They had rarely seen so many men in white shirts, even on Sunday, and women and kids in their finest clothes, even if they were only patched and faded coveralls, they were starched and clean.
Then a bunch of city flatlanders came by—the men all had on hats and bright suits and ties, and the woman—a goddess—was the first flapper they had ever seen—the eyes of the flatlanders were moving everywhere. Heads turned to watch them all along their route. They were moving toward the general mercantile, and they looked tired and dusty for all their fancy duds.
“Well, boys,” said Luke. “That were a right smart breakfast. I reckon us-all better be gettin’ on down towards the musical place and see what the otherns look like.”
They gathered up their saws and ladders and walked toward the sweetest sounds this side of Big Bone Lick.
* * *
“So,” says Little Willie to a citizen, “tell us where we can score a couple of motorman’s gloves?”
The man is looking at him like he has just stepped off one of the outermost colder planets. This is fitting, for the citizen looks to us vice versa.
“What my friend of limited vocabulary means,” says Chris the Shoemaker to the astounding and astounded individual, “is where might we purchase a mess of fried pork chops?”
The man keeps looking at us with his wide eyes the size of doorknobs.
“Eats?” I volunteers.
Nothing is happening.
Large Jake makes eating motions with his mitt and goozle.
Still nothing.
“Say, fellers,” says this other resident, “you won’t be gettin’ nothing useful out’n him. He’s one of the simpler folks hereabouts, what them Victorian painter fellers used to call ‘naturals.’ What you want’s Ma Gooser’s place, straight down this yere street.”
“Much obliged,” says Chris.
“It’s about time, too,” says Miss Millie Dee Chantpie. “I’m so hungry I could eat the ass off a pigeon through a park bench!”
I am still staring at the individual who has given us directions, who is knocking the ashes out of his corncob pipe against a rain barrel.
“Such a collection of spungs and feebs I personally have never seen,” says Chris the Shoemaker, who is all the time looking at the wire that comes down the hill into town.
“I must admit you are right,” says Little Willie. And indeed it seems every living thing for three counties is here—there are nags and wagons, preggo dolls with stair-step children born nine months and fifteen minutes apart, guys wearing only a hat and one blue garment, a couple of men with what’s left of Great War uniforms with the dago dazzlers still pinned to the chests—yes indeedy, a motley and hilarity-making group.
The streets are being full of wagons with melons and the lesser legumes and things which for a fact I know grow in the ground. The indigenous peoples are selling everything what moves. And from far away you can hear the beginnings of music.
“I spy,” says Chris the Shoemaker.
“Whazzat?” asks Little Willie.
“I spy the blacksmith shop, and I spy the general mercantile establishment to which the blower wire runs. Here is what we are doing. William and I will saunter over to the smithy and forge, where we will inquire of aid for the vehicle. Charlie Perro, you will go make the call which will tender our apologies as being late for the meet, and get some further instructions. Jacob, you will take the love of my life, Miss Millie, to this venerable Ma Gooser’s eatatorium where we will soon join you in a prodigious repast.”
* * *
The general mercantile is in the way of selling everything on god’s green earth, and the aroma is very mouth-watering—it is a mixture of apple candy and nag tack, coal oil and licorice and flour, roasted coffee and big burlap sacks of nothing in particular. There is ladies’ dresses and guy hats and weapons of all kinds.
There is one phone; it is on the back wall; it is the kind Alexander Graham Bell made himself.
“Good person,” I says to the man behind the counter, who is wearing specs and a vest and has a tape measure draped over his shoulder, “might I use your telephonic equipment to make a collect long-distance call?”
“Everthin’s long-distance from here,” he opines. “Collect, you say?”
“That is being correct.”
He goes to the wall and twists a crank and makes bell sounds. “Hello, Gertie. This is Spoon. How’s things in Grinder Switch?… You don’t say? Well, there’s a city feller here needs to make a co-llect call. Right. You fix him up.” He hands me the long earpiece, and puts me in the fishwife care of this Gertie, and parks himself nearby and begins to count some bright glittery objects.
I tells Gertie the number I want. There are these sounds like the towers are falling. “And what’s your name,” asks this Gertie.
I gives her the name of this known newspaper guy who hangs out at Chases’ and who writes about life in the Roaring Forties back in the Big City. The party on the other end will be wise that that is not who it is, but will know I know he knows.
I hear this voice and Gertie gives them my name and they say okay.
“Go ahead,” says Gertie.
“We are missing the meet,” I says.
“Bleaso!” says the voice. “Eetmay alledoffcay. Ammysays Iseway! Izzyoway and Oemay erehay.”
Itshay I am thinking to myself. To him I says:
“Elltay usoway atwhay otay ooday?”
“Ogay Omehay!”
He gets off the blower.
“I used to have a cousin that could talk Mex,” says Spoon at the counter. I thank him for the use of the phone. “Proud as a peach of it,” he says, wiping at it with a cloth.
“Well, you should be,” I tell him. Then I buy two cents worth of candy and put it in a couple of pockets, and then I ease on down this town’s Great White Way.
* * *
This Ma Gooser’s is some hopping joint. I don’t think the griddle here’s been allowed to cool off since the McKinley Administration. Large Jake and Miss Millie Dee Chantpie are already tucking in. The place is as busy as a chophouse on Chinese New Year.
There are these indistinguishable shapes on the platters.
A woman the size of Large Jake comes by with six full plates along each arm, headed towards a table of what looks like two oxdrivers in flannel shirts. These two oxdrivers are as alike as all get-out. The woman puts three plates in front of each guy and they fall into them mouth first.
The woman comes back. She has wild hair, and it does not look like she has breasts; it looks like she has a solid shelf across her chest under her work shirt. “Yeah?” she says, wiping sweat from her brow.
“I’d like a steak and some eggs,” I says, “over easy on the eggs, steak well-done, some juice on the side.”
“You’ll get the breakfast, if’n you get anything,” she says. “Same’s everybody else.” She follows my eyes back to the two giants at the next table. Large Jake can put away the groceries, but he is a piker next to these two. A couple of the plates in front of them are already shining clean and they are reaching for a pile of biscuits on the next table as they work on their third plates.
“Them’s the Famous Singin’ Eesup Twins, Bert and Mert,” says Ma Gooser. “If’n everybody could pile it in like them, I’d be a rich woman.” She turns to the kitchen.
“Hey, Jughead,” she yells, “where’s them six dozen biscuits?”
“Comin’, Ma Gooser!” yells a voice from back in the hell there.
“More blackstrap ‘lasses over here, Ma!” yells a corncob from another table.
“Hold your water!” yells Ma. “I only got six hands!” She runs back towards the kitchen.
Chris the Shoemaker and Little Willie comes in and settles down.
“Well, we are set in some departments. The blacksmith is gathering up the tools of his trade and Little William will accompany him in his wagon to the site of the vehicular happenstance. I will swear to you, he picks up his anvil and puts it into his wa
gon, just like that. The thing must have dropped the wagon bed two foot. What is it they are feeding the locals around here?” He looks down at the plates in front of Large Jake and Miss Millie. “What is dat?”
“I got no idea, sweetie,” says Miss Millie, putting another forkful in, “but it sure is good!”
“And what’s the news from our friends across the ways?”
“Zex,” I says.
He looks at me. “You are telling me zex in this oomray full of oobrays?”
“No, Chris,” I says, “the word is zex.”
“Oh,” he says, “and for why?”
“Izzy and Moe,” I says.
“Izzy and Moe?! How did Izzy and Moe get wise to this deal?”
“How do Izzy and Moe get wise to anything,” I says, keeping my voice low and not moving my goozle. “Hell, if someone could get them to come over, this umray unningray biz would be a snap. If they can dress like women shipwrecks and get picked up by runners’ ships, they can get wind of a meet somewhere.”
“So what are our options being?” asks Chris the Shoemaker.
“That is why we have all these round-trip tickets,” I says.
He is quiet. Ma Gooser slaps down these plates in front of us, and coffee all round, and takes two more piles of biscuits over to the Famous Singing Eesup Twins.
“Well, that puts the damper on my portion of the Era of Coolidge Prosperity,” says Chris the Shoemaker. “I am beginning to think this decade is going to be a more problematical thing than first imagined. In fact, I am getting in one rotten mood.” He takes a drink of coffee. His beezer lights up. “Say, the flit in the Knowledge Box got nothing on this.” He drains the cup dry. He digs at his plate, then wolfs it all down. “Suddenly my mood is changing. Suddenlike, I am in a working mood.”
I drops my fork.
“Nix?” I asks nice, looking at him like I am a tired halibut.
“No, not no nix at all. It is of a sudden very clear why we have come to be in this place through these unlikely circumstances. I had just not realized it till now.”
Large Jake has finished his second plate. He pushes it away and looks at Chris the Shoemaker.
“Later,” says Chris. “Outside.”
Jake nods.
Of a sudden-like, I am not enjoying Ma Gooser’s groaning board as much as I should wish.
For when Chris is in a working mood, things happen.
* * *
They had drawn spot # 24 down at the judging stand. Each contestant could sing three songs, and the Black Draught people had a big gong they could ring if anyone was too bad.
“I don’t know ‘bout the ones from ‘round here,” said Cave Canem, “but they won’t need that there gong for the people we know about. We came in third to some of ’em last year in Sweet Tater City.”
“Me neither,” said Rooster Joe. “The folks I seen can sure play and sing. Why even the Famous Eesup Twins, Bert and Mert, is here. You ever hear them do ‘Land Where No Cabins Fall’?”
“Nope,” said Luke, “but I have heard of ‘em. It seems we’ll just have to outplay them all.”
They were under a tree pretty far away from the rest of the crowd, who were waiting for the contest to begin.
“Let’s rosin up, boys,” said Luke, taking his crosscut saw out of his tow sack.
Felix unfolded the ladder and climbed up. Cave pulled out a big willow bow strung with braided muletail hair.
Rooster Joe took out an eight-ounce ball peen hammer and sat back against a tree root.
Luke rosined up his fiddle bow.
“Okay, let’s give ‘er about two pounds o’ press and bend.”
He nodded his head. They bowed, Felix pressing down on the big bucksaw handle from above, Rooster Joe striking his ripsaw, Luke pulling at the back of his crosscut.
The same note, three octaves apart, floated on the air.
“Well, that’s enough rehearsin’,” said Luke. “Now all we got to do is stay in this shady spot and wait till our turn.”
They put their instruments and ladder against the tree, and took naps.
* * *
When Chris the Shoemaker starts to working, usually someone ends up with cackle fruit on their mug.
When Little Willie and Chris first teamed up when they were oh so very young, they did all the usual grifts. They worked the cherry-colored cat and the old hydrophoby lay, and once or twice even pulled off the glim drop, which is a wonder since neither of them has a glass peeper. They quit the grift when it turns out that Little Willie is always off nugging when Chris needs him, or is piping some doll’s stems when he should be laying zex. So they went into various other forms of getting the mazuma.
The ramadoola Chris has come up with is a simple one. We are to get the lizzie going, or barring that are to Hooverize another one; then we cut the lines of communication; immobilize the town clown, glom the loot, and give them the old razoo.
“But Chris,” says I, “it is so simple and easy there must be something wrong with your brainstorm. And besides, it is what? Maybe a hundred simoleons in all? I have seen you lose that betting on which raindrop will run down a windowpane first.”
“We have been placed here to do this thing,” says Chris the Shoemaker. We are all standing on the porch of Ma Gooser’s. “We cut the phone,” says Chris, “no one can call out. Any other jalopies, Large Jake makes inoperable. That leaves horses, which even we can go faster than. We make the local yokel do a Brodie so there is no Cicero lightning or Illinois thunder. We are gone, and the news takes till next week to get over the ridge yonder.”
Miss Millie Dee Chantpie has one of her shoes off and is rubbing her well-turned foot. “My corns is killing me,” she says, “and Chris, I think this is the dumbest thing you have ever thought about!”
“I will note and file that,” says Chris. “Meantimes, that is the plan. Little William here will start a rumor that will make our presence acceptable before he goes off with the man with the thews of iron. We will only bleaso this caper should the flivver not be fixable or we cannot kipe another one. So it is written. So it shall be done.”
* * *
Ten minutes later, just before Little Willie leaves in the wagon, I hear two people talking close by, pointing to Miss Millie Dee Chantpie and swearing she is a famous chanteuse, and that Chris the Shoemaker is a talent scout from Okeh Records.
* * *
“The town clown,” says Chris to me in a while, “will be no problem. He is that gent you see over there sucking on the yamsicle, with the tin star pinned to his long johns with the Civil War cannon tucked in his belt.”
I nod.
“Charlie Perro,” he says to me, “now let us make like we are mesmerized by this screeching and hollering that is beginning.”
The contest is under way. It was like this carnival freak show had of a sudden gone into a production of No, No Nanette while you were trying to get a good peek at the India Rubber Woman.
I am not sure whether to be laughing or crying, so I just puts on the look a steer gets just after the hammer comes down, and pretends to watch. What I am really thinking, even I don’t know.
* * *
There had been sister harmony groups, and guitar and mandolin ensembles, three guys on one big harmonica, a couple of twelve-year-olds playing ocarinas and washboards, a woman on gutbucket broom bass, a handbell choir from a church, three one-man bands, and a guy who could tear newspapers to the tune of “Hold That Tiger!”
Every eight acts or so, Reverend Shapenote and the Mt. Sinai Choir got up and sang sacred harp music, singing the notes only, with no words because their church believed you went straight to Hell if you sang words to a hymn; you could only lift your voice in song.
Luke lay with his hat over his eyes through two more acts. It was well into the afternoon. People were getting hot and cranky all over the town.
As the next act started, Luke sat up. He looked toward the stage. Two giants in coveralls and flannel shirts got up. Even from t
his far away, their voices carried clear and loud, not strained: deep bass and baritone.
The words of “Eight More Miles To Home” and then “You Are My Sunshine” came back, and for their last song, they went into the old hymn, “Absalom, Absalom”:
Day-Vid The—He-Wept—and Wept
Saying—Oh My Son—Oh my son …
and a chill went up Luke’s back.
“That’s them,” said Rooster Joe, seeing Luke awake.
“Well,” said Luke Apuleus, pulling his hat back down over his eyes as the crowd went crazy, “them is the ones we really have to beat. Call me when they gets to the Cowbell Quintet so we can be moseying up there.”
* * *
I am being very relieved when Little Willie comes driving into town in the flivver; it is looking much the worse for wear but seems to be running fine. He parks it on Main Street at the far edge of the crowd and comes walking over to me and Chris the Shoemaker.
“How are you standing this?” he asks.
“Why do you not get up there, William,” asks Chris. “I know for a fact you warbled for the cheese up at the River Academy, before they let you out on the technical.”
“It was just to keep from driving an Irish buggy,” says Little Willie. “The Lizzie will go wherever you want it to. Tires patched. Gassed and lubered up. Say the syllable.”
Chris nods to Large Jake over at the edge of the crowd. Jake saunters back towards the only two trucks in town, besides the Cardui vehicle, which, being too gaudy even for us, Jake has already fixed while it is parked right in front of the stage, for Jake is a very clever fellow for someone with such big mitts.
“Charlie Perro,” says Chris, reaching in Miss Millie Dee Chantpie’s purse, “how’s about taking these nippers here,” handing me a pair of wire cutters, “and go see if that blower wire back of the general mercantile isn’t too long by about six feet when I give you the nod. Then you should come back and help us.” He also takes his howitzer out of Miss Millie’s bag.
“Little William,” he says, turning. “Take Miss Millie Dee Chantpie to the car and start it up. I shall go see what the Cardui Black Draught people are doing.”
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 72
