Forty Stories (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

by Donald Barthelme

  I say: “Yes. At eleven.”

  He says: “But the rain …”

  I say: “With her hands in the back pockets of her trousers.”

  He says: “Deo gratias.”

  Porcupines At The University

  “AIND now the purple dust of twilight time / steals across the meadows of my heart,” the Dean said.

  His pretty wife, Paula, extended her long graceful hands full of Negronis.

  A scout burst into the room, through the door. “Porcupines!” he shouted.

  “Porcupines what?” the Dean asked.

  “Thousands and thousands of them. Three miles down the road and coming fast!”

  “Maybe they won’t enroll,” the Dean said. “Maybe they’re just passing through.”

  “You can’t be sure,” his wife said.

  “How do they look?” he asked the scout, who was pulling porcupine quills out of his ankles.

  “Well, you know. Like porcupines.”

  “Are you going to bust them?” Paula asked.

  “I’m tired of busting people,” the Dean said.

  “They’re not people,” Paula pointed out.

  “De bustibus non est disputandum,” the scout said.

  “I suppose I’ll have to do something,” the Dean said.

  Meanwhile the porcupine wrangler was wrangling the porcupines across the dusty and overbuilt West.

  Dust clouds. Yips. The lowing of porcupines.

  “Git along theah li’l porcupines.”

  And when I reach the great porcupine canneries of the East, I will be rich, the wrangler reflected. I will sit on the front porch of the Muehlebach Hotel in New York City and smoke me a big seegar. Then, the fancy women.

  “All right you porcupines step up to that yellow line.”

  There was no yellow line. This was just an expression the wrangler used to keep the porcupines moving. He had heard it in the Army. The damn-fool porcupines didn’t know the difference.

  The wrangler ambled along reading the ads in a copy of Song Hits magazine, PLAY HARMONICA IN 5 MINS. and so forth.

  The porcupines scuffled along making their little hops. There were four-five thousand in the herd. Nobody had counted exactly.

  An assistant wrangler rode in from the outskirts of the herd. He too had a copy of Song Hits magazine, in his hip pocket. He looked at the head wrangler’s arm, which had a lot of little holes in it.

  “Hey Griswold.”

  “Yeah?”

  “How’d you get all them little holes in your arm?”

  “You ever try to slap a brand on a porky-pine?”

  Probably the fancy women will be covered with low-cut dresses and cheap perfume, the wrangler thought. Probably there will be hundreds of them, hundreds and hundreds. All after my medicine bundle containing my gold and my lucky drill bit. But if they try to rush me I will pull out my guitar. And sing them a song of prairie virility.

  “Porcupines at the university,” the Dean’s wife said. “Well, why not?”

  “We don’t have facilities for four or five thousand porcupines,” the Dean said. “I can’t get a dial tone.”

  “They could take Alternate Life Styles,” Paula said.

  “We’ve already got too many people in Alternate Life Styles,” the Dean said, putting down the telephone. “The hell with it. I’ll bust them myself. Single-handed. Ly.”

  “You’ll get hurt.”

  “Nonsense, they’re only porcupines. I’d better wear my old clothes.”

  “Bag of dirty shirts in the closet,” Paula said.

  The Dean went into the closet.

  Bags and bags of dirty shirts.

  “Why doesn’t she ever take these shirts to the laundry?”

  Griswold, the wrangler, wrote a new song in the saddle.

  Fancy woman fancy woman

  How come you don’t do right

  I oughta rap you in the mouth

  for the way you acted

  In the porte cochère of the Trinity River

  Consolidated General High last Friday

  Nite.

  I will sit back and watch it climbing the charts, he said to himself. As recorded by Merle Travis. First, it will be a Bell Ringer. Then, the Top Forty. Finally a Golden Oldie.

  “All right you porcupines. Git along.”

  The herd was moving down a twelve-lane trail of silky-smooth concrete. Signs along the trail said things like NEXT EXIT 5 MI. and RADAR IN USE.

  “Griswold, some of them motorists behind us is gettin’ awful pissed.”

  “I’m runnin’ this-here porky-pine drive,” Griswold said, “and I say we better gettum off the road.”

  The herd was turned onto a broad field of green grass. Green grass with white lime lines on it at ten-yard intervals.

  The Sonny and Cher show, the wrangler thought. Well, Sonny, how I come to write this song, I was on a porky-pine drive. The last of the great porky-pine drives you might say. We had four-five thousand head we’d fatted up along the Tuscalora and we was headin’ for’ New York City.

  The Dean loaded a gleaming Gatling gun capable of delivering 360 rounds a minute. The Gatling gun sat in a mule-drawn wagon and was covered with an old piece of canvas. Formerly it had sat on a concrete slab in front of the ROTC Building.

  First, the Dean said to himself, all they see is this funky old wagon pulled by this busted-up old mule. Then, I whip off the canvas. There stands the gleaming Gatling gun capable of delivering 360 rounds a minute. My hand resting lightly, confidently on the crank. They shall not pass, I say. Ils ne passeront pas. Then, the porcupine hide begins to fly.

  I wonder if these rounds are still good?

  The gigantic Gatling gun loomed over the herd like an immense piece of bad news.

  “Hey Griswold.”

  “What?”

  “He’s got a gun.”

  “I see it,” Griswold said. “You think I’m blind?”

  “What we gonna do?”

  “How about vamoose-ing?”

  “But the herd …”

  “Them li’l porcupines can take care of their own selves,” Griswold said. “Goddamn it, I guess we better parley.” He got up off the grass, where he had been stretched full-length, and walked toward the wagon.

  “What say potner?”

  “Look,” the Dean said. “You can’t enroll those porcupines. It’s out of the question.”

  “That so?”

  “It’s out of the question,” the Dean repeated. “We’ve had a lot of trouble around here. The cops won’t even speak to me. We can’t take any more trouble.” The Dean glanced at the herd. “That’s a mighty handsome herd you have there.”

  “Kind of you,” Griswold said. “That’s a mighty handsome mule you got.”

  They both gazed at the Dean’s terrible-looking mule.

  Griswold wiped his neck with a red bandanna. “You don’t want no porky-pines over to your place, is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Well, we don’t go where we ain’t wanted,” the wrangler said. “No call to throw down on us with that… machine there.”

  The Dean looked embarrassed.

  “You don’t know Mr. Sonny Bono, do you?” Griswold asked. “He lives around here somewheres, don’t he?”

  “I haven’t had the pleasure,” the Dean said. He thought for a moment. “I know a booker in Vegas, though. He was one of our people. He was a grad student in comparative religion.”

  “Maybe we can do a deal,” the wrangler said. “Which-a-way is New York City?”

  “Well?” the Dean’s wife asked. “What were their demands?”

  “I’ll tell you in a minute,” the Dean said. “My mule is double-parked.”

  The herd turned onto the Cross Bronx Expressway. People looking out of their cars saw thousands and thousands of porcupines. The porcupines looked like badly engineered vacuum-cleaner attachments.

  Vegas, the wrangler was thinking. Ten weeks at Caesar’s Palace at a sock 15 Gs
a week. The Ballad of the Last Drive. Leroy Griswold singing his smash single, The Ballad of the Last Drive.

  “Git along theah, li’l porcupines.”

  The citizens in their cars looked at the porcupines, thinking: What is wonderful? Are these porcupines wonderful? Are they significant? Are they what I need?

  Sakrete

  ON our street, fourteen garbage cans are now missing. The garbage cans from One Seventeen and One Nineteen disappeared last night. This is not a serious matter, but on the other hand we can’t sit up all night watching over our garbage cans. It is probably best described as an annoyance. One Twelve, One Twenty-two, and One Thirty-one have bought new plastic garbage cans at Barney’s Hardware to replace those missing. We are thus down eleven garbage cans, net. Many people are using large dark plastic garbage bags. The new construction at the hospital at the end of the block has displaced a number of rats. Rats are not much bothered by plastic garbage bags. In fact, if I were ordered to imagine what might most profitably be invented by a committee of rats, it would be the dark plastic garbage bag. The rats run up and down our street all night long.

  If I were ordered to imagine who is stealing our garbage cans, I could not do it. I very much doubt that my wife is doing it. Some of the garbage cans on our street are battered metal, others are heavy green plastic. Heavy green plastic or heavy black plastic predominates. Some of the garbage cans have the numbers of the houses they belong to painted on their sides or lids, with white paint. Usually by someone with only the crudest sense of the art of lettering. One Nineteen, which has among its tenants a gifted commercial artist, is an exception. No one excessively famous lives on our street, to my knowledge, therefore the morbid attention that the garbage of the famous sometimes attracts would not be a factor. The Precinct says that no other street within the precinct has reported similar’ problems.

  If my wife is stealing the garbage cans, in the night, while I am drunk and asleep, what is she doing with them? They are not in the cellar, I’ve looked (although I don’t like going down to the cellar, even to replace a blown fuse, because of the rats). My wife has a yellow Pontiac convertible. No one has these anymore but I can imagine her lifting garbage cans into the back seat of the yellow Pontiac convertible, at four o’clock in the morning, when I am dreaming of being on stage, dreaming of having to perform a drum concerto with only one drumstick….

  On our street, twenty-one garbage cans are now missing. New infamies have been announced by One Thirty-one through One Forty-three—seven in a row, and on the same side of the street. Also, depredations at One Sixteen and One Sixty-four. We have put out dozens of cans of D-Con but the rats ignore them. Why should they go for the D-Con when they can have the remnants of Ellen Busse’s Boeuf Rossini, for which she is known for six blocks in every direction? We eat well, on this street, there’s no denying it. Except for the nursing students at One Fifty-eight, and why should they eat well, they’re students, are they not? My wife cooks soft-shell crabs, in season, breaded, dusted with tasty cayenne, deep-fried. Barney’s Hardware has run out of garbage cans and will not get another shipment until July. Any new garbage cans will have to be purchased at Budget Hardware, far, far away on Second Street.

  Petulia, at Custom Care Cleaners, asks why my wife has been acting so peculiar lately. “Peculiar?” I say. “In what way do you mean?” Dr. Maugham, who lives at One Forty-four where he also has his office, has formed a committee. Mr. Wilkens, from One Nineteen, Pally Wimber, from One Twenty-nine, and my wife are on the committee. The committee meets at night, while I sleep, dreaming, my turn in the batting order has come up and I stand at the plate, batless….

  There are sixty-two houses on our street, four-story brownstones for the most part. Fifty-two garbage cans are now missing. Rats riding upon the backs of other rats gallop up and down our street, at night. The committee is unable to decide whether to call itself the Can Committee or the Rat Committee. The City has sent an inspector who stood marveling, at midnight, at the activity on our street. He is filing a report. He urges that the remaining garbage cans be filled with large stones. My wife has appointed me a subcommittee of the larger committee with the task of finding large stones. Is there a peculiar look on her face as she makes the appointment? Dr. Maugham has bought a shotgun, a twelve-gauge over-and-under. Mr. Wilkins has bought a Chase bow and two dozen hunting arrows. I have bought a flute and an instruction book.

  If I were ordered to imagine who is stealing our garbage cans, the Louis Escher family might spring to mind, not as culprits but as proximate cause. The Louis Escher family has a large income and a small apartment, in One Twenty-one. The Louis Escher family is given to acquiring things, and given the size of the Louis Escher apartment, must dispose of old things in order to accommodate new things. Sometimes the old things disposed of by the Louis Escher family are scarcely two weeks old. Therefore, the garbage at One Twenty-one is closely followed in the neighborhood, in the sense that the sales and bargains listed in the newspapers are closely followed. The committee, which feels that the garbage of the Louis Escher family may be misrepresenting the neighborhood to the criminal community, made a partial list of the items disposed of by the Louis Escher family during the week of August eighth: one mortar & pestle, majolica ware; one English cream maker (cream is made by mixing unsalted sweet butter and milk); one set green earthenware geranium leaf plates; one fruit ripener designed by scientists at the University of California, Plexiglas; one nylon umbrella tent with aluminum poles; one combination fountain pen and clock with LED readout; one mini hole-puncher-and-confetti-maker; one pistol-grip spring-loaded flyswatter; one cast-iron tortilla press; one ivory bangle with elephant-hair accent; and much, much more. But while I do not doubt that the excesses of the Louis Escher family are misrepresenting the neighborhood to the criminal community, I cannot bring myself to support even a resolution of censure, since the excesses of the Louis Escher family have given us much to talk about and not a few sets of green earthenware geranium leaf plates over the years.

  I reported to my wife that large stones were hard to come by in the city. “Stones,” she said. “Large stones.” I purchased two hundred pounds of Sakrete at Barney’s Hardware, to make stones with. One need only add water and stir, and you have made a stone as heavy and brutish as a stone made by God himself. I am temporarily busy, in the basement, shaping Sakrete to resemble this, that, and the other, but mostly stones—a good-looking stone is not the easiest of achievements. Ritchie Beck, the little boy from One Ten who is always alone on the sidewalk during the day, smiling at strangers, helps me. I once bought him a copy of Mechanix Illustrated, which I myself read avidly as a boy. Harold, who owns Custom Care Cleaners and also owns a Cessna, has offered to fly over our street at night and drop bombs made of lethal dry-cleaning fluid on the rats. There is a channel down the Hudson he can take (so long as he stays under eleven hundred feet), a quick left turn, the bombing run, then a dash back up the Hudson. They will pull his ticket if he’s caught, he says, but at that hour of the night… I show my wife the new stones. “I don’t like them,” she says. “They don’t look like real stones.” She is not wrong, they look, in fact, like badly thrown pots, as if they had been done by a potter with no thumbs. The committee, which has named itself the Special Provisional Unnecessary-Rat Team (SPURT), has acquired armbands and white steel helmets and is discussing a secret grip by which its members will identify themselves to each other.

  There are now no garbage cans on our street—no garbage cans left to steal. A committee of rats has joined with the Special Provisional committee in order to deal with the situation, which, the rats have made known, is attracting unwelcome rat elements from other areas of the city. Members of the two committees exchange secret grips, grips that I know not of. My wife drives groups of rats here and there in her yellow Pontiac convertible, attending important meetings. The crisis, she says, will be a long one. She has never been happier.

  Captain Blood

  WHEN Captain Blood
goes to sea, he locks the doors and windows of his house on Cow Island personally. One never knows what sort of person might chance by, while one is away.

  When Captain Blood, at sea, paces the deck, he usually paces the foredeck rather than the afterdeck—a matter of personal preference. He keeps marmalade and a spider monkey in his cabin, and four perukes on stands.

  When Captain Blood, at sea, discovers that he is pursued by the Dutch Admiral Van Tromp, he considers throwing the women overboard. So that they will drift, like so many giant lotuses in their green, lavender, purple, and blue gowns, across Van Tromp’s path, and he will have to stop and pick them up. Blood will have the women fitted with life jackets under their dresses. They will hardly be in much danger at all. But what about the jaws of sea turtles? No, the women cannot be thrown overboard. Vile, vile! What an idiotic idea! What could he have been thinking of? Of the patterns they would have made floating on the surface of the water, in the moonlight, a cerise gown, a silver gown …

  Captain Blood presents a facade of steely imperturbability.

  He is poring over his charts, promising everyone that things will get better. There has not been one bit of booty in the last eight months. Should he try another course? Another ocean? The men have been quite decent about the situation. Nothing has been said. Still, it’s nerve-wracking.

  When Captain Blood retires for the night (leaving orders that he be called instantly if something comes up) he reads, usually. Or smokes, thinking calmly of last things.

  His hideous reputation should not, strictly speaking, be painted in the horrible colors customarily employed. Many a man walks the streets of Panama City, or Port Royal, or San Lorenzo, alive and well, who would have been stuck through the gizzard with a rapier, or smashed in the brain with a boarding pike, had it not been for Blood’s swift, cheerful intervention. Of course, there are times when severe measures are unavoidable. At these times he does not flinch, but takes appropriate action with admirable steadiness. There are no two ways about it: when one looses a seventy-four-gun broadside against the fragile hull of another vessel, one gets carnage.