The Avram Davidson Treasury

by Avram Davidson

  The lip of the bottle clicked against one of Uncle Fox-head’s few teeth. He drank noisily, then licked his lips. “Today we drink the white man’s sweet water,” he said. “What will we drink tomorrow?” No one said anything. “I will tell you, then,” he continued. “Unless the white men relent, we will drink the bitter waters of The Hollow Places. They are bitter, but they are strong and good.” He waved his withered hand in a semi-circle. “All this will go,” he said, “and the Fathers and Mothers of The People will return and lead us to our old home inside the Earth.” His sister’s son, who had never learned English nor gone to school, moaned. “Unless the white men relent,” said the old man.

  “They never have,” said Cottonwood, in Tickisall. In English, he said, “What will he do when he sees that nothing happens tomorrow except that we get kicked the Hell out of here?”

  Newt said, “Die, I suppose…which might not be a bad idea. For all of us.”

  His brother turned and looked at him. “If you’re planning Quarterhorse’s Last Stand, forget about it. There aren’t twenty rounds of ammunition on the whole reservation.”

  Billy Cottonwood raised his head. “We could maybe move in with the Apahoya,” he suggested. “They’re just as dirt-poor as we are, but there’s more of them, and I guess they’ll hold on to their land awhile yet.” His cousins shook their heads. “Well, not for us. But the others… Look, I spoke to Joe Feather Cloud that last time I was at the Apahoya Agency. If we give him the truck and the sheep, he’ll take care of Uncle Fox-head.”

  Sam Quarterhorse said he supposed that was the best thing. “For the old man, I mean. I made up my mind. I’m going to L.A. and pass for Colored.” He stopped.

  They waited till the new shiny automobile had gone by towards the Agency in a cloud of dust. Newt said, “The buzzards are gathering.” Then he asked, “How come, Sam?”

  “Because I’m tired of being an Indian. It has no present and no future. I can’t be a white, they won’t have me—the best I could hope for would be that they laugh: ‘How, Big Chief—‘Hi, Blanket-bottom.’ Yeah, I could pass for a Mexican as far as my looks go, only the Mexes won’t have me, either. But the Colored will. And there’s millions and millions of them—whatever price they pay for it, they never have to feel lonely. And they’ve got a fine, bitter contempt for the whites that I can use a lot of. ‘Pecks,’ they call them. I don’t know where they got the name from, but, Damn! it sure fits them. They’ve been pecking away at us for over a hundred years.”

  They talked on some more, and all the while the dust never settled in the road. They watched the whole tribe, what there was of it, go by towards the Agency—in old trucks, in buckboards, on horses, on foot. And after some time, they loaded up the pick-up and followed.

  The Indians sat all over the grass in front of the Agency, and for once no one bothered to chase them off. They just sat, silent, waiting. A group of men from Crosby and Spanish Flats were talking to the Superintendent; there were maps in their hands. The cousins went up to them; the white men looked out of the corners of their eyes, confidence still tempered—but only a bit—by wariness.

  “Mr. Jenkins,” Newt said to one, “most of this is your doing and you know how I feel about It—”

  “You better not make any trouble, Quarterhorse,” said another townsman. Jenkins said, “Let the boy have his say.”

  “—but I know you’ll give me a straight answer. What’s going to be done here?”

  Jenkins was a leathery little man, burnt almost as dark as an Indian. He looked at him, not unkindly, through the spectacles which magnified his blue eyes. “Why, you know, son, there’s nothing personal in all this. The land belongs to them that can hold it and use it. It was made to be used. You people’ve had your chance, Lord knows—Well, no speeches. You see, here on the map, where this here dotted line is? The county is putting through a new road to connect with a new highway the state’s going to construct. There’ll be a lot of traffic through here, and this Agency ought to make a fine motel.

  “And right along here—” his blunt finger traced, “—there’s going to be the main irrigation canal. There’ll be branches all through the Reservation. I reckon we can raise some mighty fine alfalfa. Fatten some mighty fine cattle… I always thought, son, you’d be good with stock, if you had some good stock to work with. Not these worthless scrubs. If you want a job—”

  One of the men cleared his sinus cavities with an ugly sound, and spat. “Are you out of your mind, Jenk? Here we been workin for years ta git these Indyins outa here, and you tryin ta make um stay …”

  The Superintendent was a tall, fat, soft man with a loose smile. He said ingratiatingly, “Mr. Jenkins realizes, as I’m sure you do too, Mr. Waldo, that the policy of the United States government is, and always has been—except for the unfortunate period when John Collier was in charge of the Bureau of Indian Affairs—man may have meant well, but Lord! hopeless sentimentalist—well, our policy has always been: Prepare the Indian to join the general community. Get him off the reservation. Turn the tribal lands over to the Individual. And it’s been done with other tribes, and now, finally, it’s being done with this one.” He beamed.

  Newt gritted his teeth. Then he said, “And the result was always the same—as soon as the tribal lands were given to the individual red man they damn quick passed into the hand of the individual white man. That’s what happened with other tribes, and now, finally, it’s being done with this one. Don’t you know, Mr. Scott, that we can’t adapt ourselves to the system of individual land-ownership? That we just aren’t strong enough by ourselves to hold onto real estate? That—”

  “Root, hog, er die,” said Mr. Waldo.

  “Are men hogs?” Newt cried.

  Waldo said, at large, “Told ya he w’s a trouble-maker.” Then, bringing his long, rough, red face next to Newt’s, he said, “Listen, Indyin, you and all y’r stinkin relatives are through. If Jenkins is damnfool enough ta hire ya, that’s his look-out. But if he don’t, you better stay far, far away, because nobody likes ya, nobody wants ya, and now that the Guvermint in Worshennon is finely come ta their sentces, nobody is goin ta protec ya—you and y’r mangy cows and y’r smutty-nosed sheep and y’r blankets—”

  Newt’s face showed his feelings, but before he could voice them, Billy Cottonwood broke in. “Mr. Scott,” he said, “we sent a telegram to Washington, asking to halt the break-up of the Reservation.”

  Scott smiled his sucaryl smile. “Well, that’s your privilege as a citizen.”

  Cottonwood spoke on. He mentioned the provisions of the bill passed by Congress, authorizing the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to liquidate, at his discretion, all reservations including less than one hundred residents, and to divide the land among them.

  “Mr. Scott, when the Treaty of Juniper Butte was made between the United States and the Tickisalls,” Cottonwood said, “there were thousands of us. That treaty was to be kept ‘as long as the sun shall rise or the grasses grow.’ The Government pledged itself to send us doctors—it didn’t, and we died like flies. It pledged to send us seed and cattle; it sent us no seed and we had to eat the few hundred head of stock-yard cast-offs they did send us, to keep from starving. The Government was to keep our land safe for us forever, in a sacred trust—and in every generation they’ve taken away more and more. Mr. Scott—Mr. Jenkins, Mr. Waldo, and all you other gentlemen—you knew, didn’t you, when you were kind enough to loan us money—or rather, to give us credit at the stores, when this drought started—you knew that this bill was up before Congress, didn’t you?”

  No one answered him. “You knew that it would pass, and that turning our lands over to us wouldn’t mean a darned thing, didn’t you? That we already owed so much money that our creditors would take all our land? Mr. Scott, how can the Government let this happen to us? It made a treaty with us to keep our lands safe for us ‘as long as the sun rises or the grasses grow.’ Has the sun stopped rising? Has the grass stopped growing? We believed in you�
�we kept our part of the treaty. Mr. Scott, won’t you wire Washington—won’t you other gentlemen do the same? To stop this thing that’s being done to us? It’s almost a hundred years now since we made treaty, and we’ve always hoped. Now we’ve only got till midnight to hope. Unless—?”

  But the Superintendent said, No, he couldn’t do that. And Jenkins shook his head, and said, sorry; it was really all for the best. Waldo shrugged, produced a packet of legal papers. “I’ve been deppatized to serve all these,” he said. “Soons the land’s all passed over ta individj’l ownership—which is 12 P.M. tanight. But if you give me y’r word (whatever that’s worth) not ta make no trouble, why, guess it c’n wait till morning. Yo go back ta y‘r shacks and I’ll be round, come morning. We’ll sleep over with Scott f’r tanight.”

  Sam Quarterhorse said, “We won’t make any trouble, no. Not much use in that. But we’ll wait right here. It’s still possible we’ll hear from Washington before midnight.”

  The Superintendent’s house was quite comfortable. Logs (cut by Indian labor from the last of the Reservation’s trees) blazed in the big fireplace (built by Indian labor). A wealth of rugs (woven by Indians in the Agency school) decorated walls and floor. The card-game had been on for some time when they heard the first woman start to wail. Waldo looked up nervously. Jenkins glanced at the clock. “Twelve midnight,” he said. “Well, that’s it. All over but the details. Took almost a hundred years, but it’ll be worth it.”

  Another woman took up the keening. It swelled to a chorus of heartbreak, then died away. Waldo picked up his cards, then put them down again. An old man’s voice had begun a chant. Someone took it up—then another. Drums joined it, and rattles. Scott said, “That was old Fox-head who started that just now. They’re singing the death-song. They’ll go on till morning.”

  Waldo swore. Then he laughed. “Let’m,” he said. “It’s their last morning.”

  Jenkins woke up first. Waldo stirred to wakefulness as he heard the other dressing. “What time is it?” he asked.

  “Don’t know,” Jenkins said. “But it feels to me like gettin-up time… You hear them go just a while back? No? Don’t know how you could miss it. Singing got real loud—seemed like a whole lot of new voices joined in. Then they all got up and moved off. Wonder where they went… I’m going to have a look around outside.” He switched on his flash-light and left the house. In another minute Waldo joined him, knocking on Scott’s door as he passed.

  The ashes of the fire still smoldered, making a dull red glow. It was very cold. Jenkins said, “Look here, Waldo—look.” Waldo followed the flash-light’s beam, said he didn’t see anything. “It’s the grass…it was green last night. It’s all dead and brown now. Look at it …”

  Waldo shivered. “Makes no difference. We’ll get it green again. The land’s ours now.”

  Scott joined them, his overcoat hugging his ears. “Why is it so cold?” he asked. “What’s happened to the clock? Who was tinkering with the clock? It’s past eight by the clock—it ought to be light by now. Where did all the Tickisalls go to? What’s happening? There’s something in the air—I don’t like the feel of it. I’m sorry I ever agreed to work with you, no matter what you paid me—”

  Waldo said, roughly, nervously, “Shut up. Some damned Indyin sneaked in and must of fiddled with the clock. Hell with um. Govermint’s on our side now. Soons it’s daylight we’ll clear um all out of here f’r good.”

  Shivering in the bitter cold, uneasy for reasons they only dimly perceived, the three white men huddled together alone in the dark by the dying fire, and waited for the sun to rise.

  And waited…and waited…and waited…

  Or All the Seas with Oysters

  INTRODUCTION BY GUY DAVENPORT

  This story has for thirty years had a double life. As a text it has been extensively anthologized and admired as one of Avram’s best and most beguiling. It has also entered urban folklore, told as an anecdote by people who have never read it or heard of Avram Davidson. Newspaper columnists like to recount its crazily plausible concept that safety pins are the pupae and coat hangers the larvae of bicycles. In some plagiarisms that turn up regularly in Creative Writing classes, paper clips (more familiar to young unmarried writers) become the pupal stage. A colleague once told me he had a genius among his students, giving a garbled version of this story as evidence. The student, it turned out, had not read Avram but admitted that he had taken the idea from the academic air. Avram himself did a brisk business in setting the record straight with letters to newspapers and magazines.

  The story had its first inception when Avram once noticed two bicycles, male and female, seemingly abandoned by a path in a woody park, and heard, from behind nearby bushes, the bikes’ owners involved in mutual esteem. But he knew his Samuel Butler, whose Erewhon has in its chapters called “The Book of the Machines” the theory that the evolution of things occurs at a faster rate than that of organisms. Hence Avram’s title, from the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Dying Detective,” in which Holmes, feigning dementia, raves that any unchecked species is programmed by natural law to fill all available biological space. “I cannot think why the whole bed of the ocean is not one solid mass of oysters, so prolific the creatures seem.”

  Avram’s bike-shop owners Oscar the sensualist and Ferd the intellectual are an urban Don Giovanni and Samuel Butler. Their conjunction and the tension between them might have turned up in an H. G. Wells fantasy, and he might have tapped the demonic undertones as well as Avram has, but, though he is of all writers (except, perhaps, Kipling) the most likely to insert the marvellous into the everyday, he could not have managed Avram’s deft transformation of an American ordinariness into so sinister a fable of man and his losing battle with the machine.

  OR ALL THE SEAS WITH OYSTERS

  WHEN THE MAN CAME in to the F & O Bike Shop, Oscar greeted him with a hearty “Hi, there!” Then, as he looked closer at the middle-aged visitor with the eyeglasses and business suit, his forehead creased and he began to snap his thick fingers.

  “Oh, say, I know you,” he muttered. “Mr.—um—name’s on the tip of my tongue, doggone it …” Oscar was a barrel-chested fellow. He had orange hair.

  “Why, sure you do,” the man said. There was a Lion’s emblem in his lapel. “Remember, you sold me a girl’s bicycle with gears, for my daughter? We got to talking about that red French racing bike your partner was working on—”

  Oscar slapped his big hand down on the cash register. He raised his head and rolled his eyes up. “Mr. Whatney!” Mr. Whatney beamed. “Oh, sure. Gee, how could I forget? And we went across the street afterward and had a couple a beers. Well, how you been, Mr. Whatney? I guess the bike—it was an English model, wasn’t it? Yeah. It must of given satisfaction or you would of been back, huh?”

  Mr. Whatney said the bicycle was fine, just fine. Then he said, “I understand there’s been a change, though. You’re all by yourself now. Your partner …”

  Oscar looked down, pushed his lower lip out, nodded. “You heard, huh? Ee-up. I’m all by myself now. Over three months now.”

  The partnership had come to an end three months ago, but it had been faltering long before them. Ferd liked books, long-playing records and high-level conversation, Oscar liked beer, bowling and women. Any women. Any time.

  The shop was located near the park; it did a big trade in renting bicycles to picnickers. If a woman was barely old enough to be called a woman, and not quite old enough to be called an old woman, or if she was anywhere in between, and if she was alone, Oscar would ask, “How does that machine feel to you? All right?”

  “Why… I guess so.”

  Taking another bicycle, Oscar would say, “Well, I’ll just ride along a little bit with you, to make sure. Be right back, Ferd.” Ferd always nodded gloomily. He knew that Oscar would not be right back. Later, Oscar would say, “Hope you made out in the shop as good as I did in the park.”

  “Leaving me all alone here all th
at time,” Ferd grumbled.

  And Oscar usually flared up. “Okay, then, next time you go and leave me stay here. See if I begrudge you a little fun.” But he knew, of course, that Ferd—tall, thin, pop-eyed Ferd—would never go. “Do you good,” Oscar said, slapping his sternum. “Put hair on your chest.”

  Ferd muttered that he had all the hair on his chest that he needed. He would glance down covertly at his lower arms; they were thick with long black hair, though his upper arms were slick and white. It was already like that when he was in high school, and some of the others would laugh at him—call him “Ferdie the Birdie.” They knew it bothered him, but they did it anyway. How was it possible—he wondered then; he still did now—for people deliberately to hurt someone else who hadn’t hurt them? How was it possible?

  He worried over other things. All the time.

  “The Communists—” He shook his head over the newspaper. Oscar offered an advice about the Communists in two short words. Or it might be capital punishment. “Oh, what a terrible thing if an innocent man was to be executed,” Fred moaned. Oscar said that was the guy’s tough luck.

  “Hand me that tire-iron,” Oscar said.

  And Ferd worried even about other people’s minor concerns. Like the time the couple came in with the tandem and the baby-basket on it. Free air was all they took; then the woman decided to change the diaper and one of the safety pins broke.

  “Why are there never any safety pins?” the woman fretted, rummaging here and rummaging there. “There are never any safety pins.”

  Ferd made sympathetic noises, went to see if he had any; but, though he was sure there’d been some in the office, he couldn’t find them. So they drove off with one side of the diaper tied in a clumsy knot.