The Avram Davidson Treasury

by Avram Davidson

  “She says to him, there ain’t no such of a thing as any Goobers. Goobers is peanuts, she says to him. George Wolf, he told her. That’s why they call’m Goobers, he says, they look like that. Only not so small. Not near so small. Got wrinkled old shells on. Dirty yellow colored. Even sometimes a couple of hairs. Watch out, sassy. They’ll git ahold of you. George Wolf.”

  Barlow Brook put his moldering shoes up to the kerosene stove.

  “You hear, now, Boy,” said my grandfather, smirking at me.

  I swallowed. I asked what, what happened to the sassy girl at George Wolf’s. A quick, secret look passed between those two evil old men. Something had happened to her, I knew that. I know it now. And I’ve got my own idea as to what. But, then… When Barlow Brook said, “Came and got her,” I had no idea except for sure that the Goobers were the they.

  You can be sure that I did my best not to break any more plates. I fetched and I carried. When my grandfather said “Come here, Boy,” I came a running. But he was a bully, and there is no satisfying of bullies. He knew I was in mortal terror of being sold to the Goobers and he never let up. There were hickory trees back in the thicket and one day he sent me to get some nuts. I didn’t mind at all and I went quick.

  And I came back quick. There was a bad family by the name of Warbank lived outside of town, so bad that even my grandfather didn’t want anything to do with them. They were meaner than he was and they had a bunch of big yellow dogs meaner than they were. When I got to the hickory trees with my bucket, there was Ding Warbank and Cut Warbank with their own buckets, and their dogs.

  “You get the Hell out of here,” said Ding.

  “It ain’ your thicket,” I said.

  “Get him,” said Cut. The dogs came after me and I ran. One of them got hold of my pants and it came away in his teeth. Behind me, Cut called them back.

  “We better not see you here again,” yelled Ding.

  My grandfather took on fierce. No trashy Warbanks, he yelled, were going to tell him he couldn’t have nuts from “his own” thicket.

  “You go on back there,” he ordered. “Go on, now.”

  I didn’t move.

  “Go on, I tell you! Go on, go on, go on! You want me to sell you to the Goobers?”

  Oh, I was afraid of that, all right. I was afraid of the Goobers. But I’d never really seen any. And I had seen those Warbanks’ yellow dogs, felt their white shiny teeth pulling that bite out of my pants legs. And I wouldn’t go.

  He yelled and he raged. Then, all of a sudden, he quit. “All right, Boy,” he said. “All right, then. I am through warning you. In one hour’s time, as I live and as my name’s Dade Harkness, in one hour’s time I swear that I will sell you to the Goobers. Now git out my sight—but don’t you leave the yard!”

  What he figured on, I guess, was that the Warbanks would be gone by then and I’d rush out and get his old hickory nuts and then he’d pardon me…for the time being.

  I stumbled away. “It’s four o’clock,” he yelled after me. “They’ll be here at five. Don’t bother packing—you won’t need nothing!”

  An hour like that, I never want to pass again. I hid here and hid there, till I was sweaty and dirty as never before. But I didn’t trust any place. By and by I got so thirsty that I had to come out and get to the pump. I could hear the old man muttering to himself.

  His warning about not leaving the yard didn’t matter to me worth a poke of peas—he, well, what could he’ve done to me for disobeying? Sell me to the Goobers? He was going to do that anyway…he said. Of course, he’d said it before and he’d changed his mind before, too. I knew only one thing for sure, and that was that I couldn’t stand any more of it. Anything was likely to be better.

  I’d never been to George Wolf’s place, but I knew where it was, and it wasn’t all that far away. About a mile or so off, on the old dirt road along the creek. It was an ugly old shack, never had a lick of paint on it, I guess, though I barely noted that any more than I did the broken windows or the roof falling in on one side and the weeds and underbrush choking up the front yard.

  If George Wolf had been the original local acquaintance of the Goobers, then the Goobers couldn’t’ve lived too far away from his place. That was the way my thoughts were running—and I was running, too—right into the woods and down the hill and almost into the swamp that stopped me going further.

  “Goobers!” I yelled. “Goobers! You old Goobers! You hear me?” I screamed.

  There was nothing but the echo of my voice. It was darkish there, and clammy, and it smelled bad and I was hot and cold and sweaty and I took a big breath and went on yelling again.

  “I don’t care if he sells me! I don’t care if you buy me! He isn’t going to go on scaring me like this! You want to buy me? You just come on and do it!”

  Something was buzzing when I stopped again. Maybe just a dragon fly. Something moved in the gray underbrush. Maybe just the wind. I could see a hole in the ground not far off. Maybe it was just a plain, ordinary hole. But I didn’t wait to find out about any of this. I turned and ran and stumbled away.

  Where? Why, where but back to the old man’s house, back to the only sort of home I knew. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I knew it was going to happen there. It had to.

  I slowed down to a soft walk before I got to the yard. Probably he didn’t even know I’d gone, didn’t think I’d’ve dared to. And I could still hear him muttering to himself for a while. Then, suddenly, he stopped.

  So did I. Stopped breathing, I mean. I guess. The bell in the old church was striking, and while I’d missed the start, there was no need for me to count the chimes. It only struck the hours. So it had to be five o’clock.

  I darted a quick look at the vines hiding his chair from where I was standing. Chair, no, I couldn’t see it. But I could see him—see his head, anyway, for he’d gotten up, sort of and had poked his face forward. It had gone the most horrible ugly sort of putty color. His eyes had a glaze over them like cold fried eggs. I had to turn to see what he was looking at, though of course I knew.

  There were the Goobers, coming up the back path.

  They were under my height. There were three of them and they had dirty yellow-colored wrinkled old shells on, with even a few hairs. And dirt was clinging to them.

  “Where Boy?” asked the first.

  “Here Boy,” said the second.

  “You sell Boy?” asked the third.

  They walked up and squeezed my arms and felt my legs. They pulled on my nose and grabbed hold of my tongue. They spun me around and thumped me on the back. Then they quit.

  “No,” said the first.

  “No good,” said the second.

  “No buy Boy,” said the third.

  They turned around and walked off. I watched them go, not even turning around when I heard my grandfather keel over and thump the porch floor.

  After that, of course, I made his life a living Hell until I ran off two years later at the age of twelve, and there wasn’t a damned thing the old bastard could do about it.

  The Power of Every Root

  INTRODUCTION BY THOMAS M. DISCH

  In 1964, having been an official SF writer for all of two years, I set off for Mexico to write my first novel. There I moved into the shell lately emptied by my sometime editor at F&SF, Avram Davidson. I had never met Avram, but having inherited his home, garden, landlady, and friends in Mexico City, I came to feel a peculiar intimacy, quite as though I were leading his life as much as my own, a sense that would be heightened when, later, I learned in a letter from Avram that a young woman who’d been his traveling companion in Belize had run off with Tony, a dashing young con man whom I’d earlier befriended at a beach on the Pacific coast, where he was selling solid gold watches to gas station attendants.

  Like Avram, I fell in love with the raffishness of the Mexico that opened its doors and its cantinas to visiting gringos. Unlike Avram, I never became so well assimilated that I could make that love yield
an homage as affectionate and closely observed as “The Power of Every Root.” Reading it again, now that my expatriate days are over (and Avram’s, too), I can smell all the spices and fetors of the marketplace he inventories so lovingly in this tale—and remember the heady freedoms of being a penny-a-word writer living high off the hog in a lush garden between two great volcanoes.

  THE POWER OF EVERY ROOT

  CARLOS RODRIGUEZ NUÑEZ, A police officer of the municipality of Santo Tomas, sat in the private waiting room of Dr. Olivera considering his situation. Perhaps he ought not to be there at all.

  Not the private waiting room in particular: it was usually empty except during the week following major fiestas, when it was likely to be much occupied by the younger sons of prosperous families who had (the younger sons) visited the Federal Capital, touring the libraries and theaters and museums and other buildings of the national patrimony…but never, never las casitas. The reason, therefore, why they were here?

  “A strain, Sir Doctor. Without doubt, nothing more than a strain …! Woe of me, Sir Doctor! What an enormous needle! Surely—just for a tiny, little strain?”

  The physician would smile benignly, speak soothingly, continue charging his syringe with penicillin.

  None of this was applicable to the police officer Carlos. In fact, it was not applicable to the younger sons of the non-prosperous families, who—for one thing—could only afford to visit the District Capital (or, at most, the State one) on fiestas; and—for another—did not take their subsequent difficulties to a physician: they took them to the curandero. Carlos now wondered if he should not do the same. No… No… The social status of a government employee, a civil servant, might be imperiled by visiting a native herbalist and wizard. Besides, the physician’s public waiting room was just that: public. Let him be seen there, word would get around, Don Juan Antonio would ask questions. Don Juan Antonio was jefe de policia, and it seemed to Carlos that his superior’s manner to him of late had lacked cordiality. But, then, it seemed to Carlos that everybody’s attitude toward him of late lacked cordiality. He could not understand why this should be. He was a very gentle policeman; he took only the customary little bites of graft; he did not hit drunks hard; he gave cigarettes to prisoners. Often.

  Why, therefore, people should—suddenly, sometimes only for matters of a few seconds—change, become hideous, diabolical, when they looked at him, he could not know. Their faces would swell, become even more horrible than those of the masked moros or the judases in the fiesta parades had seemed to him as a child. The air would become hot; voices would croak and mutter ugly things; he had difficulty breathing, sometimes. And his head—

  A large, tinted oval photograph of old Doña Caridad, Dr. Olivera’s mother, glared at him from the wall. Her lips writhed. She scowled. Carlos got up hastily. Doña Caridad’s unexpected and totally unprovoked hostility was more than he could stand. He had his hand out to open the outer door when the inner door opened and the physician himself stood there—momentarily surprised, immediately afterwards urbane as always. Bowing him in. Doña Caridad was as immovable and expressionless as before.

  There was a formal exchange of courtesies. Then silence. Dr. Olivera gestured toward a publication on his desk. “I have just been reading,” he said, “in the medical journal. About eggs. Modern science has discovered so much about eggs.” Carlos nodded. Dr. Olivera placed his fingertips together. He sighed. Then he got up and, with a sympathetic expression, gestured for Carlos to drop his trousers.

  “Ah, no, Sir Medico,” the officer said hastily. “No, no, it isn’t anything like that.” Dr. Olivera’s mouth sagged. He seemed to hesitate between annoyance and confusion. Carlos breathed in, noisily, then said, all in a rush, “My head is bursting, I have dizziness and pains, my eyes swell, my chest burns, my heart also, and—and—” He paused. He couldn’t tell about the way people’s faces changed. Or about, just now, for example, Doña Caridad. Dr. Olivera might not be trusted to keep confidence. Carlos choked and tried to swallow.

  The physician’s expression had grown increasingly reassured and confident. He pursed his lips and nodded. “Does the stomach work?” he inquired. “Frequently? Sufficiently frequently?”

  Carlos wanted to tell him that it did, but his throat still was not in order, and all that came out was an uncertain croak. By the time he succeeded in swallowing, the señor medico was speaking again.

  “Ninety percent of the infirmities of the corpus,” he said, making serious, impressive sounds with his nose, “are due to the stomach’s functioning with insufficient frequency. Thus the corpus and its system become poisoned. Sir Police Officer—poisoned! We inquire as to the results—We find—” he shook his head rapidly from side to side and he threw up his hands “—that pains are encountered. They are encountered not only in the stomach, but in,” he enumerated on his fingers, “the head. The chest. The eyes. The liver and kidneys. The urological system. The upper back. The lower back. The legs. The entire corpus, sir, becomes debilitated.” He lowered his voice, leaned forward, half-whispered, half-hissed, “One lacks capacity …” He closed his eyes, compressed his lips, and leaned back, fluttering his nostrils and giving short little up-and-down nods of his head. His eyes flew open, and he raised his brows. “Eh?”

  Carlos said, “Doctor, I am thirty years old, I have always until now been in perfect health, able, for example, to lift a railroad tie. My wife is very content. Whenever I ask her, she says,¿Como no? And afterwards she says, ¡Ay, bueno! I do not lack—” A baby cried in the public waiting room. Dr. Olivera got up and took out his pen.

  “I will give you a prescription for an excellent medication,” he said, making a fine flourish and heading the paper with a large, ornate, Sr. C. Rodriguez N. He wrote several lines, signed it, blotted it, handed it over. “One before each alimentation for four days, or until the stomach begins to function frequently… Do you wish the medicine from me, or from the farmacia?”

  Discouraged, but still polite, Carlos said, “From you, Doctor. And… Your honorarium?”

  Dr. Olivera said, deprecatingly, “With the medication…ten pesos. For you, as a civil servant. Thank you…ah! And also: avoid eggs. Eggs are difficult to digest—they have very, very large molecules.”

  Carlos left via the private waiting room. Doña Caridad looked away, contemptuously. Outside, those coarse fellows, woodcutters, the cousins Eugenio and Onofrio Cruz, nudged one another, sneered. Carlos looked away.

  He crossed the plaza, vaguely aware of its smells of grilling, crisp pork carnitas, ripe fruit, wood smoke. His head and eyes and throat were misbehaving again. He remembered that the Forestal authorities had forbidden woodcutting for a month as a conservation measure and that he had meant to look out for possible violations. A toothless old Indian woman with bare, gray feet, padded by, mumbling a piece of fried fish. Her face twisted, became huge, hideous. He shut his eyes, stumbled. After a moment he felt better and went on up the steps of the covered market and into the excusado. As always he received mild pleasure from not having to pay the twenty centavos charge. He closed the door of the booth, dropped the pills in the bowl, flushed it. So. Saved twenty centavos, spent—wasted—ten pesos. On the wall was a new crop of graffiti. A harlot is the mother of Carlos Rodriguez N. read one. Ordinarily he would have read it without malice, even admiring the neat moderation of the insult—by crediting him with two family names, albeit reducing one to the formal initial, the writer had avoided accusing him of illegitimacy. Or he might have remarked to himself the effects of enforcing the lowered compulsory school entrance age: the obscenities were increasingly being written lower and lower on the walls.

  But now—now—

  Incoherent with rage, he rushed, shouting, outside. And almost ran into his superior, Don Juan Antonio, the chief of police. Who looked at him with the peculiar look so familiar nowadays, asked, “Why are you shouting?” And sniffed his breath.

  Accepting this additional insult, Carlos muttered something about boys beg
ging in the market. Don Juan Antonio brushed this aside, gestured toward the other end of the plaza. “Twenty auto-buses of students from the high schools and colleges of the State Capital are stopping over here before they continue on to the National Youth Convention. Must I direct traffic myself while you are chasing beggar boys?”

  “Ah, no, señor jefe!” Carlos walked hastily to where the yellow buses were slowly filing into the plaza and began directing them to the somewhat restricted place available for parking—the rest of the space being already occupied by vendors of black pottery marked with crude fish, brown pottery painted with the most popular women’s names, parrot chicks, Tabasco bananas, brightly colored cane-bottom chairs, pineapples sliced open to reveal the sweet contents, shoes, rubber-tire-soled sandals, holy pictures and candles, rebozos, mantillas, pear-shaped lumps of farm butter, grilled strips of beef, a hundred varieties of beans, a thousand varieties of chili peppers, work shirts, bright skirts, plastic tablecloths, patriotic pictures, knitted caps, sombreros: the infinite variety of the Latin American marketplace—he called out to the bus driver, banging his hand on the bus to indicate that the vehicle should come back a little bit more…a little bit more…a little bit—

  Crash!

  He had backed the bus right into the new automobile belonging to Don Pacifico, the presidente municipal! The driver jumped out and cursed; the mayor jumped out and shouted; the students descended; the population assembled; the police chief came running and bellowing; Señorita Filomena—the mayor’s aged and virginal aunt—screamed and pressed her withered hands to her withered chest; her numerous great-nephews and great-nieces began to cry—Carlos mumbled, made awkward gestures, and that ox, the stationmaster, a man who notoriously lacked education, and was given to loud public criticism of the police: he laughed.

  The crowd became a mob, a hostile mob, the people of which continuously split in two in order to frighten and confuse the miserable police officer with their double shapes and now dreadful faces. It was horrible.