakespeare (ham and Danish Jarlsberg cheese); the Sinatra (tongue and baloney); the Pia Zadora (marshmallow fluff and honey).

  Bracketed to the side walls were scarred ashwood counters with stools positioned beneath. A pickle barrel—tongs hanging from the rim—occupied the center of the room.

  Nerfball worked at a long, wide butcher-block slab, at the front of which stood a narrow glass case functioning both as a divider between the artist and his fans, and as a display area for various figurines and good luck objects. A herd of plastic dinosaurs, a bust of Elvis, a ceramic horse that everyone knew meant something secret and special to Honeyman.…

  Behind Nerfball and on either side, within easy reach, were all his implements and raw ingredients. Bottles of Tiger Sauce, tubs of cream cheese, sharp knives and twin steamers that could turn a quarter-pound of pastrami and Swiss into so much ambrosia.

  People yelled out their orders, Nerfball reacted with wordless speed, Honeyman made small talk; slices of pumpernickel, white, and rye arced through the air to land on the slab in perfect formation. What with all this, the afternoon sped swiftly by, another day among many, until finally it was nearing three o’clock, and the store was momentarily empty.

  Nerfball wiped his hands on his apron and looked up with a dazed air. Honeyman walked over to him and clapped him with honest appreciation on the back.

  “Thanks, Nerf. You were, as usual, superb. I think I can handle the supper crowd alone. Why don’t you break early today? Here, I’ll get your pay.”

  Honeyman took from the register the original and unique spondulix which he had hastily scribbled out a month or so ago, in a fit of desperate creativity. The old electric bill was now somewhat more greasy and worse for wear, but its green crayoned message was still discernible.

  Honeyman got ready to go through the daily ritual that already seemed ancient. He would hand Nerfball the spondulix. Nerf would cobble up ten sandwiches for himself. Then his employee would hand the spondulix back and depart with the sandwiches, the medium in which it was redeemable.

  Today, however, Nerfball refused to take part.

  “Can’t you pay me in cash?” he asked.

  Honeyman was grieved. “Jeez, Nerf, you know every penny I take in goes for something crucial. I still haven’t paid off the bakery for last week yet. If I have to meet your wages in real money, IH go under. And then where will either of us be? You know I don’t draw any pay for myself.”

  “Yeah, but you’re the owner, Mister Capitalist. You’re supposed to take risks and suffer.”

  “Nerf—I cannot pay you in American currency. Will you take spondulix or not?”

  Nerfball sighed dramatically. “All right. Hand it over.”

  Honeyman surrendered the spondulix. Nerfball took off his apron and prepared to leave.

  “Hey, wait a minute. Don’t you want your sandwiches?”

  “No, I don’t. Beatbox got a new job, after some lady who didn’t like the message he delivered squeezed his clown nose too hard. He works for a donut shop and gets to bring home all the stale ones. Nobody wants sandwiches anymore.”

  “All that sugar’s bad for you.”

  “I can’t help what people like.”

  “What’re you gonna do with the spondulix then?” asked Honeyman. He felt somehow reluctant to let the piece of paper bearing his signature leave the shop.

  “Oh,” said Nerfball mysteriously, “I’ve got a plan.”

  And so saying, he left.

  Honeyman did not sleep well that night. Dreams wherein brutal strangers accosted him, shouting, “Payable on demand!” troubled his slumbers.

  The next day the same exchange was made. Honeyman inscribed this second spondulix on a napkin, secretly hoping that the perishable medium would quickly fall apart. The day after that the same thing happened. And the day after that, and the day after that.…

  Soon there were a rough dozen spondulix—representing 120 sandwiches—out in the world, God knew where. Nerfball refused to say. Honeyman hoped they were stashed somewhere in the Old Vault Brewery, where rats would chew them to pieces, lining their nests with Nerfball’s nestegg.

  But then, like sins or pigeons, the spondulix began to flock homeward.

  Honeyman was alone in the shop around suppertime one day when Tiran Porter, the owner of a nearby hardware store, came in. Clutched in hand was a napkin. Honeyman’s heart seized up, as if arrest was imminent.

  “Hey, Rory, my man—is this thing any good? That Nerdo dude convinced me to take it in place of thirty dollars’ worth of electrical equipment. I wasn’t gonna, till I seen your name on it. I knew you’d play me straight.”

  Honeyman experienced a slight sense of relief, a momentary passing of his foreboding. At the same time, he suspected his relief was to be short-lived.

  “Sure, Tiran, just like it says: good for ten sandwiches, ’bout forty bucks. You made a good deal.”

  Porter seemed
mollified. “Okay, then, I’m gonna spend some of it.”

  “Some of it?”

  “Sure, I can’t eat no ten sandwiches at once. Give me an Atlantic City on white, hold the lettuce.”

  As Honeyman made the sandwich, his mind worked frantically. How was he to redeem part of a spondulix?

  When the sandwich was made, Honeyman did the only thing he could. Feeling like God on the second day, he created a new denomination. On a fresh napkin, he scrawled: ONE SPONDULIX REDEEMABLE FOR NINE SANDWICHES. Then signed it. Taking the ten-sandwich note, he handed Porter the sandwich and his change.

  “I don’t get no cash back?”

  “Sorry, Tiran, but you paid in spondulix. It’s sorta like food stamps.”

  Nodding with new understanding, Porter departed, apparently satisfied.

  One sandwich down, 119 to go.

  But of course Nerfball would be getting paid again tomorrow, thereby causing the minting of a new ten-spot spondulix, which would no doubt enter circulation soon, more than negating the single sandwich he had redeemed just now.

  Honeyman tried to figure out if he was going to come out ahead or behind on all this. A pain began to mount behind his eyeballs, and he suspected that his brainstorm was going to lead to his complete undoing.

  One day soon he would think back to this moment and realize his pessimistic forecast had been all right. And all wrong.

  The next day Honeyman verged several times on confronting Nerfball about his wanton and promiscuous exchange of spondulix for goods and services other than the specified sandwiches. But each time he stopped himself. The bills were really not Honeyman’s any longer, once he passed them over to Nerf. The pudgy Beer Nut had every right to use them as best he could. Honeyman was lucky he could get the man to employ his talents at all. The various members of the Beer Nuts were notoriously lazy, avoiding work whenever possible. And Honeyman needed Nerfball more than Nerf needed him. Lacking this one crucial employee, the shop would go under. God, what a precarious existence this world afforded! And what a mess Honeyman had made of his own personal life, ever since that day under the Mexican sun, before the eyes of the world.

  Watching the sweaty Nerfball transform heaps of cold cuts into works of art, Honeyman resigned himself once again, both to his past and to whatever was to come.

  No customer tried to tender spondulix in payment that day. But the following afternoon a group of workers from the Stahl Soap Corporation came in at shift’s end, smelling sweetly of their product, like a newly opened box of bath salts. At first Honeyman couldn’t figure out why they had traveled all the way over from Park Street, down by the river, since it was quite a distance away. Then they revealed they had two spondulix among them, and wanted all twenty sandwiches.

  While he was slapping the sandwiches together, with none of Nerf’s finesse, Honeyman tried to find out where they had gotten the spondulix. He couldn’t figure out what Nerfball had traded for, since he seldom bathed, there being no running water at the brewery where the Beer Nuts squatted.

  “So, guys—where’d you get my coupons?”

  A skinny fellow who seemed capable of consuming an infinite amount of “free” pickles spoke up around a mouthful. “Harry Lieberman—you know Harry, he drives the company truck—well, Harry hauled a bunch of stuff somewhere for those hippies that live in the old brewery, and they paid him with these. Harry gave ’em to me as payment for his bowling league dues. So I’m sharing them with the whole league.”

  Honeyman nearly sliced the tip of his finger off. This was bad news indeed. The exchanges were getting more complicated. The spondulix were now circulating among third parties, people who, for some unknown reason, obviously trusted in them enough not to try to redeem them immediately. And others, fourth-parties, also seemed willing to accept the spondulix without first-hand knowledge of Honeyman’s honesty or willingness to make good on them. Wasn’t this property a known characteristic of real money? Didn’t economists have some complicated way to measure this circulation, the number of times money changed hands?

  God, this was scary! Honeyman’s personal signature on dozens of napkins that were roaming out in the city of Hoboken like prodigal children, masquerading as money.… He had to abandon spondulix! But he couldn’t. His business would go under if he did.

  Piling slices of tomatoes atop rings of Bermuda onions in a stack as tall as his worries, Honeyman wondered where this would all end.

  And in the back of his mind was another worry. What were the Beer Nuts up to? First electrical equipment, then hauling—it had to be something dangerous.

  When Earl Erlkonig walked into the shop during a lull the next day with Suki Netsuke on his arm, Honeyman knew, just from the expression on the man’s hereditarily blanched face, that his trepidations had a foundation in reality.

  “Hey, Rory, my molecule, I’m paying a call to invite you to an Outlaw Party.”

  So. Here it was, out in the open now. And it was just as bad as Honeyman had feared. Anxiety gave way momentarily to annoyance, as from the back room came the distracting honking of Nerfball, performing his hourly nasal irrigations.

  The Outlaw Party was an institution of long-standing. Sans permit or permission, the Beer Nuts and other assorted fringe folks would take over a public location come nightfall on a specified day. Decorations would be strung up, kegs tapped, food laid on, and music unleashed. Invitation to the party was initially by word of mouth among a select group, although as soon as its noisy existence became generally known, it would be besieged by the hoi polloi.

  The Hoboken police generally tolerated the occasional Outlaw Party, knowing that the motivation was sheer fun, not vandalism or riot. However, the rush of events sometimes went too far, and overstepped boundaries in a way the authorities could not ignore. Always implicit in the festivities was the possibility of chaos and anarchy breaking loose. There was the time, for instance, when the site had been the abandoned ferry building down near the PATH station, before that structure’s recent renovation and the reestablishment of ferry service to Manhattan. Apparently the sight of a full orchestra atop the building’s roof, with dancers threatening to fall off the gables and kill themselves, had been too much for the cops. The subsequent dispersal of the revelers had eventually involved two fire companies and a contingent of National Guardsmen.

  Honeyman supposed he was just getting older, but for some reason he didn’t relish the idea of an Outlaw Party as much as he once had. The prospect of confronting the police at this time, when he was already guilty of perpetuating spondulix, rather took the enjoyment out of things.

  Regarding Erlkonig’s open face, with its broad white African nose and translucent eyebrows, Honeyman sought to detect any duplicity in the man’s invitation, but failed. Netsuke, meanwhile, had silently taken a napkin from the counter and was folding it into an origami crane. Honeyman tried to work up a little resentment at Erlkonig for stealing his girl away, but couldn’t do it.

  “Oh, what the hell,” he finally said, “sure, I’ll come.”

  “Great, my moll. I knew we could count on you. And maybe you’d contribute a little something—?”

  “No problem. IH make up a few platters.”

  “It wasn’t sandwiches I was after, Rory. The food angle is pretty well covered. But there’s a few other things we need to purchase, and our treasury is, like, empty.”

  “Earl, you know I’m broke.”

  Erlkonig smiled broadly. “Ah, my moll, that’s where you’re wrong. All you have to do is write out a few more of those spondulix things you’ve been giving Nerfball.”

  In a flash it dawned on Honeyman. Nerf never would have had the initiative or brains to promote spondulix. It must have been all Erlkonig’s doings. The man was crafty. Honeyman had always credited him with brains and guile, but this was beyond belief. To take advantage of Honeyman’s quandary in such a duplicitous manner—

  “Earl, you’re asking me to mortgage my future. Every spondulix I write is like a loan again
st my potential profits, meager as they might be.”

  Erlkonig became serious. “No, man, that’s wrong. That’s like a worst-case scenario. All the spondulix will never come in. Most are just gonna circulate forever. Take my word for it, I know. It’s money for nothing, Rory. It’s like having a money tree growing in your yard. You just have to overcome your fear and go with it.”

  Honeyman wanted to believe. It would make things so easy. “Do you really think so?”

  “My moll—I know so!”

  At that moment, Netsuke finished her paper bird. She opened her hands and tossed it upward, like a magician releasing a dove. The origami crane clearly flapped its wings a few times, then glided to a landing on the counter in front of Honeyman, where it promptly melted back to the original napkin, now intricately creased.

  Netsuke said nothing. The two men looked at her, then back to each other.

  “I wish I knew how she does that,” said Erlkonig.

  “Me too,” said Honeyman. Then: “Oh, Christ, here’s your spondulix.” Using another magic napkin, he wrote one spondulix for the largest denomination yet: five hundred sandwiches.

  “Thanks, moll,” said Erlkonig, putting the draft away in his shirt pocket. He and Netsuke turned to go.

  “Hey, where’s the party?”

  “Oh, we’re commandeering the campus of the Stevens Institute. Week from tonight. See you there.”

  Then they were gone, leaving Honeyman shaking his head at the audacity of it. The Stevens Institute of Technology occupied a spectacular bluff above the river, and afforded a gorgeous view of nighttime Manhattan. It was bound to be a hell of a bash.

  And when the deliveryman from the bakery came that day, Honeyman had no trouble persuading him to take spondulix in payment.

  4.

  Overlooking Sinatra

  A Frisbee skimmed low over Honeyman’s Mets cap, nearly knocking the hat from his head. Out of the concentrated dusk beneath a big elm off to his left came the voice of Leather.