by Paula Guran
The girl opened the door and handed Art the three-page letter. It was typed perfectly, of course.
“There is something a little odd about this,” Art said.
“Oh? The ungrammar of the letter is your own, sir. Should I have correct?”
“No. It is something else. Tell me the truth, girl: how does the man next door ship out trailer-loads of material from a building ten times too small to hold the stuff?”
“He cuts prices.”
“Well, what are you people? The man next door resembles you.”
“My brother-uncle. We tell everybody we are Innominee Indians.”
“There is no such tribe,” Jim Boomer said flatly.
“Is there not? Then we will have to tell people we are something else. You got to admit it sounds like Indian. What’s the best Indian to be?”
“Shawnee,” said Jim Boomer.
“Okay then we be Shawnee Indians. See how easy it is.”
“We’re already taken,” Boomer said. “I’m a Shawnee and I know every Shawnee in town.”
“Hi cousin!” the girl cried, and winked. “That’s from a joke I learn, only the begin was different. See how foxy I turn all your questions.”
“I have two-bits coming out of my dollar,” Art said.
“I know,” the girl said. “I forgot for a minute what design is on the back of the two-bitser piece, so I stall while I remember it. Yes, the funny bird standing on the bundle of firewood. One moment till I finish it. Here.” She handed the quarter to Art Slick. “And you tell everybody there’s a smoothie public stenographer here who types letters good.”
“Without a typewriter,” said Art Slick. “Let’s go, Jim.”
“P.S. Love and Kisses,” the girl called after them.
The Cool Man Club was next door, a small and shabby beer bar. The bar girl could have been a sister of the public stenographer.
“We’d like a couple of Buds, but you don’t seem to have a stock of anything,” Art said.
“Who needs stock?” the girl asked. “Here is beers.” Art would have believed that she brought them out of her sleeves, but she had no sleeves. The beers were cold and good.
“Girl, do you know how the fellow on the corner can ship a whole trailer-load of material out of a space that wouldn’t hold a tenth of it?” Art asked the girl.
“Sure. He makes it and loads it out at the same time. That way it doesn’t take up space, like if he made it before time.”
“But he has to make it out of something,” Jim Boomer cut in.
“No, no,” the girl said. “I study your language. I know words. Out of something is to assemble, not to make. He makes.”
“This is funny.” Slick gaped. “Budweiser is misspelled on this bottle, the i before the e.”
“Oh, I goof,” the bar girl said. “I couldn’t remember which way it goes so I make it one way on one bottle and the other way on the other. Yesterday a man ordered a bottle of Progress beer, and I spelled it Progers on the bottle. Sometimes I get things wrong. Here, I fix yours.” She ran her hand over the label, and then it was spelled correctly.
“But that thing is engraved and then reproduced,” Slick protested.
“Oh, sure, all fancy stuff like that,” the girl said. “I got to be more careful. One time I forget and make Jax-taste beer in Schlitz bottle and the man didn’t like it. I had to swish swish change the taste while I pretended to give him a different bottle. One time I forgot and produced a green-bottle beer in a brown bottle. ‘It is the light in here, it just makes it look brown,’ I told the man. Hell, we don’t even have a light in here. I go swish fast and make the bottle green. It’s hard to keep from making mistake when you’re stupid.”
“No, you don’t have a light or a window in here, and it’s light,” Slick said. “You don’t have refrigeration. There are no power lines to any of the shanties in this block. How do you keep the beer cold?”
“Yes, is the beer not nice and cold? Notice how tricky I evade your question. Will you good men have two more beers?”
“Yes, we will. And I’m interested in seeing where you get them,” Slick said.
“Oh look, is snakes behind you!” the girl cried.
“Oh how you startle and jump!” she laughed. “It’s all joke. Do you think I will have snakes in my nice bar?” But she had produced two more beers, and the place was as bare as before.
“How long have you tumble-bugs been in this block?” Boomer asked.
“Who keep track?” the girl said. “People come and go.”
“You’re not from around here,” Slick said. “You’re not from anywhere I know. Where do you come from? Jupiter?”
“Who wants Jupiter?” the girl seemed indignant. “Do business with a bunch of insects there, is all! Freeze your tail too.”
“You wouldn’t be a kidder, would you, girl?” Slick asked.
“I sure do try hard. I learn a lot of jokes but I tell them all wrong yet. I get better, though. I try to be the witty bar girl so people will come back.”
“What’s in the shanty next door toward the tracks?”
“My cousin-sister,” said the girl. “She set up shop just today. She grow any color hair on bald-headed men. I tell her she’s crazy. No business. If they wanted hair they wouldn’t be bald-headed in the first place.”
“Well, can she grow hair on bald-headed men?” Slick asked.
“Oh sure. Can’t you?”
There were three or four more shanty shops in the block.
It didn’t seem that there had been that many when the men went into the Cool Man Club.
“I don’t remember seeing this shack a few minutes ago,” Boomer said to the man standing in front of the last shanty on the line.
“Oh, I just made it,” the man said.
Weathered boards, rusty nails . . . and he had just made it.
“Why didn’t you—ah—make a decent building while you were at it?” Slick asked.
“ ‘This is more inconspicuous,” the man said. “Who notices when an old building appears suddenly? We’re new here and want to feel our way in before we attract attention. Now I’m trying to figure out what to make. Do you think there’s a market for a luxury automobile to sell for a hundred dollars? I suspect I would have to respect the local religious feeling when I make them though.”
“What is that?” Slick asked.
“Ancestor worship. The old gas tank and fuel system still carried as vestiges after natural power is available. Oh, well, I’ll put them in. I’ll have one done in about three minutes if you want to wait.”
“No, I’ve already got a car,” Slick said. “Let’s go, Jim.” That was the last shanty in the block, so they turned back.
“I was just wondering what was down in this block where nobody ever goes,” Slick said. “There’s a lot of odd corners in our town if you look them out.”
“There are some queer guys in the shanties that were here before this bunch,” Boomer said. “Some of them used to come up to the Red Rooster to drink. One of them could gobble like a turkey. One of them could roll one eye in one direction and the other eye the other way. They shoveled hulls at the cottonseed oil float before it burned down.”
They went by the public stenographer shack again.
“No kidding, honey, how do you type without a typewriter?” Slick asked.
“Typewriter is too slow,” the girl said.
“I asked how, not why,” Slick said.
“I know. Is it not nifty the way I turn away a phrase? I think I will have a big oak tree growing in front of my shop tomorrow for shade. Either of you nice men have an acorn in your pocket?”
“Ah—no. How do you really do the typing, girl?”
“You promise you won’t tell anybody.”
“I promise.”
“I make the marks with my tongue,” the girl said.
They started slowly on up the block.
“Hey, how do you make the carbon copies?” Jim Boomer called back.
<
br /> “With my other tongue,” the girl said.
There was another forty-foot trailer loading out of the first shanty in the block. It was bundles of half-inch plumbers’ pipe coming out of the chute—in twenty-foot lengths. Twenty-foot rigid pipe out of a seven-foot shed.
“I wonder how he can sell trailer-loads of such stuff out of a little shack like that,” Slick puzzled, still not satisfied.
“Like the girl says, he cuts prices,” Boomer said. “Let’s go over to the Red Rooster and see if there’s anything going on. There always were a lot of funny people in that block.”
R. A. Lafferty (1914-2002) wrote more than two hundred short stories and twenty-one novels—historical as well as science fictional. He received a Hugo Award in 1973 for his short story “Eurema’s Dam” and was honored with a World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993. As his New York Times obituary stated, Lafferty was “ . . . a prolific science fiction writer best known for his short stories and his fresh, eccentric . . . satirical style [who] pushed the limits of his genre.”
Acknowledgements
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“Bridle” © 2006 Caitlín R. Kiernan. First publication: The Ammonite Violin & Others (Subterranean Press).
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“In Our Block” © 1965 R. A. Lafferty. Published with the permission of the author’s estate and the JABberwocky Literary Agency. First publication: Worlds of If, July 1965.
“A Water Matter” © 2008 Joseph F. Lake, Jr. Published with the permission of the Lake Family Trust and the Donald Maass Literary Agency. First publication: Tor.com, 29 October 2008.
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“Palimpsest” © 2008 Catherynne M. Valente. First publication: Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy, ed. Ekaterina Sedia (Senses Five Press).
“Working for the God of the Love of Money” © 2001 Kaaron Warren. First publication: Dark Regions # 16, Fall 2001.
