The Avram Davidson Treasury

by Avram Davidson

  The sausage was fresh and savory; so was the coffee. Dusty chewed and swallowed with relish, slowly turned the pages of the catalog.

  OUR NUMBER 23. Fly-figure, male 5 ft. high, bundle of 20 in outstretched hand (r.), usual colors. A nice staple type Show Figure no moderate-sized bus. need feel ashamed to display. At rival establishments, UP TO $75. C. P. Hennaberry’s Price: $50 even (with warbonnet, $55).

  Note: Absolutely impos. to cite trade-in values via mails, as this depends on age, size, condition of fig., also state of market @ time.

  OUR NUMBER 24. Same as above, with musket instead of tomahawk.

  OUR NUMBER 36. Turk, male 6 ft. high, for shops which sell the fragrant Ottoman weed, polychrome Turk holding long leaf betw. both hands, choice of any two colors on turban. A. C. P. HENNABERRY SPECIAL: $165. (with beard & long pipe, $5 extra).

  They went upstairs after Dusty had finished his breakfast, pausing on the third (or second-hand figures) floor, to greet Otto and Larry.

  Young Larry was still considered a learner and was not yet allowed to go beyond replacing arms, hands, noses, and other extra parts.

  Otto, to be sure, was a master carver, but Otto had several strikes against him. In his youth, in his native Tyrol, Otto had studied sacred iconography; in his maturity, in America, Otto had studied drinking. As a result, when he was mellow, unless he was carefully supervised, his Indians had a certain saintly quality to them, which made purchasers feel somehow guilty. And when, on the other hand, Otto was sobering up, a definite measure of apocalyptic horror invariably appeared in his sachems which frightened buyers away.

  As a result, Otto was kept at doing extras—bundles of cigars, boxes of cigars, bundles of tobacco leaf, coils of tobacco leaf, twists of the same, knives, tomahawks, all to be held in the figures’ hands—and at equally safe tasks like stripping off old paint, sanding, repainting, finishing.

  He nodded sadly, eyes bloodshot, to Dusty and Charley, as he applied ochre and vermillion to a war bonnet. “Ho, Chesus,” he groaned softly.

  Up in the woodloft, they made an inspection of the spars. “Now you needn’t pick the ones I started, of course,” Charley said. “Take fresh ones, if you like. ‘Course, all’s I did was I drawn the outlines and just kind of chiseled ’em in. And put the holes in on top for the bolts.”

  Dusty stood back and squinted. “Oh, I guess they’ll be all right, Charley,” he said. “Well, let’s get ’em downstairs.”

  This done, Charley went back to work on the Sir Walter, carefully chiseling Virginia Tobacco in bas-relief on the cloak.

  Dusty took up his axe and blocked out approximate spaces for the head, the body down to the waist, roughly indicated the division of the legs and feet. Then he inserted the iron bolt into the five-inch hole prepared for it, and tilted back the spar so that the projecting part of the bolt rested on a support. When he had finished head and trunk, he would elevate the lower part of the figures in the same way.

  Finally, finished with blocking out, he picked up mallet and chisel.

  “I now strike a blow for liberty,” he said.

  Smiling happily, he began to chip away. The song he sang was “Aura Lee.”

  Don/Dusty Benedict let himself into his studio quietly—but not quietly enough. The sharp sound of a chair grating on the floor told him that his brother-in-law was upstairs. In another second, Walter told him so himself in an accent more richly Southern, probably, than when he had come North as a young boy.

  “We’re upstairs, Don.”

  “Thank you for the information,” Don muttered.

  “We’re upstairs, Don.”

  “Yes, Walter. All right. I’m coming.”

  Walter welcomed him with a snort. “Why the hell do you always wear those damn cotton-pickin’ clothes when you go away? Not that it matters. I only wish I could just take up and go whenever the spirit moves me. Where was it you went this time?”

  “Syracuse,” Don mumbled.

  “Syracuse. America’s new vacation land.” Walter laughed, not pleasantly. “Don, you really expect me to believe you? Syracuse! Why not just say to me, frankly,”I’ve got a woman’? That’s all. I wouldn’t say another word.” He poured himself several drams of Don’s Scotch.

  Not much you wouldn’t, Don thought. Aloud, “How are you, Mary?” His sister said that she was just fine, sighed, broke off the sigh almost at once, at her husband’s sour look.

  Walter said, “Roger Towns was up. Another sale for you, another commission for me. Believe me, I earned it—gave him a big talk on how the Museum of Modern Art was after your latest. So he asked me to use my influence. He’ll be back—he’ll take it. This rate, the Modern Art will be after you before long.”

  Don privately thought this unlikely, though anything was possible in this world of no values. He wasn’t a “modern, free-form” artist, or, for that matter, any kind of artist at all. He was a craftsman—In a world which had no need for craftsmen.

  “But only—” another one of the many qualities which made Walter highly easy to get along without: Walter was a finger-jabber—“but only if you finish the damned thing. About time, isn’t it? I mean vacations are fine, but the bills …”

  Don said, “Well, my affairs are in good hands—namely, yours.”

  Walter reared back. “If that’s meant as a dig—! Listen, I can get something else to do any time I want. In fact, I’m looking into something else now that’s damned promising. Firm sells Canadian stocks. Went down to see them yesterday. ‘You’re just the kind of man we’re interested in, Mr. Swift,’ they told me. ‘With your vast experience and your knowledge of human nature…’”

  Walt scanned his brother-in-law’s face, defying him to show signs of the complete disbelief he must have known Don felt. Don had long since stopped pretending to respond to these lies. He only ignored them—only put up with Walt at all—for his sister’s sake. It was for her and the kids only that he ever came back.

  “I’d like a drink,” Don said, when Walt paused.

  Dinner was as dinner always was. Walt talked almost constantly, mostly about Walt. Don found his mind wandering again to the Wooden Indian Society. Derwentwater, ending every speech with “Delendo est Demuth’s!” Gumpert and his eternal “Just one stick of dynamite, Don, just one!” De Giovanetti growling, “Give us the Equation and we’ll do it ourselves!”

  Fools! They’d have to learn every name of those who had the hideous metal Indian in mind, conduct a massacre in Canal Street. Impossible. Absurd.

  No, Elwell had been right. Not knowing just how the Preservationist work was to be done, he had nonetheless toiled for years to perfect a means to do it. Only when his work was done did he learn the full measure of WIS intransigence. And, after learning, had turned to Don.

  “Take up the torch,” he pleaded. “Make each sachem such a labor of love that posterity cannot help but preserve it.”

  And Don had tried. The craft had been in him and struggling to get out all the time, and he’d never realized it!

  Slowly the sound of Walter’s voice grew more impossible to ignore. “…and you’ll need a new car, too. I can’t drive that heap much longer. It’s two years old, damn it!”

  “I’d like a drink,” Don said.

  By the time Edgar Feld arrived, unexpectedly, Don had had quite a few drinks.

  “I took the liberty not only of calling unheralded, but of bringing a friend, Mr. White,” the art dealer said. He was a well-kept little man. Mr. White was thin and mild.

  “Any friend of Edgar’s is someone to be wary of,” Don said. “Getchu a drink?”

  Walt said he was sure they’d like to see the studio. There was plenty of time for drinks.

  “Time?” Don muttered. “Whaddayu know about time?”

  “Just step this way,” Walt said loudly, giving his brother-in-law a deadly look. “We think, we rather think,” he said, taking the wraps off the huge piece, “of calling this the Gemini—”

  Don said genially that they ha
d to call it something and that Gemini (he supposed) sounded better than Diseased Kidney.

  Mr. White laughed.

  Edgar Feld echoed the laugh, though not very heartily. “Mr. Benedict has the most modest, most deprecatory attitude toward his work of any modern artist—working in wood or in any other medium.”

  Mr. White said that was very commendable. He asked Don if he’d like a cigar.

  “I would, indeed!” the modest artist assented. “Between cigarette smoke, gasoline and diesel fumes, the air is getting unfit to breathe nowadays… So Edgar is conning you into modern art, hey, Whitey?”

  “Ho, ho!” Edgar Feld chuckled hollowly.

  “Nothing better than a good cigar.” Don puffed his contentment.

  White said, with diffidence, that he was only just beginning to learn about modern art. “I used to collect Americana,” he explained.

  Edgar Feld declared that Mr. White had formerly had a collection of wooden Indians. His tone indicated that, while this was not to be taken seriously, open mockery was uncalled for.

  Don set down the glass he had brought along with him. No, White was hardly WIS material. He was safe. “Did you really? Any of Tom Millards, by any chance? Tom carved some of the sweetest fly-figures ever made.”

  Mr. White’s face lit up. “Are you a wooden Indian buff, too?” he cried. “Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I had two of Millard’s fly-figures, and one of his pompeys—”

  Walt guffawed. “What are fly-figures and pompeys?”

  “A fly-figure is a sachem with an outstretched arm,” Don said. “A pompey is a black boy.”

  “A rosebud,” Mr. White happily took up the theme, “is a squaw figure. A scout is one who’s shading his eyes with one hand. Tom Millard, oh, yes! And I had some by John Cromwell, Nick Collins, Thomas V. Brooks, and Tom White—my namesake. Listen! Maybe you can tell me. Was Leopold Schwager a manufacturer or an artist?”

  Don Benedict laughed scornfully. “Leopold Schwager was a junk-dealer! Bought old figures for five, ten dollars, puttied and painted ’em, sold ’em for twenty-five. Cobb!” he exclaimed suddenly. “You have any Cobbs, Mr. White?”

  “Cobb of Canal Street? No, I always wanted one, but—”

  Edgar Feld looked at Walter Swift, cleared his throat. “Now, Don—”

  “Cobb of Canal Street,” Don said loudly, “never used a mallet. No, sir. Drove the chisel with the palm of his hand. And then there was Charley Voles—”

  Feld raised his voice above Don’s. “Yes, we must talk about his fascinating though obsolete art sometime. Don’t you want to step a little closer to the Gemini, Mr. White?”

  “Yes, White, damn it, buy the damned Gemini so they’ll quit bothering us and we can get back to real art,” said Don.

  And forget about Walter, Demuth’s and the WIS, he said to himself.

  Next morning, he tried to remember what had happened after that. White had taken the shapeless mass of wood Walt called Gemini. (What would he tell Roger Down, the private collector? Some good, whopping lie, depend on it.) He was sure he remembered White with his checkbook out. And then? A confused picture of White examining the polished surface, pointing at something—

  Don Benedict badly wanted a cup of coffee. His room was just off the studio, and once there had been a hot-plate there, but Walt had ordered it removed on the grounds of danger. So now Don had to go up to Walt’s apartment when he wanted a cup of coffee. That was how Walt liked everything to be: little brother coming to big brother. Well, there was no help for it. Don went upstairs, anticipating cold looks, curt remarks, at every step.

  However, Walt was sweetness itself this morning. The coffee was ready; Walt had poured it even before Don entered the kitchen. After he finished his cup (made from unboiled water, powdered coffee, ice-cold milk) Walt urged another on him. Rather than speak, he took it.

  Don knew, by the falsely jovial note of Walter’s voice, that Something Was Up. He gulped the tepid slop and rose. “Thanks. See you later, Walter—”

  But Walter reached out his hand and took him by the arm. “Let’s talk about the Lost Dutchman Mine. (”The what?”) The Spanish Treasure. (“I don’t—”) Spelled E-l-w-e-l-l,” said Walter, with an air at once sly and triumphant.

  Don sat down heavily.

  “Don’t know what I mean by those figures of speech? Odd. You did last night. Matter of fact, they were yours,” said Walter, mouth pursed with mean amusement. He would refresh Don’s memory. Last night, Mr. White had asked Don how he had come to have so much contemporary knowledge about the making of wooden Indians. Don had laughed. “An old prospector I befriended left me the map to the Lost Dutchman Mine,” he had said, waving his glass. “To the Spanish Treasure.”

  When Mr. White, puzzled, asked what he meant, Don had said, “It’s easy. You just walk around the horses.” Now what, just exactly, had Don meant by that?

  “I must have been drunk, Walter.”

  “Oh, yes, you were drunk, all right. But in vino veritas… Now I’ve been thinking it out very carefully, Don. It seems to me that ‘the old desert rat’ you spoke of must have been that fellow Elwell, who slipped on the ice two winters ago. The one you got to the hospital and visited regularly till he died. Am I right, Don? Am I?”

  Don nodded miserably. “Damn liquor,” he added.

  “Now we’re making progress,” said Walt. “Okay. Now about this map to the mine. I know he left you that damn notebook. I know that. But I looked it over very carefully and it was just a lot of figures scribbled—equations, or whatever th’ hell you call ’em. But it had something else in it, didn’t it? Something you took out. We’ll get to just what by and by. So—and it was right after that that you started going on these vacations of yours. Made me curious. Those funny clothes you wore.”

  Stiff and tight, Don sat in the bright, neat kitchen and watched the waters rise. There was nothing for him here and now, except for Mary and the children, and his love for them had been no more selfish than theirs for him. He had been glad when Walt first appeared, happy when they married, unhappy when Walt’s real nature appeared, very pleased when the chance occurred to offer “a position” to his brother-in-law. The misgivings felt when a few people actually offered to buy the shapeless wooden things he had created almost aimlessly (he knowing that he was not a sculptor but a craftsman) vanished when he saw it was the perfect setup for keeping Mary and the kids supported.

  Of course, after a while Don had been able to arrange the majority of the “sales.” The waste of time involved in hacking out the wooden horrors which “private collectors” bought was deplorable. The whole system was dreadfully clumsy, but its sole purpose—to create a world in which Walter would be satisfied and Mary happy—was being fulfilled, at any rate.

  Or had been.

  What would happen now, with Walter on the verge of finding out everything?

  “And Syracuse—what a cottonpickin’ alibi! I figured you had a woman hid away for sure, wasting your time when you should have been working, so—well, I wanted to find out who she was, where she lived. That’s why I always went through your pockets when you came back from these ‘vacations’—”

  “Walter, you didn’t!”

  But of course he knew damned well that Walter did. Had known for some time that Walter was doing it. Had acted accordingly. Instead of hiding the evidence, he had deliberately planted it, and in such a way that it couldn’t possibly fail to add up to exactly one conclusion.

  “What a lot of junk!” Walter jeered. “Like somebody swept the floor of an antique shop and dumped it all in your pocket. Ticket stubs with funny old printing, clippings from newspapers of years back—and all like that. However —” he jabbed a thick, triumphant finger at Don—“money is money, no matter how old it is. Right? Damned right! Old dollar bills, old gold pieces. Time after time. You weren’t very cautious, old buddy. So now—just what is this ‘Spanish Treasure’ that you’ve been tapping? Let’s have the details, son, or else I’ll be mighty unhapp
y. And when I’m unhappy, Mary is too …”

  That was very true, Don had realized for some time now. And if Mary couldn’t protect herself, how could the youngsters escape?

  “I’m tired of scraping along on ten per cent, you see, Don. I got that great old American ambition: I want to be in business for myself. And you are going to provide the capital. So—again, and for the last time—let’s have the details.”

  Was this the time to tell him? And, hard upon the thought, the answer came: Yes, the time was now, time to tell the truth. At once his heart felt light, joyous; the heavy weight (long so terribly, constantly familiar) was removed from him.

  “Mr. Elwell—the old gentleman who slipped on the ice; you were right about that, Walter—” Walter’s face slipped into its familiar, smug smile. “Mr. Elwell was a math teacher at the high school down the block. Imagine It—a genius like him, pounding algebra into the heads of sullen children! But he didn’t let it get him down, because that was just his living. What he mainly lived for were his space-time theorems. ‘Elwell’s Equations,’ we called them—”

  Walter snorted. “Don’t tell me the old gimp was a time traveler and left you his time machine?”

  “It wasn’t a machine. It was only a—well, I guess it was a sort of map, after all. He tried to explain his theories to me, but I just couldn’t understand them. It was kind of like chess problems—I never could understand them, either. So when we arranged that I was going to visit 1880, he wrote it all down for me. It’s like a pattern. You go back and forth and up and down and after a while—”