The R a Lafferty Fantastic Megapack

by R. A. Lafferty

  “And then what do you think that Moysha did?”

  “O, he signed on and went back to sea.”

  Sour John was thunderstruck.

  “How did you know that? You’ve hit it again. I never will know how you do it. Well, that’s what he did. In the face of everything he left his beautiful wife and children, and his clean life, and went to the filthy sea again. It’s incredible.”

  “And how is he doing now?”

  “God knows. I mean it literally. Naturally he’s dead. That’s been a year. You don’t expect a seaman married to a crippled woman to live forever do you?”

  “And how is Bonny?”

  “I went to see her this afternoon; for this is the port where it all happened. She had out an atlas and a pencil and piece of string. She was trying to measure out what town in the whole country is furthest from the sea.

  “She is lonely and grieves for Moysha, more than for either of her other husbands. But O she is lovely! She supports herself and her brood by giving piano lessons.”

  “Is there a moral to this?”

  “No. It is an immoral story. And it’s a mystery to me. A man will not normally leave a clean home to dwell in an open grave, nor abandon children to descend into a sewer, nor forswear a lovely and loving wife to go faring on a cesspool, knowing that he will shortly die there as a part of the bargain.

  “But that is what he did.”

  SATURDAY YOU DIE

  Originally published in Artesian Magazine, Spring 1960.

  Besides being born (that is an ordeal, no less an ordeal because you forget it) the worst thing to be gone through is to be a new boy in a small Southern town.

  There are reasons for this. First, the boys are tougher in the South. They go barefoot in April. They play with green snakes. They keep scorpions in fruit jars. They clang cow bells, and they pop whips. In the second place, all the boys are bigger than you are. But in the North they had all been your size.

  Howard Glass, Stanely Savage, Clifford Welch, and that other boy whose name had not been learned yet, they were all bigger than Henry. Howard and Stanely would both go to school next year. Not only that, but Clifford and that other boy had already been to school, and next year they would be in the second grade.

  So all the boys in town were bigger than Henry. And, though he would have been the last to admit it, they were all tougher too.

  “If you ever tell anybody what we tell you we’ll throw you in the ditch at Carter Road and you won’t be able to get out,” Howard Glass said. “And nobody will find you until the weed-cutter comes along, and then all they’ll find is your bones.”

  “I never tell anything,” Henry said steadfastly. “In all my life I never tell anything.”

  The ditch at Carter Road was the deepest one in town and Henry didn’t know whether he’d be able to climb out of it or not. In the entire North there was nothing remotely like that ditch at Carter Road.

  “Or else we’ll bury you in the cave,” said Howard Glass. “We have another cave under the floor of the first and we bury people there.”

  They did have a cave in this new town. In the North they had only talked about caves but nobody had ever seen one.

  Howard’s name was Glass, probably because he wore glasses, the only one besides grown people who ever did so. He had eyes as big as a cow’s. Clifford Welsh said that if Howard had his glasses off then his eyes wouldn’t be any bigger than anyone else’s, but there was no way to prove this. Howard always had his glasses on and they made him look like an owl. But they didn’t have owls here in the South. If they had, they were a different kind, and you wouldn’t know them for what they were.

  And there is this about the South; it is larger than it is in the North. This is because more than half the trees had been cut down or had never been there; the grass was heavy green; and there was no snow left on the north side of the houses, and perhaps there had never been. The water came from crank-handle cisterns instead of pump-handle pumps; and more of the town people kept cows. The squirrels were grey instead of red. The trees were different. And they had new kinds of birds, like scissortails, that nobody had ever seen before. It was less cloudy, and the days were longer. You could see a great deal farther as both the earth and the sky were everywhere of more extent. Other people have noticed other differences between the North and the South, but it was Henry who discovered the essential difference: it is larger in the South.

  “After you bury them in the cave, how long before you let them out?” Henry asked.

  “How would we let them out? After you’re dead there’s nothing to let out.”

  “Then you get to stay there all the time?”

  “Sure. All the time. Except that the next Saturday we take you out again and cut you up.” Howard’s eyes were flecked green behind his glasses and were bigger than a cow’s. “Then we cut the flesh off you and put it in jars to sell for crawfish bait. And we put your bones in a box and bury them again.”

  “But the first time you’re buried, it’s only for a week?”

  “Yes, a week.”

  “That isn’t so bad to be buried for a week if you know that you’re going to get out again.”

  * * * *

  The hill at the edge of town was named Doolen’s Mountain. It was closer to Henry’s house than to any of the others. There had been nothing like Doolen’s Mountain in the North, and those people wouldn’t have believed it if it were told to them. The cave was in the near flank of Doolen’s Mountain, and Henry knew that he could get into the cave when the rest of the boys had gone home for dinner. They said it was their cave and he couldn’t go in, but now he lived in the house closest to it.

  But he didn’t go into the cave on that first day: instead he climbed the mountain itself. It was three times as tall as a house, and it seemed to go down in five sides from the flat top of it.

  Two of the fluted sides faced back into town. And down beyond the center one of the opposite sides there ran a long ragged ditch that twisted as far as the horizon through ragged pasture land. The other two country sides were green, but two different shades of green. One of them was blue-green and stretched to the limit of vision: it was winter wheat. One was bright green: a prairie-hay meadow coming to life.

  There came some kind of bees or yellowjackets and chased Henry off the top of Doolen’s Mountain. But he waited until he thought they would be gone, and then got a stick and went back up. He stayed there a long time. He threw rocks down the sides of the mountain. Then he happened to think: “If everybody would do that, then they’d use up the whole mountain and it’d be flat as the rest of the places and I’d have no place to climb.” He threw no more rocks down. Instead he went down and got rocks, some of them the same ones he’d thrown down and others that couldn’t be identified, and carried them back to the top to repair the damage.

  Clifford Welch came up to the top of the mountain and sat down two feet away from Henry. They seemed not to notice each other, and for a long while each went about his own business. But it was Clifford who spoke first which pleased Henry, for he knew that in this he was the victor.

  “If any of the other boys hurt you, you tell me,” Clifford said. “I’m the biggest and I’ll make them stop. When I tell anybody to do something they have to do it because they’re all afraid of me.”

  “What if they hurt me next week when you’re in school?”

  “After school you tell me about it and I’ll make them quit.”

  “What if they kill me?”

  “Then I’ll kill them.”

  That seemed satisfactory, but oddly it wasn’t. Often there are things left over that worry you when they should be settled.

  “Howard Glass says he’s going to kill me and bury me in the cave,” Henry said.

  “Howard was just bragging. Last time was
the first time we even let him watch. Stanely and I are the only ones who ever kill boys and bury them in the cave.”

  “Howard says it will be next Saturday.”

  “Yes. Next Saturday. We always do it on a Saturday.”

  “Are you really going to do it to me?”

  “Unless there’s another new boy moves to town before then. If another new boy moves here, we kill him instead of you. We always kill the last one to come.”

  “Maybe another new one will come,” Henry said. They left it at that. It wasn’t completely satisfactory, but it would have to do. So much had happened since last Saturday, with almost all of two days on the train, and most of one night in the depot in Kansas City, and other things besides that. Last Saturday was a long ways away, and the next one would be a long time coming.

  “If a new boy comes to town, can I help you kill him?” Henry asked.

  “We’ll see,” said Clifford. “Maybe we won’t let you help with the first one, but there’ll be others.”

  From the top of Doolen’s Mountain, three times as high as a house, higher than some barns, you could see everything. There was no limit to your vision except the sky itself.

  “I’ve been in five states,” Henry said, “this one, and the one we left, and the two we came through on the way down here. And one week we went to South Dakota from Iowa when I was little. I’ve been in five states.”

  “What are states?” Clifford asked. And the bitter disappointment cut Henry like a butcher knife.

  * * * *

  But it was Stanely Savage who really told Henry what things were about. This was the next Monday when Clifford Welch and the other boy were in school. The other boy was named Quenton Quint. And on that day also, Howard Glass (the other one who didn’t go to school yet) had to stay in his house on account of his abominable conduct:—which is no part of this history, and yet in a way it is, for Howard often behaved abominably, as Henry was to learn as the days went by. But this Monday there were only Henry and Stanely.

  “Under our cave is another cave,” Stanely said, “and it goes for miles. It comes out on a river or ocean, and the boats tie up there. We go there at night and trade with the pirate boats when they come up.”

  “But the cave is in Doolen’s Mountain,” Henry said, “and the only river that comes near Doolen’s Mountain is the bayou, and it’s only a ditch. How could the cave come out on a big river or ocean where boats tie up?”

  But as soon as Henry had asked that, he knew that his objection was a flimsy one. In a story, a boy finds a door in a tree and goes in, and there are hundreds of houses and towns and a whole country that is different from the outside one. A lot of things are bigger on the inside than on the outside.

  Naturally Stanely didn’t answer Henry’s objection, but he continued:

  “All the pirates come here, Black Wolf and Dread Wolf and Captain Kidd and John Silver, and that other pirate who has one red eye and one black eye. He’s the king of them all.”

  “What’s his name?” Henry asked.

  “We can’t tell anybody his name. He’s supposed to be hanged and drowned and not running loose. The pirates bring us live monkeys and parrots and gunny sacks full of gold. They bring us pearls as big as pigeon’s eggs, and slaves in chains, and long swords, and those other kind of curved swords. They bring us guns with the barrel-ends like funnels, and red pants, and green pirates’ coats.”

  “Where do you keep all that stuff? I never see any of it.”

  “We keep it hidden. We put part of it in the cave under our first cave. We keep part of it in other places. I keep my slave-in-chains in a little room up in the attic of my house that nobody knows is there but me. At night he comes down to my room and makes gold money for me. He grinds it out with a little grinder.”

  “What does he grind it out of?”

  “He puts in old bolts and nuts and horseshoes and old milk-can covers.”

  “And it comes out gold money?”

  “Sure it does. I got a whole roomful of it.”

  “Could I get a slave to make me some too?”

  “No. You’re too little. And besides, you’ll be dead.”

  “What do you trade to the pirates for all that?”

  “Hickory nuts and pecans mostly. They can’t get them at sea. And bird’s eggs. But the thing that is worth more than anything else is eyes. That’s what we kill all the boys for, to get their eyes to trade to the pirates.”

  “What do they do with all the eyes?”

  “Well, they nail them up on the top of the mast, or on one of those sticks that go out from the side of the mast. They tell those eyes to keep a sharp watch and give a signal if they see land or a ship or a whale.”

  “Is that what will happen to my eyes?”

  “Yes. They’ll nail them up on the highest part of the ship for a lookout.”

  “But if there’s nothing left but my eyes, how will I give the signal when I see something? I won’t have anything left to holler with.”

  “I think they give you a little bell to ring,” Stanely said.

  * * * *

  There was more to it than that, of course. When they kill you they do different things to different parts of you. They sell some of you to Mr. Hockmeyer to put in his sausage. You know how he jokes about grinding boys up in his machine? He isn’t joking. He really does it. He doesn’t use much of them in each batch though: only one boy to half a dozen hogs. People like the taste of the sausage but they wouldn’t buy it if they knew what was in it. And some of the bones can be used. The shooter of Clifford Welch has a fork made from a boy’s wishbone. But the eyes are the most valuable part.

  * * * *

  It wasn’t until Wednesday that Henry went into the cave itself. There wasn’t much there: pieces of an old structo set, a hammer head without a handle, some hickory-nut shells, ashes from a fire, a jar full of poison water. Henry knew about the water: that is the way they killed you; they made you drink it and you fell down and died. It looked like other water, but it had scorpion poison in it.

  The doorway to the lower cave, however, was ingeniously hidden. There are three ways to open a secret door. One is to find the edge of it and pry it up. One is to say the words that will make it open. One is to have someone show you how.

  But Henry couldn’t find any edge to it however far he dug. He tried different words, but they were not the right ones. So somebody would have to show him how. At least he’d get to go down to the lower cave Saturday when they killed him.

  The rest of the week was filled with great expectation. Henry dreamed it out in the mornings as he sat in the cave, and in the afternoons as he sat on top of Doolen’s Mountain. The appeal of a completely untrammeled existence has always been strong. It would be perfect to be no more than a pair of eyes. To be on the highest stick of a ship and to be able to see further than anybody else in the world, that would be a new sort of ultimate. From the very top you would be able to see whole islands that nobody else had seen, to see whole ships before they came into view. Being so high, you could see the tops and the backs of the clouds, and look at the inside of the cloud rooms. You could look down and see the green whales, bigger than catfish, snoozing in the weeds. And some day you would be able to see what made the first wave. The first wave pushes the next one, and that one pushes the one you see. But nobody has ever seen the first wave that starts them all.

  And if you are nothing but two eyes, you can turn one of them to look at the other one. Or, with the two of them not tied together, you can be in two different places at one time, which nobody else can do. You can roll like marbles and go wherever you want to. You can hide in places and see people who can’t see you. It is to be invisible. Moreover, you get to travel all over the world and work for the king of the pirates who has one red eye and one black eye. It is a unique
existence, and very few boys have ever experienced it.

  And so it was all through the week and into Friday dusk that Henry thought, into howling locust time, cricket time, June bug time (in the South they have June bugs in April), street-light time, star-light time. Then, in the twilight, there was a big truck in town, square as a cracker box, big as a train, and with red lights on the back and front of it. Cursing and straining men were moving crates half as big as a room, and boxes and trunks. They had opened up the old Shane house that had always been dark and locked and drawn-blinded and weed-choked. This evening it was full of light.

  A little later, Mrs. Glass told Henry to come into her house and have some cake. What matter that Howard Glass acted abominably to him and twisted his arm! It was worth it for the cake. Henry went home happy afterwards, for the next day was Saturday and he would get to be killed and turned into a pair of eyes and ride on the highest part of a pirate ship and ring a bell when he saw a whale or land or a boat. He would be the lookout for the pirate king with one red eye and one black eye. He would get to see the world.

  “You can give all my clothes away,” he told his mother as he came home that evening. “After tomorrow, I won’t be using them anymore.” But she didn’t know what he meant. Often she didn’t.

  * * * *

  If you know what is going to happen, the last night in the old life can be an exciting one. The vision of the new and enlarged life will set you to dreaming without sleeping, and morning never comes soon enough.

  The sun comes up earlier in the South, and Henry was around very early that Saturday morning, banging on doors. But he could get nobody up, nobody but the new boy. All the front porch of the Shane house was still piled up with crates and chairs in spite of all that had already been taken inside.

  “Where do you come from?” Henry asked the new boy.

  “Kansas.”

  “That isn’t very far. We came through Kansas on our way down here. We came from three times that far away. What’s your name?”